SSN

Interview

Captain Doug Littlejohns, CBE, RN (Ret.), is one of the finest naval officers I have ever met, and I am proud to call him my friend. His distinguished career includes three command tours, HMS Osiris, HMS Sceptre, and HMS London, respectively a diesel-powered submarine, a nuclear fast-attack submarine, and a missile-armed frigate. In addition, Doug was operations officer for NATO submarines in the Eastern Atlantic, Assistant Director of Naval Warfare for U.K. missile submarines, Principal Staff Officer to the Chief of the Defense Staff, Marshal of the Royal Air Force Lord David Craig, during the Persian Gulf War, and commanding officer of the Royal Navy’s engineering college, HMS Thunderer. He has seen and done it all. If you want to know why the Navy’s been around for so long, people like Doug are the reason.

James Adams, who conducted the interview, is also a good friend, and as Washington Bureau Chief of The Sunday London Times is one of the finest writers I know. He writes extensively on U.S. domestic and foreign policy and on such issues as nuclear proliferation and international terrorism.

James Adams: Tom, Doug, thank you very much for joining me today. Tom, a hallmark of your work is its reality — it’s close to the truth, always on the cutting edge of the political scene. You two have chosen China for SSN as the principal antagonist. Do you see China as a threat to the stability of the world today?

Tom Clancy: Well, China is a country that doesn’t really know what it wants to be. On the one hand they’re trying to develop a free market economy and give their citizens economic freedom. On the other hand we had Tiananmen Square, where they decided that their citizens could have economic freedom, but not political freedom. This is a considerable imbalance. Moreover, in this particular case, we also have the Spratly Islands. There appear to be considerable deposits of oil there. And you’ll recall that fourteen years ago that was the reason that Argentina went after the Falkland Islands — the thought that there might be oil there that they could exploit. Even though Argentina is currently self-sufficient in oil.

A war of aggression is really nothing much more than a large-scale armed robbery. Is this scenario plausible? I think it’s quite plausible. Because nations are greedy. Particularly Marxist nations.

James Adams: Doug, you served out in the Far East as a submariner. Do you agree with that? Was the potential threat posed by China part of the war game that went on when you were out there?

Captain Doug Littlejohns: I was out there in the mid ’60s. That was at the time of the Indonesia confrontation, and we didn’t really think much about China in those days.

James Adams: Would you buy the general scenario as seeing China becoming a bigger player on the scene?

Captain Doug Littlejohns: Oh, very much so. And I think this is an extremely good plot.

James Adams: Tom, you talked briefly about the Spratlys. Tell me a bit more about them. We’ve read a lot about them, and we know that many nations claim them, and I think that China has landed ships on them. And so have other countries. What exactly is the status of those islands?

Tom Clancy: The Spratly Islands are kind of like a dead grandfather with a heck of a big estate. And everybody wants to claim to be the number-one heir. In fact, I think that China’s territorial claim to the Spratlys is fictitious.

James Adams: Tenuous at best.

Tom Clancy: Especially given their location. But they’re such inhospitable pieces of real estate that whoever can get there, plant a flag, and defend it is going to own them.

James Adams: And you think that this scenario, where China is an aggressor because of political instability internally, might be a realistic driver in the near future?

Tom Clancy: Well, historically, a nation with internal problems will externalize. And nothing draws a country together like an external threat. Or a perceived external threat. It’s the classical method historically to unite a country.

James Adams: Doug, you have tremendous experience in submarines. This is a story about submarines. We’re in a post-Cold War world now. We devoted a great deal of energy to dealing with the potential threat from the Soviet submarine fleet. But now we’re in a different environment. What do you think is the strategic and tactical role of submarines in the post-Cold War world?

Captain Doug Littlejohns: It ranges right across the spectrum, starting obviously with the major strategic use of a submarine — which is to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles. But in this situation, the submarine can be used strategically by taking up a position off an enemy area. Its existence is then made known to the enemy. We had a very good example of that in the ’70s when Argentina was making noises about the Falklands. We dispatched an SSN down there, and we told them it was there. And that put off the business for a few years.

James Adams: But in that particular situation, Argentina had no counter force to combat that. They weren’t capable really of dealing with the submarines that we had. That’s not the case with China, where they have a pretty extensive anti-submarine warfare capability.

Captain Doug Littlejohns: Well, they have an anti-submarine warfare capability. I don’t think you can put it in the same league as the anti-submarine capability of NATO nations or, indeed, of the former Soviet Union. So for the game — and for reality — the technical superiority of the U.S. submarine force far outweighs the capability that China, on its own today, could put against them.

James Adams: In other words, the submarines that the Americans can field are quieter and faster than the capability of the Chinese to find with their sonars and other technologies.

Captain Doug Littlejohns: Yes. At this stage. But the world always moves on.

I think that for the scenario that we’re looking at here — which isn’t cast in today’s technological climate — the American submarines would have a pretty good time against their ASW forces.

James Adams: Tom, do you think that the Chinese Navy would have any realistic chance against the United States? They have a lot of numbers but not much capability, and there’s a huge technological gap between the two.

Tom Clancy: One of the things you have to remember about combat is that it’s not really a technical exercise. It’s a human exercise, and a psychological exercise. It’s not machine against machine, it’s person against person. And we all too often overlook that. The difference between a good navy and a bad navy is the quality in the training of its personnel. You know, better to have good men in bad ships than bad men in good ships. If the Chinese decide to make it a national goal to upgrade their Navy — and, of course, they don’t really have a Navy; it’s the Naval Branch of the People’s Liberation Army — but if they decided to really invest some time and money in it to develop the capabilities they need, they could indeed be quite formidable.

China does have a maritime history that we all too often forget.

James Adams: But they’ve been trying to upgrade land, sea, and air for some years now. They’ve invested a lot of money, and a lot of people. But they’ve not been able to bridge that technological gap between the United States and the NATO forces and what they currently have. They have a lot of things, but can they take that training and that technology and bring them together to make it effective, do you think?

Tom Clancy: The fundamental power base of any country is its economy. China has a very rapidly growing economy. They’re making computers. They’re making all manner of products, which can be sold worldwide. If they can do that, they can make damn near anything.

James Adams: So do you think that today we treat China with kid gloves that are perhaps inappropriate? Do you see them as a threat, as some people would argue, for the stability of the world?

Tom Clancy: I don’t know that I would go quite that far. Probably the country at greatest risk from Chinese aggression would be Russia, the former Soviet Union.

Do we treat China in a way which causes me difficulty? Yes. When Deng Xiaoping stomped on the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, we should have done something, for two reasons: First of all, America should not do business with countries that do such things to its own citizens. Moreover, and this is something frequently overlooked, that act was deliberately taken in the knowledge that Bernie Shaw and CNN were filming it — or sending it out live at the time — on global television. They were, indeed, therefore telling the world, “Drop dead. This is the way we do business and if you don’t like it, that’s too bad.” I question the ethics of doing business as usual with a country that is so grossly repressive as the People’s Republic of China.

James Adams: Doug, in SSN we have a very realistic portrayal of what it’s like to be in command of a submarine. Something that you have done. Can you tell me a bit about what sort of training goes in to make a commander? What is looked for, psychologically and in practical terms, in somebody who can deliver?

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?

Tom Clancy: It could be. The Falkland Islands War of 1982 is an interesting historical model. Why did that happen? It happened because the military junta that ruled Argentina at the time was making such a botch of running their nation that they had to find something to distract their people from the screwups they had at home. And they did that by grabbing the Falklands and causing a particularly pointless little war.

In the case of the People’s Republic of China, one way to distract their people from their political difficulties at home is to externalize. One target is Hong Kong. They’re going to absorb Hong Kong very shortly. And if they can absorb Taiwan, they’ll have an enormously powerful economy.

Also, they would put “paid” on a long-standing bill with Chiang Kai-shek and the Pao Min Tong. And the Chinese are people with long memories.

James Adams: But this would not be without cost. It would be difficult to imagine the United States sitting by and saying, “Okay, guys, take it over.”

Tom Clancy: This is unknown. It is a fact of U.S. law that America has a particularly schizophrenic policy toward China. On the one hand we acknowledge that there is only one China. And yet, on the other hand, we say this is not true. But if the People’s Republic of China attacks Taiwan, we’re not going to like it very much.

Now those two statements of policy are incompatible, but that is standing U.S. law.

Captain Doug Littlejohns: I think the world should watch very carefully what the Chinese military does now. When they did their exercises off Taiwan, they had to sort of back down. It will be interesting to see how they respond to that, and whether they feel that they’ve got to pour more money or focus more money in certain areas to ensure that that never happens again.

Tom Clancy: A further complication: What’s the nearest U.S. Navy base? We don’t have Subic Bay in the Philippines anymore. We have to stage out of the nearest one we have — which I guess is Japan. And that’s a goodly distance.

James Adams: Yes, it is. And would Japan really want that either, if China was rattling sabers?

Tom Clancy: Good question.

Captain Doug Littlejohns: They’re not terribly keen on nuclears.

Tom Clancy: No, they’re not. The next nearest fleet base is Pearl Harbor, and that’s 3,000 miles.

James Adams: Give me a sense of what it’s like inside a submarine in a crisis. You’re under attack. You don’t quite know where the enemy is. You’ve got to find them, retaliate, and at the same time take evasive action. What’s the flavor of that like? What’s the smell, the taste of the drama?

Captain Doug Littlejohns: Well, the first thing I’d like to get across to people — and I think the player needs to get that as well — is professionalism. People remain reasonably cool and calm. They have to, to do their job, because everybody is depending on everybody else.

James Adams: It didn’t look like that in Crimson Tide, of course.

Captain Doug Littlejohns: Well… I thought Crimson Tide was a great movie until about halfway through it.

James Adams: Until their mutiny started.

Captain Doug Littlejohns: I hope that wasn’t made by Paramount.

Having said that, you train for it all the time. And therefore it’s almost — well, second nature is probably putting it too far, but if you compare a submarine to a smooth-running engine, then a little perturbation like an attack and so on just notches it up to a different gear. And people respond to that. I’ve never experienced hysteria or people jumping up and down. They just get on and do the job.

James Adams: What was your worst experience as a submariner?

Captain Doug Littlejohns: I think the worst experience was when I had water coming in when it shouldn’t have been coming in when I was pretty close to my maximum diving depth. But that was handled very nicely.

James Adams: What did you do?

Captain Doug Littlejohns: Well, we were in a place where we could surface in a hurry. And actually I was very impressed by the way people responded. They did all the right things in the right order at the right time.

James Adams: Has that always been your experience? There haven’t been occasions where people have said or done things that take it outside of the normal performance loop?

Captain Doug Littlejohns: If the submarine is taken outside of the normal performance loop then the captain will do that — and do it very advisedly, because he knows the risks he’s running. But there are tactical scenarios when you will need to do just that. If you’re a professional, and you know the capabilities and the limitations, not only of your kit and your crew but of yourself — which is the most important one — then you can do it and get away with it.

James Adams: In one part of the game the commander of the submarine Cheyenne is instructed to fire only if fired upon. That seems to me to be a very vulnerable position to be put in, because you’re placed not in a proactive position, but in a reactive one. Which is not a happy state to be in.

Tom Clancy: Well, you won’t have a Navy commander initiating war between two superpowers. That’s seventeenth- and eighteenth-century stuff.

James Adams: But do you also want to allow yourself to be in a position where you can get taken out?

Tom Clancy: That’s a political decision. In America, the military is controlled by civilians.

Captain Doug Littlejohns: So it is elsewhere. I never served in an SSBN — a boomer — but to answer James’s question, when you go to sea in an SSN, you go on semi-war footing. You’ve got torpedoes loaded, particularly if you’re doing some interesting operations. And then you are in the situation you’ve just described. You could find somebody firing at you at any moment, but you can’t go out and initiate things. Because military don’t make war, they conduct a war which is made by the politicians.

James Adams: That’s a fine distinction. Tom, what about your experiences on submarines?

Tom Clancy: Well, for one thing, they were all tied alongside while I was on board. With one exception.

James Adams: What was the exception?

Tom Clancy: I stepped off a tugboat onto the portside fairwater plane of U.S.S. Hammerhead, walked across, and climbed up into the sail, so Newsweek could take some photographs of me being a fool.

Captain Doug Littlejohns: And you weren’t seasick?

Tom Clancy: Not in the least. I was too scared to be seasick. There was only a little bit of water between the pressure hull of the submarine and the tugboat. I figured I was on a real thinning program if I fell off.

James Adams: Getting back to the game, in one of the missions we meet the Akula class submarine for the first time. By then, we’ve already met the Han class. Describe for me, Tom, the distinctions between the two and their capabilities.

Tom Clancy: It’s the difference between a Model T Ford and a current day Ferrari. The Akula is a very formidable platform. Toward the end of the life of the Soviet Union, they actually started to understand what navies were all about.

James Adams: With the help of—?

Tom Clancy: Phillip John Walker. Yes, he was very helpful to them in some ways. Fortunately, one of the other things they found is that it’s awfully expensive to do it right.

The Akula is the rough equivalent of an early 688 class, which means that it may be, what? Fifteen years behind current technology. But that’s only a few percentage points of performance.

Captain Doug Littlejohns: It’s a major step/change/ improvement in capability. In my early days in submarines, if one went out to sea in the Atlantic and hung around for a bit, one was bound to find a Russian submarine. And you knew that he wasn’t going to be able to find you.

Now the situation is much more mind focusing. Now you can’t go out there and just crash around and expect to always have a tremendous sonar advantage over him.

James Adams: But it seems to have been the case, Tom, that since the end of the Cold War the Russians have been organizing a pretty severe change in the way they make up the submarine fleets, getting rid of the old ones, keeping up the new ones, refining the crews so that they’re better trained, better organized, and investing in new submarines. Do you think that’s right? How does that capability stack up these days?

Tom Clancy: I’ve yet to figure out exactly what the Russians were thinking about in terms of defense policy. Historically, they’re a continental power, not a maritime power, and the biggest national security threat they face is probably China. Now there are people in Moscow who still worry about the Germans, but I guess that’s because they’ve been reading the recent history. They do not face a maritime threat per se, which makes me wonder why the hell they continue to build some ships. Retiring the old ships was just to save money and they had no real tactical utility. Yes, they do seem to be continuing construction on the Akula, the advanced Akula class. But I really don’t know why.

Captain Doug Littlejohns: I still think that they’re looking to the West. You say they don’t have an immediate maritime threat, but the U.S. has got the biggest Navy in the world, and that in being is a threat. Go back to Jutland, a fleet in being is a threat.

James Adams: Why do you think they’ve been putting the Akulas off the East and West coasts of the United States in the last year or so, successfully I believe — some of them, we think, undetected? That shows first of all an aggressiveness we haven’t seen before; second, an ability that we haven’t seen before; and third, a worrying potential gap between American capability vis-à-vis Russian capability.

Captain Doug Littlejohns: Well, you’ve made three points there. The aggression we have seen before. They’ve always wanted to go into the Atlantic and roam at will and show their capability in so doing, but they couldn’t do it. Now they can, to an extent. It’s always impossible to say what sort of detection capability the NATO forces or the U.S. special equipment has got because you don’t know quite what you’re missing in what you have detected.

There is no doubt that they have been doing what you say and getting away with it. And that does a number of things, doesn’t it? It gives them a considerable amount of confidence, it worries the Western powers, and it goes back to their political leadership who say, “Well, we can do something if we want to.” So I think they will continue to do that. Whereas, whether they’ve got a proper maritime policy since Gorshkov died is another question, and I would agree with Tom that it could do with a re-evaluation.

James Adams: Do you think that’s right, Tom? Do you think that that analysis is why this apparent new aggression against the United States is with their submarines?

Tom Clancy: Well, aggression is the wrong word. The sea is free for passage for all and we fought a war over this once. They’ve got some toys; they probably want to play with them. And, in realistic terms, I don’t really think it goes far beyond that. They’ve got the platforms, they want to see if they work. To me, and from conversations that I’ve had with people who’ve talked with the Russian — what they used to call Stavka; I don’t know what they call it now, Russian Military High Command — the two big enemies they see in their future are Germany and the People’s Republic of China. As for Germany, I think they’re just out of their minds, but the Russians have a long history of paranoia. In the case of China, we need to remember that the Chinese have been as far West as Novagrad, which is almost in the Baltic. So there is a historical concern there that they have, particularly since China has a growing economy and needs natural resources, and the Soviets in Eastern Siberia have the world’s largest unexplored mineralogical treasure house.

James Adams: Later in the game, we meet a new class of submarine called the Mao, which is based on another Russian development, the Severodvinsk class. Can you tell me a bit about that?

Tom Clancy: It’s a new boat. As I said earlier, we can anticipate that the Chinese have highly sophisticated industrial capability now. And if they choose to build something that good, they can probably do it. Back in World War I, the Germans built a fleet from scratch, and by 1916 they had ships every bit as good as what the Royal Navy was fielding with hundreds of years of tradition. It’s simply a matter of political will and industrial expertise. They have the industrial expertise, and if they develop the political will it’s going to happen.

James Adams: In part of the game, we in the Cheyenne experience being attacked with sonar buoys extensively. Doug, you must have gone through that yourself. Will you describe for me how that works and what it feels like?

Captain Doug Littlejohns: You don’t really get attacked by a sonar buoy.

James Adams: Threatened, then.

Captain Doug Littlejohns: Sonar buoys tend to be dropped from either maritime aircraft or helicopters and they have a limited detection capability. But years and years of research has gone into developing the pattern in which they lay them in the water. And they do have a certain capability to detect. Occasionally in the submarine you can hear a sort of plopping noise as something’s dropped into the water, but in the main, you do not know whether there are sonar buoys there or not.

James Adams: So it’s passive because it just sits there?

Captain Doug Littlejohns: They are predominantly used passively, but there are active capabilities in these sonar buoys. Now if somebody is active on the sonar buoy close to you, then that probably means either they’ve seen you because you’ve been up at periscope depth and they’ve seen your periscope, or they’ve got a passive detection on you and they’re trying to localize you for a weapon attack. So one wouldn’t hang around very long.

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?

Captain Doug Littlejohns: Very.

James Adams: It is?

Captain Doug Littlejohns: One of the more dangerous scenarios — and I hope no submariners will take offense at this — is mixing it up like that. When you’ve got surface forces, aircraft, and submarines all in the same part of the ocean with enemy submarines infiltrating, there’s a temptation to fire at shadows. There are procedures which have been worked on for years to control people in areas which move with the carrier task force, but that requires an awful lot of communications, either underwater communications or satellite type communications. I’ve done it a few times and never felt entirely comfortable when there’s been a known enemy in the vicinity.

James Adams: Those sort of blue on blue instances are all too common on land where people apparently should be able to see each other.

Captain Doug Littlejohns: War’s dangerous and that sort of thing does happen.

Tom Clancy: In World War II, we know at least one and possibly as many as three U.S. submarines were killed blue on blue. And in the one known case, the submarine was in a safe travel zone where nobody was supposed to attack anybody.

Captain Doug Littlejohns: My point exactly.

Tom Clancy: Yes, but a tincan skipper said, “This is it, that’s a Japanese submarine.” Boom.

Captain Doug Littlejohns: Yes.

James Adams: We learn in the game that intelligence says, “There are no enemy around here,” and intelligence, to put it mildly, gets it slightly wrong. What can you rely on? Are you very alone down there? Are you saying it’s me against everybody?

Captain Doug Littlejohns: No, I think that would be overdramatizing it. But there’s no doubt that if one puts implicit faith in the intelligence without a questioning mind, then it will end in tears. Intelligence can be reassuring, but as we mentioned earlier, Akula submarines have come out into the Atlantic and not necessarily been detected, or have only been detected infrequently, during which time they could have moved thousands of miles. So intelligence is not the be all and end all, and therefore it is just another part of the brickwork for running your submarine. That’s it.

James Adams: You have a jaundiced view of intelligence, Tom, I see.

Tom Clancy: It’s imperfect. I’ve yet to meet a tactical or operational commander who really trusts his intelligence sources.

James Adams: Because they prefer to trust their own judgment on the ground rather than some guy who’s somewhere in the rear?

Captain Doug Littlejohns: No, but it is nice to get intelligence, particularly hard intelligence reports, because that can make you frame your thinking for the next several hours. The English language gets very rough treatment in the intelligence service and you go from probable to possible with an awful lot of variations in the middle. And it is possible, after years of reading these things, to know how comfortable they’re feeling back at base. But as I said, I would never put total confidence in it.

James Adams: How do you think a player will come out of this game? Will they come out thinking, “God, who wants to be a skipper of a submarine?” or will they come out thinking, “This is a gripping, exciting, intellectually challenging task?” What do you think they’ll come away with?

Captain Doug Littlejohns: First of all, they’ll come out with a sense of achievement, I hope, if they’ve got through the fifteen scenarios. Secondly, it is not designed to act as a recruiting drive for the U.S. Navy submarine service. But I think what the player will come out with is with a bit of an understanding of what it’s like down there, something which nobody really has tried to portray in the past. You mentioned Crimson Tide; we’ve had a few other movies as well, one that was involved with this chap here. But none of those have really been able to pit the player against a few scenarios where he’s had to learn, hopefully, by his mistakes — or, if he’s bright enough, to operate the submarine intuitively. So I think that, yes, they’ll come out of it with a much better understanding of what life on a submarine is about. And that’s it.

James Adams: What do you think, Tom?

Tom Clancy: I know people who’ve done submarine and anti-submarine warfare from the surface, from underneath, and from the air, and they all agree that it’s the best game in town, that there is nothing more intellectually challenging than submarine slash anti-submarine warfare. And if the player really pays attention to the game, he’ll come out with as realistic a feel for that game as you can get anywhere.