Heard about the conversation about Naval History at the United States Naval Academy? The original post was very interesting. The follow up was very compelling. An outside observation by a civilian was very encouraging.

 

But I think in the end what I appreciated most was seeing someone in Navy public affairs address the issue professionally and directly in a blog comment. Well done.

 

This week I found myself reading about the value of naval wargaming as it was discussed over email and reading about the value of naval history as it was debated in the blogosphere; and both of these conversations served as a fresh reminder that my hobbies are neither as unique nor as trivial as I long presumed they were.

 

Regarding the simi-private naval wargaming discussion that some of you have likely observed as I have, my only comment is this - there is no reason why the Naval War College isn't running an open source project on SourceForge for the development of a networked, Enterprise naval simulation system that can scale to multiple locations and be multi-player. The University systems in the US are saturated with video game programmers right now - some of whom are very talented, and if someone could come up with a system for measuring combat power, the implementation into software wouldn't be as expensive as you think if you have the right folks running the project from the NWC.

 

Video games are excellent branding tools, as SOCOM has made obvious, which means a naval simulation could be legitimately sponsored and funded from a number of offices N1-N9 and be a legitimate expense, or investment, depending upon how you look at it.

 

In fact, the biggest challenge would be deciding whether the game should be real-time or a play by email turn based system. I favor play by email, but I'm also one of those nerds who enjoyed table top Harpoon, although I'm also admitted a nerd who consumed time writing my own custom DBs for the digital version.

 

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Yay Harpoon!

Nice.

I ever try to mention Harpoon in my little academic papers ...