Sea Control - Sea Control 556 - Wargaming with Larry Bond

Episode Date: November 29, 2024

LinksSea Control 169 – Larry Bond and Sebastian Bruns on Harpoon, Red Storm Rising, and Tom Clancy

Hey folks, it's Jared. Today I'm joined by Larry Bond, and we're going to be talking about wargaming, specifically his experience with using a game called NABTAG or CTAG with the U.S. Navy back in the 70s and early 80s. That game inspired Larry to create his Harpoon series. Full disclosure, we initially record this as an interview, but not necessarily as a podcast, so if there's not the standard intro and outro verbiage, if it seems a bit looser, that's the reason. There is a companion piece of writing I've done for this that covers the last 50 years of wargaming in the surface, Navy, but as of this recording, that hasn't been accepted for publication yet. Somehow it gets accepted between when my editors finish with this

and we publish. We'll be sure to link it in the show notes. This episode was edited and produced by Andrew Frame. Here at SimSec, we aim to further international maritime security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out SimSec.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. If you'd like to contribute to the discussion, check out the Write for SimSec tab to learn how you can submit articles from publication. And now, Kimbersman. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. So this interview is being conducted 3 July 2023 with Larry Bond for the purpose of discussing the Sea Control Tactical Analysis Game, also the Naval Tactical

Analysis Game. I've seen the acronyms stand for different things in different places depending on who's doing the quoting. So I think some people have taken some liberties with that. But once I find a primary source, I'll figure out what the actual acronym stands for. So Larry, we'll start with you. What was your commissioning source prior to joining the Navy? So how did you come to be in the United States Navy? Through officer candidate school. I was already graduated and working in computers and got laid off in the recession of 75. Looking for another career path, I decided to join the Navy and went through there through OCS. I graduated in April of 75. It was in spring of 75, I think, that I reported to my first show, USS McKean in Seattle.

Can you tell me a little bit more about your career in the computer industry? What were you doing? So what was your undergraduate background? And then how did that lead to that job in the computer industry? What were you doing? Because I have a feeling that's going to come up later as we talk about this a little bit. Well, certainly computers has played a huge role in what I've been doing since then. Well, actually, so I started in high school.

They wheeled an old ESR-33 teletype into the math class and said, hey, we're starting a computer club. You want to be in it? And I said, shoot, sounds like fun. And so we learned basic, we learned, you know, basic programming. We're talking yellow tape, punch tape. We're talking, you know, long front outs and corrected types of the changes. But it interested me enough, so I decided to pursue a career in that.

I went to the College of St. Thomas, where they had a quantitative methods major. And you learned computers, you learned operations research. I had a minor in math for a while and then switched over to business administration. But they're teaching assembly, they're teaching Fortran, they're everything. They're still very, these days, very low tech, you'd call it. I mean, we were all very excited when the first green screen monitor showed up in the computer center. It was like, whoa, green screen monitor, no teletypes anymore, and to punch cards.

I graduated in 73 and got a job with what was then Cutting Edge Outfit doing time share. This was taxes where they had pre-printed forms. The CPA was our client, would take those forms. They typed in the information. Our computers did the math and determined what was a valid deduction and everything else. And then we had a template that we had created that matched the tax forms. So we would print out on a blank sheet of paper information at the correct location.

We then had a clear acetate sheet with a tax form. We'd lay that on the photocopier, lay the print on top of that, hit the copy button, and you had a completed tax form. And this was all cutting edge. I mean, this was like, ooh, cool stuff. And I did that for a while. Well, then they laid me off and I worked for another outfit that was also doing time sharing and I was doing more general business applications.

But I was not a huge fan of computer programming. If you weren't interested in what you were programming, it became mind-numbingly boring. So I got out of that and chose to pursue an ultimate career path. You mentioned the recession of 1975. Why did you decide to then join the Navy? What was it about the Navy that appealed to you? And then did you consider anything else? Well, Jerry, there's an interesting story there.

My whole family is aviation. My grandfather on my dad's side was a- We have aviation too, so you could do that for me. I'm a mechanic. I'd stop with camels, okay? I'd be way back. He was gassed in the Great War, lived to be the age of 87. My dad's generation, he was an E-fluid B-24s.

I had B-58s and C-130s. So when I decided I was going to pursue this ultimate career path, I applied for Navy Aviation. I was selected, went down there, but my eyes were not good enough for right seat work. And why was it Naval Aviation? Why did I not go to the Air Force since all my family was Air Force? It is because I had an uncle who was a graduate lawyer when he joined the Air Force, and he was obviously going into their JAG program.

The recruiter was all, oh, this is, no, I'll be saluting you in a week, sir. And what happened was he flunked the test. So instead of being an officer in JAG Corps, he was an Airman Basic in Greenland. And he was the one who convinced me to join the Navy because their aviation program, you could drop out and be a civilian again if you flunked the course or you didn't like what you saw. And so having that escape hatch was what convinced me to go Navy. And then I was not qualified for aviation. I mean, my vision at that time was 2015 corrected, but the amount of refractive error in my glasses was too great.

I wanted to be in an EA-6. I thought being an EWO in an EA-6 would be the coolest thing in the world. And we saw the program down there. It was challenging, but I liked enough of what I saw, so I decided to go surface Navy. Went up to Newport, did my five months up there, and then was commissioned. what was your experience with any type of war gaming prior to entering service was that something that you picked up in high school even earlier than that i can remember i got a copy of avalon hills africa corps there's a christmas present one year for my uncle lee and i must have been

10 11 i mean it was uh very young and i played it to death i even made mods to it i started fiddling with it doing stuff and that got me hooked i did all kinds of different games and was very heavily involved in role-playing in high school and in college. Minnesota at that time was really a lot going on in the gaming community. That's where Dave Arneson lived, half of the team that created Dungeons & Dragons. I was good friends with Dave. I was playing Dungeons & Dragons before it was Dungeons & Dragons. And other TSR people like Mike Carr wrote Fight the Skies,

which was a great World War I air game. And there was a regular gaming group that met. We got permission to use spaces at the college, and we met every week. So I was very familiar with gaming when I joined the fleet. Did you actually just go to school in Minnesota, or was that where you grew up? I didn't ask where you grew up. I grew up in St. Paul, and then I was a day student at St. Thomas College. So you report to USS McKeon.

What was your early experience on the ship like? Gaming aside, we'll set all that aside here, but you're a new surface warfare officer showing up to USS McKeon. And what was that experience like? What job did you get? I was a boot ensign. My initial assignment was electronic material officer and electronic warfare officer, which I found fascinating and very interesting.

Material officer meant I was responsible for all the radars and communications equipment. I'm trying to remember what my collateral duties were at that point. I think I was an educational services officer too. But McKean was a Naval Reserve Force destroyer, which meant we operated with two-thirds manning. She was old. She was a gearing and had been framed in the 60s. So basically, we would pick up a bunch of reservists, work with them for two weeks in port doing stuff, training exercises. And we would go out and we'd sail down the West Coast and we'd pull into San Diego where we'd drop off those reservists, pick up another batch, do a bunch of stuff in port. because there were some services that were not available up in Seattle, even though the shipyard was right over there. But we weren't anywhere close to the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard.

We were on the other side of Pier 90, right where the Dotson Roos pulled up, as a matter of fact. We would go down to San Diego, do maintenance, do training. We had access to some of the simulators down there, stuff like that. Then we'd go out, participate in some sort of exercise, drop off that load of reservists, pick up another batch, sail north go up to seattle drop those guys off and repeat rinse three or four times a year that was our operational cycle we once once we were going to participate in an exercise going to

hawaii we were so excited everybody's pumped we had steam up we were getting ready to settle up all lines and the division commander canceled our participation in the exercise from cal Crudez-Brown, 37, sent us a thing saying, cancel USS McKean participation due to extreme age of the vessel. That's what it said. And my skipper was so hot that they actually had to physically restrain him from going into the radio room and ending his career. But it was a destroyer. I got seasick, by the way, every time we went out. Green as grass. Not a career in anti-seq quality. Lost a lot of weight, but I got through it. Finished two years. They sent me to a bunch of schools And then I became the ASW officer and tactical training officer, as I recall.

And that was a lot of fun, chasing submarines around, getting to shoot things. So you mentioned Seattle. Were you actually home ported in the city of Seattle or were you up at the Naval Base in Everett? No, no, we were in Seattle proper. Pier 90 is just a few blocks up from Pike Place Market and Pier 70 where all the tourist stuff was. So it was a great location.

We had people all the time who wanted to swap out or, you know, we'd get these, you know, Navy requests, you know, so-and-so's looking for a swap. And I was offered a split tour. You know, the Navy tried to compensate for the fact that, you know, okay, you're on an older ship, you're not operating a lot. You want to go to a missile cruise or something, we'll send you there. I said, no, no, I love Seattle. I really do like Seattle.

The climate was wonderful, especially coming from Minnesota. You know, I liked the job. I liked my skipper, which God knows who I was going to get if I went somewhere else. So I said, let's just stick with this for my first tour. And I'd come to the end of my first tour. By that time, I'd already started gaming on the ship with NavTag and stuff. And I was almost ready to get out because the seasickness is not a career, as I said. And the script said, let's do shore duty.

If you do shore duty, you won't get sick. And he arranged, talked with the detailers quite a bit about places to send me where my gaming skills could be put to use. And I was given two options, which were very hard to decide between. One, I was going to go down to Norfolk, where they had a floor already gridded out, and I was going to be running tactical training games for middle and senior grade officers. And this is me as a JG, and I'm going, that sounds pretty good. And then the other was to go up to a place called Center for Naval Analysis, which was at the think tank in Washington, D.C. Before we transition to your short dude, I want to go back and talk a little bit more

about your time on board McKeaton, because some of the older interviews I've read here said that was where you first got exposed to NavTag, SeaTag, whatever we're going to call it at that point, as well as that was where you kind of started developing what became Harpoon. So I'd like to talk first about, I would imagine your role as EMO, EWO, that was kind of where you first started to encounter NavTag, SeaTag. So were you playing at that point the analog version of the game, or had the computerized version already come out at that point?

I have only played the analog version of the game. And what happened was it was featured in an issue of Surface Warfare magazine. And I went looking for that issue, by the way. I got it in my file somewhere. I could not find it. And it talked about it had pictures of some miniature ships on the front. Now, at this point, on the ship, when I was not out at sea in the weekends, I'd be gaming with my friends that I'd made in Seattle,

including I was very active in World War II Naval, a set of rules called General Ports. I had miniature ships painted up, and NAVTEC came out, and I went, whoa, there's a modern naval miniatures game. Let's check this out. And at that point, we were on one of our cycles, and we were in San Diego,

and the article described the guy who had designed the game and mentioned this, that Neil Byrne, a lieutenant commander at that time, and the article mentioned even the staff officer assigned to Conqueror Desmond 5. Well, we were in Conqueror Desmond 5. As a matter of fact, the flag, you know, the tender, was she on Dixie at that point? I'm trying to remember which tender he was on. They were like two periods down. So I said, shoot, walk down, talk to him.

He says, yeah, here's a copy. Signed for it, of course. It was secret, no for it. brought it back to the ship showed it to the skipper he gives me a bravo zoom nice and said start setting this up and this is the uh analog version right so it's basically just a box with what comes in the box that he's given you i mean it wasn't even you didn't even think about it in terms of analog versus digital at this point it was a paper game or a bunch of data cards with information about the ship's rules i was fairly thick thing to plow through but a lot of

were tables of stats and stuff like that. We tried running some games. The skippers' backing was crucial. The department heads were not really happy with the idea at first. But there was an immediate reaction to the fact that we got ships out on the table. And at that point, there were several ministerships available from CNC, and I painted them up. I call them banging the rocks together,

taking what you learned in the book and applying it in at least a halfway real synthetic. And there were so many disconnects at first. I mean, we had an exercise. I put down a Kenda and a Koshin at one end, and I had a Leahy and a Knox at the other. I says, okay, we're going to shoot at each other here. This was the gunnery officer, I think,

was in charge of the Leahy. And he says, okay, I'm going to use my standard missiles in surface-to-surface mode. And I says, how are you going to do that? Well, it says you can do it. I says, where's your ship pointed? He had his bow dead onto the kenda.

That's not going to work real well. And so just integrating that kind of stuff. He also was, I mean, for a gunnery officer, he should have been better on ship recognition. Because I held the kenda up about three feet away from him. I says, what is this? He says, Adams class? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Bad idea. I mean, the kenda. My grandmother knows what a kenda is. And I remember playing at least twice. And it got very frustrating because the rules were not clear on many points. there was no turn sequence per se. I seem to recall that he presumed you knew enough about naval warfare and the terms and everything, so that if he said, do this, everything else would flow normally. And we were all naval officers, and we had problems following his instructions.

And so I says, I can write something simpler that's not quite so game-specific. Now, of course, I've been playing Avalon Hill, I've been playing all these other games, so I know how rule structuring was to be set up. And that's why I sat down and wrote the first draft of the Harkwood rules. We played several games of Harkwood, essentially playtesting those rules on the ship. And they were fairly well received. How long would a standard CTAG game take? Do you remember approximately from setup to completion? And then were you doing like some analysis afterwards as far as, here's what happened? Why did you make this? Were you having those conversation we always had hot wash up afterwards it was and it was actually kind of a two-way hot

wash up because they'd be talking to me about how the problems or issues they were having with the gameplay and i was saying you know gee you know you've got every ship pointed unmasking batteries and this and that the other thing and obviously we were on a tight schedule it was always kind of thing we do it after lunch for an hour hour and a half we were talking very very small battles two or three ships on a side at most. And a lot of the time was spent simply marching through different sections of the rules, figuring out what the heck we were supposed to do. But we usually got a few shots off. Dice were rolled. People hit or missed. They were engaged, I felt, and saw some value in that, especially, I know it's still this way today. I mean,

the Navy would rather teach junior officers how to fill out a maintenance request form or a personnel or rather than actually teach them how to fight, which is of course why they joined the Navy. I mean, you're a war fighter, let's pay some attention to that kind of stuff. You hit on something earlier. One of the things that we would ultimately need to really push back against is that cultural piece that you talk about of like carving that time out of the schedule to actually do this. Because if it takes any longer than three hours, you're never surviving planning board for training. It's never going to make it through. and you're not going to be able to do it multiple days per week.

So like you might get one day per week where you can do this and then it's going to need to be, you talked about the support of the captains being absolutely critical. I got pushback from the department heads and at least one called me an empire dolder. I'm like, really? This is my empire? It's a very small empire with a small E.

It's a fiefdom. Yeah, it's a fiefdom. I wish I'd had that on my lips when you said it. It's like anything else. I mean, organizationally, wargaming, in my experience, has not really become a part of a military organization's day-to-day routine operations without massive support from higher-ups. And it's not enough for the top guy to say it. All the top guys have to say it all the way down. I don't know if you read Matt Caffrey's history on wargaming. On Wargaming, yeah. I just saved a digital copy in my Google Drive today, so I have that to go through, and CTAG makes an appearance in there, I'm pretty sure. Oh, yeah. Yeah, well, I just attended Matt's retirement ceremony last weekend. I just got back from it the other day. Matt talks about how the Russians not only required full commotion that a staff officer be able to run a wargame, he had to be able to design a wargame to fit a particular need. So this would be part of his skill set as he moved forward.

And it has to be at that level if we want to incorporate it in the community. So part of my pitch here is actually incorporating it into the WTI program. So the service Navy specifically is established with a weapons tactics instructors program that has long been part of the aviation community. But we want to actually grow our own tactical experts, but that is their job. just like they're supposed to be tacticians to a level that you know your average officer is not and i think them having this war gaming capability and being the ones who run the war game and run the hot wash has a lot of complementary arts arts and pieces if you will so like there's there's a

lot of things there that sort of come together in that one person whether or not you can squeeze that in because now we're talking about more curriculum or training xyz and what already exists i don't know but you mentioned like high level support i mean the reason c-tag navtag came to the fleet in the way that it is because there is a memo from the cno october 15 1980 saying execute this like i want this on my ships i also i also think that one of the reasons why c-tag navtag did better was because it was computerized finally which dramatically lowers the learning curve if you're talking any kind of a manual game where somebody has to sit down learn the rules understand the rules that's okay you've now identified a skill that everybody has to have it

they're already required to learn a lot well let's talk about the rules for a second because one of the other critiques that i saw was that but unless you had a space the size of a football field to move your vessels around what you basically wound up doing was just turning your vessels each turn to it's is that a valid critique is that an accurate description of what you're doing with uh navtag c tag or well it depends on what kind of a game you want to play the small balance that we played we could you know use the word on table and you drop the scales accordingly uh one nautical mile to the inch five nautical miles to the inch i think we normally played mile to the inch kind of thing especially those those early games the idea and i've used this in

harpoon as well but we never went that far navtag but with harpoon start on a graph paper and And because you're doing a lot of the early stuff there, that's where you make your decision. You set up your standing orders. I'd require each side to set up standing orders, and then I'd just drive them together and see where they interact, and then we'd drop to the table. And dropping to that table is a critical step.

I mean, even sophisticated gamers really need the visual feedback that they get from seeing minis on the table, symbols on the map, something that allows them to visualize what is going on. You never experienced a nav tag C tag, the transition to the electronic version of that game. So let's just talk about Harpoon then. So you talked about the difficulty of the rule set. I actually found like an old set of, it's actually supposed to be an extension of the nav tag system to incorporate a bunch of new things. So Tomahawk missile is mentioned in their close-in weapons system, which, you know, we kind of now all take for granted being on our ships now today. But it's brand new, obviously, back in, I want to say it was 1982. In fact, one of the references in the footnotes was, like, Harpoon by you from 1981, which I thought that was interesting. So they're now trying to update this in-house product to keep pace with what you have developed in Harpoon.

you talked about with the rules that there's no description of actual gameplay it's just all this whole series of it was ours of data cards and everything else and i'm reading through this thing is like there's nothing that actually tells me if i want to play how to do this so i guess i just like pick four ships and sit across the table from the other person we take turns doing stuff my my personal assessment is that neil byrne kept the game in his head i mean if he was running a game that he could be there he could say okay you guys are doing this you guys are doing that and you could talk about that in terms of a seminar format but you have to codify things i ran more games as a instructor at the german armed forces staff college i ran a game that

was developed at the naval war college in newport with the germans there it's like everything has to be codified so people can read before they show up there is still a whole bunch of demonstration required. It's like, this is what that actually means, especially if someone has no background with gaming. You said it all when you said they had no background in gaming. The guys on the ship knew their skills, they knew their jobs, but they didn't know how to play a game. There's a set of nomenclature, there are a set of conventions. And no matter how much I bring it down, at some point, you have to learn how to step through those rules. And let's talk about what's wrong with NAVTAG. Full kudos to Neil Byrne. I mean, he did a great job.

Yeah. By the way, we are not here to cast aspersions on the outstanding work of Neil Byrne, which to some extent continues today with the very things that we're talking about. So with that caveat in mind, there were a couple of things that were wrong with the NAVTAG, in my opinion. One, it's secret no-fork, which means if it wasn't in use, it had to be locked up in the safe. I couldn't make copies without creating more classified material, which also had to be locked up in the safe so it's now like i can hand out stuff at a time here's the scenario we're going to play you know be ready when you show up that was a major thing the second thing was as we've discussed the lack of an articulated turn sequence of play how do you do this stuff

the third thing was and this is a matter of emphasis and objective he was talking in in the rules and i remember the computer game where you're actually setting modes on your fire control radar you're actually i mean knobology to me that was too specialized if you are the fire control officer you need to know the modes and yeah i mean sure the weapons officer because you obviously know that you're supporting his jobs but there's so much more in terms of just threat levels how detection works it was too far down in the weeds so i wanted to back it up a level we had a copy of combat fleets of the world 75 76 on my uh on my ship which i still think is one of the better maybe references out there, or was anyway. And that was my data source. And I went to other

unclassified services to get the data. Then I wrote, okay, we're going to plan what we're going to do. We're going to have simultaneous movement. And I started to take, draw my wargaming experience to draw up the simplest set of rules I could get that would be understandable to guys who were not involved in gaming. And I also avoided using game-related terms like points or whatever, instead concentrating on real-world terms, knots, degrees, whatever. That was the first draft of our pool. It was designed to be accessible and simple enough for, and this is not, let's say, naval officers are slow, but simple enough for them to quickly grasp and say, okay, now we're playing this game. All your naval officers have degrees,

most of them from very good colleges and universities it comes back to a matter of time is like how much time do you have to sit and digest this set of rules here because by and large people are going to wind up doing that in their spare time they're not going to be doing it and they're at work time they're going to take it home and read it you mentioned the classification piece of that i don't know if it started out classified and changed at some point i have found a thesis like i've been going back through some uh some of these old uh neville postgraduate school of theses where eventually it became declassified because of what you mentioned is like it just becomes a problem to use when you classify it it's like all of a sudden it's

controlled now it has to they're handling measures where you need a specific person to walk it from point a to point b and if that person's not available you can't move it physically move it from one ship to another but then once it gets computerized it gets reclassified the disks are now the classified piece and you're back in the same problem of like having to move these around which that problem has only gotten worse as far as like being able to move it material from point a to point b or keep it up to date i don't know if if neil burns game should have been declassified i mean if he's down to the level of nebology no no that was not it um there was i believe there was a simplified version of it that was declassified because i can see like in this

one thesis for uh nebo postgraduate school and i forget who the author was or i'd mention it right now but it's saved in this and it will be one of the references i use as i go to produce this is uh him talking about like he actually lays out the entire set of like updated rules to incorporate tomahawk missiles close-in weapon systems all those things so it's all updated and he specifically speaks to the fact that like eventually is declassified but i agree with you also 112 on the buttonology point because like if you're talking knobology there are actually systems on board that you can use to train that you can run things using the the built-in onboard trainers that we have to practice the knobs but you're not decision making if you're talking about

like yeah yeah what fun this is now you're you know i wanted to look at the decision making you leave your radars and the simple trade-off do you go full mcon and deny yourself information how do you get around that helicopters and other sensors i mean getting those combinations to me was most interesting about naval warfare that's what really got me interested in in trying to game it out and see how all this stuff fits together so you're testing harpoon while you're on mckeon i believe yeah who are you playing with when are you playing and how is the game sort of developing while you're on mckeon well what happened was i think i played a couple games with officers on the ship and their reaction was yeah this is simpler i even played one with the

enlisted guys and the skipper was there and we sort of talked about different things it was the skipper's idea to you know we're a warship let's do some fighting here it's not all just shipping and painting the skipper was really good i had two very good skippers in a row and i'm don't watch i mean in the dump i certainly didn't have any control over that at that point i think having got a favorable reviews from them although not it was like i said yes this is finished but they were good with it and i had always wanted to publish a war game i played enough of them and I was still good friends with Dave Arneson

of Dungeons & Dragons fame and he had started his own company, Adventure Games, Inc. And I floated the idea of a modern April Warfare to him. Would you like to publish this game? And he said, yes.

And that was the first edition of Harpoon. April of 80 is when it was published. So you roll out Harpoon and eventually over the course there, I think you did

Harpoon's Captain's Edition, which I believe one of the selling points of that was like, hey, you should be able to start playing this within 30 minutes. I've at least seen that quote somewhere. I don't think it's quoting you necessarily,

but some of the advertising copy associated with it says, hey, play within 30 minutes. Yeah, GDW really pushed that, and that was our goal. I mean, we wanted to even, I think we were up to the second edition before we published Captain's Edition. No, no, it was the third edition. I did the first two of the adventure games. The third, which came out in 86, was with GEW, because the Adventure Games went away,

and that was a big success. But even in the third edition, we recognized that there was a lot of moving parts. Let's do a simpler version. And it would have done a lot better if we'd had a different price point on it. GEW's mistake was that they priced it at the same price as the full-up version. None of the distributors wanted to pick it up. Because why are we paying the same price for a simplified version of the game? But look at all these cool plastic airliners in it.

Nope. Yeah, that was a... GEW had a failed airliners game, and they had all these leftover playing pieces, so they threw them in the game to be the patrol aircraft. But there's still a very active Captain's Edition community out there, and we want to come out with a new edition of Captain's Edition. If we can get past the three or four other projects we're trying to finish first. You need something that talks about basic sets of trade-offs.

You need something that talks about weapons ranges and the different classes of weapons in general. And just boil it all down and take all the, foul off a lot of the numbers. But we haven't been able to get the time yet. And then in 1989, I want to say you roll out the first version of the Harpoon computer game. Sounds about right. And then how did you, I guess, where do you stand on analog versus computer games as far as your preference for method? You're the first person that's ever asked that question. Each has strengths and weaknesses. It's the medium. The computer game is obviously much

more accessible. And I've gotten a lot of feedback from people who played the computer game and love it. But at the same time, because it's all in a black box, you're not seeing what's going on. And you can't tweak things very easily. You can't change things. You can't update it without changing the code. And this is the way it works. And especially early on, it was very limited in terms of capabilities. These days, the sky's the limit, of course.

But there were a lot of the side decisions that had to be made. How much do we put into graphics? How much effort do we put into all the data? There were some problems that were very, very difficult to overcome. For instance, is a contact erase. And the first cut is literally check, you know, do an X squared plus Y squared on every contact. No, okay, let's add some filters. Let's do this. And trying to cram that all onto a 286 platform or even a 386 platform. And the fact that it ran at all was really a win. And I have to be honest, there's a lot of negative stuff connected with all the legal hassles that happened with all the computer games.

I mean, because they were successful, because large amounts of money became involved, there were legal stuff. I'm pretty sure I never got all the money that I should have gotten off of those games, but I'm not bitter about that. No, not at all. I think you've done okay, right? Well, yeah. Yeah, folks.

I mean- But yes. The only people who make money in the wargaming industry are the printers, okay? You brought up a couple things there that I find funny as I go through some of these source documents. One is a thesis written at the Naval Postgraduate School about the difficulty of incorporating the SH-60 Bravo, as it was a brand new platform back in like 1982, into the NavTag computer game and what it would take to incorporate it into the program.

because they've already you know they've done the code for 40 different platforms here but now we want to swap out the sh2 or the sh60 bravo which is a platform that like in my lifespan has come and gone from the navy which this stuff is already making me feel tremendous old as i read through it so to like your point on like maintaining an electronic game or a computer game resonates It was also funny as I went back through 2005, I find an article with quoting Neil Byrne because Neil Byrne is now designing a computer game with a company that he owns for the Navy called Kill Chain, which is right around sort of the time when I was a lieutenant junior grade and the Navy was undergoing this re-examination of the way that we teach surface warfare officers tactics. And Neil Byrne is specifically quoting the lines of code from NavTag to the core functions in this game, Kill Chain, that he's designed. I don't think Kill Chain was ever actually used or implemented, or if it was, I never saw it while I was out in the fleet. So it's funny that you say that.

As soon as something's computerized, keeping it up to date, unless it is a game that lives online, is very challenging. And it's more than just changing the names and maybe, okay, this one goes faster, carries more weapons. If it has new sensors, if it has extended range, you may run into hardware barriers or hardwire barriers that have been written into the code and all of a sudden, okay, we now have to be able to fly farther or longer than before. And we ran across that a lot. There was a lot of talk. And finally, I think we allowed the players to edit the stats. In my opinion, that was a terrible mistake. Because as soon as they did that, we had to add all kinds of safety so they wouldn't create warp drive on a destroyer.

Then they complained because when we'd come out with a new version of the game, it wouldn't be compatible with all their personal mods. a lot of support time got sucked up. A lot of programming time turned into support time for those personal mods instead of developing newer, better versions of the game. And we never really broke free of that cycle. We've talked about the disadvantages of the digital side. Disadvantages of the manual side are, of course, almost as great in that you've got print that can't be updated. But the beauty of a print game is if you learn the rules, you'll understand understand how everything's working together or not working together. And it's a much more

personal and social experience, which I think is positive for many gamers. I like the hot wash up is off of my favorite part of it is, okay, here's what you thought you knew and here's what's actually going on. And it can be a very humbling experience. It can also be very validated because they go, oh yeah, okay, I see that now. And that's when the education really comes in. They should walk into the game with a certain knowledge set. They're then applying that knowledge during the battle, whether they win or lose, they've been using what they've learned. And at the end of the wash up, they're finally figuring out whether or not that was right. That's when the test is graded. So have you played any of the games that are sort of out

in the ecosystem right now that people in the Navy and the Marine Corps are kind of talking about? The first one that I know I'm going to have suggested to me by people when I suggest bringing games back is going to be Command Modern Operations, which is an extremely high level combat simulation i'm waiting for the feedback on the uh the german guy that i know who uh uses it to teach it i'm trying to remember what the nato coe and keel is called it's like confined shallow water operations or something but they use it extensively there to run their games but i want to say it requires like 30 hours to basically like learn how to use the game if you will so have you played that game specifically and then are you playing any board games right now my

favorite board game right now is my wife and i play a lot of zombicide which is a it sounds like you found a good match she's a treasure on many levels but she had a bad as many of us did bad experiences with monopoly so she only plays cooperative games this is a dark ages game instead of the black plague it's zombies and so you've got bows and arrows and swords and incident and it's it's they don't take themselves very seriously but it's a clean rule system very simple easy to expand and there's actually minis which i've paved it up several and because you're cooperating it's very much a team effort and you either all win or you all all die i try and get away from the day table stuff as much as possible if i'm just gaming for recreation i got a bunch of

stuff for christmas this year and not one of them is uh any way connected with naval gaming i do We'll be running games at Historicon in just a couple weeks here now. I'll get my fill of that. I honestly got a harpoon game at that time. We're running April 25th in the Falkland Sound, Operation Sun. And that's a big game. You got the entire Argentine Naval Aviation and Air Force, all the British ships too laid out with minis.

And we have a vital map that's about six by four that has the whole Falkland Sound. And it takes several hours to play. And the staff are referees. Are you still doing anything with the Navy? Does the War College ever call you to get your thoughts on any of this stuff? We've got a lot of connections at the War College, and a lot of it has to do more with professional stuff than anything else. For instance, we published a book on the Chinese Navy

called Modern Chinese Maritime Forces. I don't know if you've seen that. But a German author was looking to get this thing published. We heard about it on the publisher Grapevine. And it's basically sketches and stats on not just the Chinese Navy, but the Maritime Militia and the Coast Guard and the Sancho City law enforcement. I mean, all of these paramilitary state organizations. And nobody wanted to publish it. So we're going, really? Seriously?

So we published it. And we've been publishing it since 2018 and updating it quarterly. Because Herrmeier continues to send us new sketches and OB updates. So we drop them in, upload the PDF. Well, you got yourself a new edition, a new update. We actually just came out with a new, quote, edition, unquote, a couple of days ago because the book has grown from 134 pages

up to 174 pages. So we said, new edition. And if you have the old PDF, we're not going to update that anymore. Now you've got to get the new PDF and then we'll update that from now on. But the Naval War College said, hey, this is good stuff.

Can you prepare an annex for us on amphibious ships? So we got Manfred's permission. He's paying him a fee for his sketches. And we put together stuff using our data from China's Navy annex book. And that's going to be annexed in a Naval War College publication that's coming out. Andrew Erickson up there, Dr. Andrew Erickson, is a very good friend of my partner, Chris Carlson. And he actually wrote the foreword for modern Chinese maritime forces. Chris also just did a killer presentation on Chinese nuclear submarines at the War College last March. We'll be doing an expanded version of that presentation at Historica. So we're tied in closely, but we've never run a game up there per se. Most of our contacts have been in terms of information exchange and getting useful guidance from them on stuff that they're looking for. It's good, but no, I haven't gained up there per se. I mean, if you ever get the opportunity, the system that they developed called War at Sea, which was the one that I brought over to Germany, that's a pretty good operational level system that people can grasp in about an hour. And we would run the students through, typically like, hey, you're going to get 30 minutes of this is how this works. And then we're going to sit at the table for an hour. You're going to figure it out. And then tomorrow

we're gaming with it. My understanding is they've taken it and we're supposed to be modifying it and shrinking it down, making it slightly more tactful for use at Surface Warfare Officer School as part of the TAO course, but I still have some background research to do on that. That was kind of all my questions, Larry. Do you have any other thoughts that I might have missed about your experience with CTAG or anything else? I can't think of anything else regarding CTAG that I haven't, Navtech that I haven't shared with you. Seeing that issue and then moving forward, everything started with that issue of Navtech. So that's a very important place in my personal history. You say you had that down in your cellar. I mean, have you retained like all

your personal papers and that stuff? I actually had Stanford. They came to me several years ago and took it all away, all my notes on Harpoot and everything. And then Matt Kirschbaum did a presentation in Connections about it. Is he at Stanford? They've got a branch out here on this coast. I'm in Palo Alto, California, where Stanford is right now. Oh, local. That's why I ask.

It's like, ah, Stanford. This could be very easy for me. You have a copy of it somewhere if you can't find it. Matt Kirschbaum was very involved in archiving and preserving a lot of very effortful digital stuff. Yes. And looking at the, especially the transition of Harpoon from paper to digital, and then talking about the data, talking about the different versions of Harpoon and how they grew, that's become more of a thing as we've gone from first to now through five editions. Yeah, there's a lot of errata in there that, like, if you don't maintain that stuff. Our system is, we have a print version and a PDF version, and we update the PDF version if there's a big change or a rata that we want to correct. So how do you tell the difference? And our system is that we change anything new in the PDF to red, as it'll get more and more red as time goes on.

And we're trying to avoid the Starfleet battles thing, you know, where it's just, what version are you at? Plus, we were hoping to, you know, have any arguments, you know, forestall any arguments where people are looking at different sets of the rules and they think they're on the same page, and they're not. Version control is, I mean, I can also see where ctag, nabtag becomes a navc program or record, and then the ability to change it rapidly to update anything just, it disappears. it's okay you want to get a change into a program of record now all of a sudden like the bureaucracy is standing in your way well it's it's crazy because uh you know we have master files that we we keep and then that stuff has to get promulgated out we obviously start with that but whenever we print new stuff that has to get folded back in the master so yeah i spend a lot of my time worrying about version control especially because we'll have we have four games now we have go out of the battleship figure out dreadnought command and see yes some ships will appear many appear two of

those games and some well there are many in three i don't think there's any that are all four except maybe that russian submarine rescue vessel whatever it is it's calling you know that's 100 years old it's constitution i'm really ukrainian seeking most of the russian navy understand me but if i sink that one i'm going to be upset i mean that thing should be a museum of silver so each game the notation system is slightly different they're very common a common damage system common common notations for most stuff but directors you don't have to worry about directors in dawn of the battleship that's not an issue uh so yeah we could talk about the original all day and i could learn a lot because i'm making it up as i go yeah absolutely thank

you for your time later legacy i'll be in touch uh as i do some more research here because i I think this is going to require some actual archive diving in one or two places. Well, this is cool, Ed. It's been a lot of fun talking to you. You too, Larry. Thanks so much. Bye-bye. Bar one, put it in the alley, put it on the shimbo now.

A porter, oh, and a porter, gin, oh. Way, hey, put it in the alley. A porter, wine, both white and red, oh. Put it on the shimbo now. So help me, bar one, put it in the alley. Way, hey, put it in the alley. Help me, bar one, put it in the alley. Boy, that is your mother.