Warfare is changing at a pace unseen in almost a century, as fighting in Ukraine and the Middle East shows. For military commanders, tackling that upheaval demands fast and constant adaptation.
Increasingly, that entails playing games.
Wargames—long the realm of top brass and classified plans—let strategists test varying scenarios, using different tactics and equipment. Now they are filtering down the ranks and out among analysts. Digitization, boosted by artificial intelligence, helps yield practical lessons in greater safety and at lower cost than staging military maneuvers would. Wargames can also explore hypotheticals that no exercise could address, such as nuclear warfare.
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The game has become a surprise hit, for users of all stripes. The Air Force recently approved Command PE to run on its secure networks. Britain’s Strategic Command just signed up to use it in training, education and analysis, calling it a tool “to test ideas.” And Taiwanese defense analysts tap Command PE to analyze responses to hostility from mainland China.
Command’s British publisher, Slitherine Software, stumbled into popularity. The family business got started around 2000 selling retail CD-ROM games like Legion, involving ancient Roman military campaigns.
When Defense Department officials in 2016 first contacted Slitherine, which is based in an old house in a leafy London suburb, its father-and-son managers were so stunned they thought the call might be a prank.
“Are you taking the piss?” J.D. McNeil, the father, recalled asking near the end of the conversation.
What drew Pentagon attention was the software’s vast, precise database of planes, ships, missiles and other military equipment from around the world, which allows exceptionally accurate modeling.
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It was a simple battle simulation that Navy Lt. Larry Bond wanted to create in 1980, after using the service’s complex training game, Navtag, onboard his destroyer.
Bond created Harpoon, published as a paper-and-dice game that drew a big following thanks to its extensive technical data on military systems. One fan was insurance-agent-turned-author Tom Clancy.
Clancy tapped Harpoon as a source for his first novel, “The Hunt for Red October,” and used it so extensively in writing his 1986 follow-up, “Red Storm Rising,” that he called himself and Bond “co-authors.”
A home-computer version of Harpoon flourished and then faded early this century. Frustrated fan Dimitris Dranidis sought to replace it. The result, Command: Modern Operations, released in 2013, took off as users—many in the military—added and corrected its open-source database.
The database now includes tens of thousands of items, from bullets to bombers, covering almost every front-line piece of equipment used by all the world’s militaries since 1946. Users keep parameters like fuel capacity and operating range accurate.
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In the military world, most acquisitions undergo more rigorous testing than consumer products for battle-readiness, but Command flips that paradigm thanks to its evolution. With roughly one million commercial users, Command “gets beat up by the community to a degree that the defense industry just can’t do,” said Barrick, the Marines instructor.
Command focuses on battles and engagements, not campaigns or wars. “It’s really useful if you want a very close look—almost through a soda straw,” said Wasser at CNAS, who sees it as an excellent tool for training and education.
Education was one of the top uses cited at a conference of Command military users in Rome hosted by the Italian Air Force last year, attended by civilian and uniformed defense professionals from the U.S., the U.K., Taiwan and beyond.
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