Wargame Review - Littoral Commander: The Indo-Pacific
Author: Sebastian J Bae
Dietz Foundation, 2022, 2-6 Players
SKU: DTZ 2022-1-1
Reviewed by: Robert C Engen, PhD
Wargaming is a fast-growing discipline within professional military education (PME). Much of my new job here at Deakin University’s Centre for Future Defence and National Security in Canberra involves wargaming for PME, and the Australian Army Research Centre has kindly provided a venue to review wargames relevant to PME and the Australian Army context.
Littoral Commander is a professional wargame that explores future tactical concepts, emerging technologies, and all-domain warfare. It is an ‘intellectual sandbox’ in which to study emerging concepts through a series of ‘what-if’ conflicts in a near-future Indo-Pacific. Although it features land, sea and littoral capabilities, air and cyber power are also included as supporting elements, and in the more complex scenarios the information space is opened up as well. This game was originally crowdfunded as Sebastian Bae’s Fleet Marine Force and became Littoral Commander at the insistence of the US Naval Infantry Corps trademark office. Regardless of the name change, it remains an engaging study of the littoral combat environment, a force design and experimentation exercise in every box.
The gameplay centres on platoon- and company-sized forces ashore, individual missile frigates and destroyers at sea, and a wide array of joint capabilities held at theatre level to support them. Logistics are an abstracted but critical consideration. There are four maps that come with the game: the Luzon Strait, the Taiwan Strait, Okinawa, and the Malacca Strait / Singapore. The game includes a robust set of scenarios. It scales very well and does not take long to learn, even for those with no wargaming experience. The box says that it is designed for two to six players, but I have run it with almost 20 in a PME environment, adding greater gradience for individual team roles.
Littoral Commander is a game about long-range strikes (LRS), an abstraction for all long-range land and naval munitions, and how they might dominate warfare in the near future (if they do not already). The myriad missile and air defence platforms are the critical capabilities, as are the logistics units that keep them firing. I’ve played many Littoral Commander PME sessions and rarely has anyone drawn close enough to fix bayonets, though they are always welcome to try. Rather, this is a game of over-the-horizon hunters and prey. As per the rules, all units are either REVEALED or CONCEALED to the enemy, and anything that is REVEALED can be targeted by LRS. Surveillance and reconnaissance need to be constant, because if you can see something you can kill it—or make it exhaust its supply of integrated air and missile defence (IAMD) munitions. Shooting, scooting, and then fading back into concealment as quickly as possible is key. Since launching salvoes of rockets REVEALS a unit to the enemy, players must exercise supreme awareness of the sensor footprint that every action leaves behind it. As one participant observed after a game I recently facilitated at the Australian Army Research Centre, ‘We used to fire to enable manoeuvre. Now we manoeuvre to enable fire.’ This sentiment captures the central idea of Littoral Commander. Modern precision munitions combined with multiple-avenue intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) exercise a serious interdiction effect on the battlefield. The game is therefore a thought-provoking representation of modern and near-future peer-adversary warfare, and what will be required to fight in this space.
The game is not perfect, and the current second printing comes with errata and rules clarifications. Sometimes the validation method used to assign strengths, scores and costs to certain units or capabilities seems opaque. Some of the ‘Joint Capability Cards’, representing theatre-level persistent or single-use assets, are more in the realm of science fiction than current capability, particularly the cyber cards. But I think the game’s faults are best overcome by treating it as a highly serious game that requires legwork and customisation. For example, Littoral Commander begs to be played double-blind, with the two adversary teams (and possibly even the task forces within those teams) working in separate rooms with their own maps, feeding decisions and orders back to a centralised ‘White Cell’ that maintains and adjudicates on a ground truth map. Combine that with a rigorous and transparent validation process for units and capabilities and you have a very serious professional wargame that can be used for testing all manner of force design hypotheses. I believe the underlying mechanisms are that good.
Sebastian Bae’s educational wargame needs to be widely played in Australia, especially by the Army. It mirrors many of the trends we are seeing with the sensor-saturated environment of Ukraine, except on a platoon- and company-scale rather than the scale of a brigade or a division. Its ‘task force’-centred play dispenses with service siloes and forces players to address complex problems jointly. The Indo-Pacific battlegrounds are a tour of some of the areas of greatest concern and likeliest future intervention for Australia. Littoral Commander is realistic in important areas, skilfully abstracted where realism would be burdensome to smooth play, and evocative throughout of some of the key dilemmas and difficulties of modern high-intensity warfare.
Imitation is the highest form of praise. I am currently designing a custom Littoral Commander scenario and map for Australia: an update to the Kokoda Track campaign that will see the Australian Army battling across the Papua New Guinea highlands, with the full array of modern munitions and capabilities at their disposal.
There are many wargames out there, but most of those you can buy at the store are by and for hobbyists and military history enthusiasts. I have encountered few of them that are better suited for professional and serious use straight out of the box than Sebastian Bae’s Littoral Commander. While certainly fun, accessible, and good value considering what comes in the box, it has been built from the ground up with the PME context in mind. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in exploring the future tactical dimensions of the littoral Indo-Pacific.
