Tom Clancy: Or he’s trying to spook you.
Captain Doug Littlejohns: Or he’s trying to spook you, yes, but then you’re getting into the “Do I/don’t I, do I believe it or don’t I believe it.”
James Adams: What happens when you hear the ping of an active buoy and you know a weapon’s about to go into the water? Or when you feel that’s going to happen? What do you do? Do you take immediate evasive action? What shape does that take?
Captain Doug Littlejohns: There is no clear answer to that. If there were a clear answer to what to do in that situation, then people wouldn’t try and fire torpedoes because they would never work. You just have to — as you do in the game — sit back and take a global view of the tactical scenario you’re in. Sometimes, you would drop countermeasures, speed up, change depth, and basically disappear as quickly as possible. Other times you might lie doggo. Or you might fire a torpedo down a bearing if you think that it’s not a sonar buoy but another submarine that’s spooking you because you will certainly spook him if you do that. So there is no clear-cut answer. And the captain of the submarine has to have all these thoughts in his mind all the time.
James Adams: What’s the environment in the South China Sea like? How does that impact on the sort of decision making you’d have to take in a submarine like the Cheyenne? What are the particular aspects of the South China Sea?
Captain Doug Littlejohns: Well, it’s certainly shallow in parts, and it would be pretty noisy with a lot of background noise. It’s a busy shipping area.
James Adams: Which helps you in…?
Tom Clancy: In a lot of ways.
Captain Doug Littlejohns: It helps and it hinders. It helps if you’re trying to sneak in and do something. But if you’re desperately searching for an elusive target like an Akula, it’s not necessarily such a great help.
But there’s nothing unique about operations in the South China Sea, really.
Tom Clancy: Keep in mind that this is an odd case of modesty on Doug’s part. He knows more about oceanography than some Ph.D. oceanographers. He has to, because a submariner uses the environment as a weapon and with considerable skill. And he’s spent fifteen years learning that.
Captain Doug Littlejohns: Well, twenty years.
James Adams: Which leads neatly into the distinctions between reality and fiction. You, Tom, as you said earlier on, have tried to blur the two.
Tom Clancy: The difference between reality and fiction has to make sense. You want to keep that in mind.
James Adams: But how did you find dealing with this game as opposed to writing novels?
Tom Clancy: The point of a game is that you set up a set of circumstances which the user, the game player, defines himself. So, essentially, we’re building an intellectual playground and letting somebody else play in it and determine what happens there. Which is sort of the magic of this if you do it right.
James Adams: But aren’t a lot of books like a war game? I would think you work it through in a similar kind of a way, although not with a similar result obviously because they’re different media. Is that right? I mean, you’ve got a lot of experience with war gaming, I think.
Tom Clancy: It’s kind of like owning a casino and loading the dice. I pretty much determine the way I want the story to turn out. A game in some ways is more intellectually honest because in my books I determine what all the players do. In a game either the artificial intelligence on the CD-ROM or another player determines what the other guy does and in that sense it’s much more realistic.
James Adams: How did you deal with that? This is a new medium for you, and you were bringing a lot of the great wealth of your experience to the game to try and create as much reality as possible. Where did reality meet the reality of fiction?
Captain Doug Littlejohns: First, nobody should be under any misconception that this is a sort of submarine attack simulator. It certainly is not that. What it is trying to do is to make a player realize a good percentage of the sort of information and actions one would take when driving an SSN. Take a scenario: if you’re homing in on a contact which has been detected by other means, it could take you three days of stealthily going around the ocean. Then you get a sniff of a contact, it goes a bit further, you get another sniff, then get into a firing position. This can take days, weeks. Clearly, that’s not something we could do in the computer game because the player would be asleep. And so the compromise between total reality and the reality of the game player is something that we’ve debated at length with experts on the marketing side and with those amongst us who enjoy the game for the game’s sake. We’ve reached a compromise which we believe is going to meet expectations.
James Adams: The timing issue, the time compression, was that the most significant compromise? Or were there other areas where you felt, “Well, okay, in the balance of things, reality has to go here and we’ll create this because it’ll create the same sort of atmosphere if not the exact thing?”
Captain Doug Littlejohns: Well, timing was by far the biggest, but there are a host of other compromises that have been made as well. They’re not particularly big, but if somebody who’s done the same sort of job as me plays the game, he should play it in the knowledge that this is a game to entertain rather than to teach.
James Adams: But more accurate entertainment perhaps than Crimson Tide.
Captain Doug Littlejohns: Oh, yes, much more so. But it would not enable the game player at the end of fifteen successful missions to go and take command of a Los Angeles class submarine.
James Adams: Well, if it were that easy, I’m sure that many others would have been summoned to the flag.
Tom Clancy: Well, maybe a Los Angeles, but not a Trafalgar, right?
Captain Doug Littlejohns: Well, we’re going to get national about this…
If the player gets it wrong, he will be killed, or he will be attacked, anyway. There’s a learning process throughout. It starts with a very simple scenario, building up to a crescendo. But by the end of the game, the player will know quite a bit about handling a submarine underwater.
James Adams: Do you agree with that analysis, Tom?
Tom Clancy: On that I have to defer to Doug. I mean, I’ve never done it for a living, he has. You know, I write about it, but just because I can spell the acronyms doesn’t mean I can drive the boats. He spent twenty years learning how to do the things I write about in a few months. So I’m the minstrel in this case and he’s the expert.
James Adams: Doug, we see in the game that there is an attack on a carrier battle group, and during this there is infiltration by enemy boats. This creates the danger of friendly fire. How real is that?