Captain Doug Littlejohns: First of all, the game is designed to put the player outside the submarine, if you like, to envisage the tactical situation around him in his mind’s eye. And to have a pictorial representation of that. That is where the game is unique. Nothing like this has been done before. As for what makes a good submarine commander, that is really almost impossible to quantify properly.
James Adams: You go on a course in England called the Perisher Course, don’t you?
Captain Doug Littlejohns: Oh, yes.
James Adams: What do they make you do in that course?
Captain Doug Littlejohns: First of all, there’s a big weeding out process before you ever get to that point. Lots of people want to be submariners, but when they get there they find they don’t like the way of life or the hours they have to keep.
James Adams: What about claustrophobia?
Captain Doug Littlejohns: I’ve only ever seen one member of a submarine who suffered from claustrophobia. In the main, you just don’t experience it. Human beings are very adaptable. By the time what we call in the Royal Navy the submarine Perisher comes along, most people are well imbued into submarines. Then it’s a question of whether they’ve got both the stamina and the mental acuity — the particular ability to remember a tactical picture after having glanced at it only very briefly. With the submarine tossing around, maneuvering all over the place, it’s very difficult to still be able to know where the various components of that tactical picture are.
That is a particular type of spatial awareness although we didn’t have that term when I did the course.
James Adams: That is very similar to the effect in SSN, where you’re having to simulate essentially what the spatial picture looks like.
Captain Doug Littlejohns: Yes. And the player has got to be able to assimilate the information — which is not coming in as thick and fast as it does on a real submarine, but it’s reasonably realistic. If he doesn’t assimilate the information, if he can’t put things in the right priority order and tackle them in a sensible way, then he will get caught.
James Adams: Tom, Doug is a good friend of yours and has been for a number of years. You also know a number of American equivalents to Doug. What would you say is the difference between a British and an American submarine commander?
Tom Clancy: I’ve gotten into a lot of trouble on this.
Captain Doug Littlejohns: And you could get in trouble here, now.
Tom Clancy: I’ve been sufficiently propagandized by Doug and a few of his partners in crime in the Royal Navy that I once published an article suggesting that the Royal Navy trained its submarine skippers better than the U.S. Navy did. Which earned me the undying wrath of a certain senior officer in the United States Navy.
You can argue long and hard about the difference between having a specialist and a generalist. Generally speaking, I think the Royal Navy has a way of developing its officers and identifying its stars. It beats the hell out of them to winnow them out, and then it picks the absolute best of that group to command. It is able to award command at a much younger age than we do in the U.S. Navy.
I think that’s a fundamentally healthy thing.
James Adams: So would you say that implies that the British commanders tend to be younger, more aggressive, and have more initiative? Or is it that it merely comes out in a different way?
Tom Clancy: It’s well within the range of personal variances — we have good ones, they have good ones, we have bad ones, they have bad ones. Generally speaking, I would say that their method for advancing their prospective commanding officers is somewhat better than ours.
James Adams: Do you agree with that, Doug?
Captain Doug Littlejohns: Yes, I do. I’m not so sure about the “we have bad ones,” but I’ll let Tom get away with that.
To go back to something that Tom said earlier, a lot of the technical capability of the U.S. submarines is of higher quality than ours, but somehow or other we manage to achieve the same sort of results. And the two navies work very closely together. Particularly on the submarine front.
James Adams: And what about the Chinese? What do we know about how they train and perform in their navies? Do we have any sense of that really?
Tom Clancy: Well, it’s a Communist country, and the Communists do not reward personal initiative… except by execution.
Now, in Communist China, you have the odd situation where they’re trying to develop a free market economy without political freedom. And that is ultimately going to fail. Because that doesn’t work. But until such time as that happens, we do face a potential adversary, given the fact that they do have the industrial capability to produce just about anything they want, of high enough quality. If they can sell television sets throughout the world, then they can build a nuclear submarine. It’s just a matter of quality control. And if they want the oil in the Spratly Islands all that badly, which they probably do, then it’s simply a matter of establishing as a national priority to make a Navy which is competitive with the rest of the world. If they decide to do that, they can.
Historically, Kaiser Wilhelm II decided to make a Navy which was quite competitive with the Royal Navy. And they did it in, what? One generation?
Captain Doug Littlejohns: And, of course, the former Soviet Union had to go through the same transformation in the ’60s, after the Cuban Missile Crisis. They certainly needed to build up a deep water Navy. And they did that. It took them probably ten, fifteen years — not just to get the equipment, but to be able to use it to a reasonable standard.
James Adams: Yes. And they developed a very effective submarine fleet.
One of the points of this game is that we have Russia passing on some equipment to the Chinese. Do you think that’s realistic? Will the Russians sell their soul, so to speak? I mean, their submarine fleet is really the only thing that’s left of their Navy that’s effective.
Captain Doug Littlejohns: Well, they’ve sold submarines to other parts of the world.
James Adams: Most of them, though, have been pretty low-grade, old-fashioned things, right? To Iran?
Captain Doug Littlejohns: They’ve also sold nuclear submarines to India. And whether they’re potential adversaries or not, there are clearly still links there. But Tom would know more about that than me.
Tom Clancy: It’s a political and economic question. The Russians are so strapped now for hard currency that if you make them the right kind of offer, they’ll probably deliver.
James Adams: And the Chinese have enough hard currency by comparison?
Tom Clancy: We’ve got a trade imbalance in China that would buy half the Soviet Navy.
James Adams: In the same way, the game supposes that a takeover of the Spratly Islands is the beginning of a move on Taiwan. We saw the exercises off Taiwan recently, which looked very intimidating. Do you think that remains a Mainland China ambition?