The Institute For The Future is working with the Office of Naval Research (ONR) on MMOWGLI — a Massively Multiplayer Online War Game Leveraging the Internet.
Despite the silly name, and despite that fact that it’s been delayed, the “game” sounds interesting from its documentation, which describes three “moves”:
- Protecting the Sea Lanes
- February 2010, Major International Anti-piracy Conference is being convened under the auspices of the IMO (International Maritime Organization), the Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia and the UN [Game artifact].
- As members of the Contact Group’s Working Group 1, Game Participants, representing various anti-piracy stakeholders, will address activities related to military and operational coordination and information sharing and the operational role of the regional coordination center.
- {Option} Participants, may also address other related issues such political, economic, informational, and law enforcement responses to a worsening situation.
- Attacks at Sea
- May 2010, Multiple (2-3) near-simultaneous attacks on ships transiting Red Sea to the Horn of Africa.Blue Force player participants could assume game roles, as for example, US combatant commander(s), SEAL team members, other nation combatant skippers, USCG LEDET, FBI teams, Combined Task Force 151 commander, merchant & cruise ship captains, on-board security team (if inserted by Control).
- Game participants could also play the roles of Somali pirates, pirate mother ship commander and on-shore pirate chieftains/war lords of the Red Force.
- There could also be a White (or Neutral) team representing regional governments, NGOs, the Somali government, etc.
- Hostage Rescue
- Most likely a Joint SOF mission: SEAL or MEUSOC primary assets on the target(s).
- Coastal Village
- Inland
- Participants play traditional Red-Blue roles as enemy combatants holding people and ships and as various members of a combined — or US-only — assault force.
- Most likely a Joint SOF mission: SEAL or MEUSOC primary assets on the target(s).
This sounds like a traditional wargame, where experts discuss what might happen in a high-pressure scenario, only with input from hundreds of interested amateurs — not a massively multiplayer online video game, where everyone’s playing a character (a pirate, a captain, a SEAL operator) in the shared game world.
This bit of the background information caught my attention:
- Ships turning southward at the Horn of Africa transit the SLOC (Sea Lane of Communication) along the east coast of Somalia because of the prevailing southerly currents there. It’s about 1,500 nm on to Mombasa, which is just south of the equator in Kenya. Comparably, that’s about the transit distance from Portland, Maine down the east coast of the US to Miami, Florida. In other words, the ocean area being patrolled by our naval forces off the coast of Somalia is comparable to that in the Gulf of Mexico from the Mississippi River east to Miami then up the eastern seaboard to Maine.
Here is an “illustrative range of [potential] player responses related to arming crews” drawn from various web sources:
- Vessels of the Military Sealift Command, which carry Defense Department cargo, use civilian crews who are trained to use weapons.
- Odds of any one ship being seized by pirates are still very small, and those risks are outweighed by the potential dangers of having guns on board a vessel.
- Mr. Pundt (Maine Merchant Marine Academy) said he would “…prefer to see an international armed force handle piracy, rather than putting merchant marine crews in the
position….” of having to do what Navy Seals did Sunday. - The shipping industry has resisted arming their boats, which would deny them port access in some nations.
- Arming big merchant ships will only drive the pirates to more vulnerable private yachts and other ships that can’t afford such protection.
- “The global shipping industry should consider placing armed guards on its boats to ward off pirates who have become increasingly violent…”, the U.S. military commander who oversees the African coastline, Gen Petraeus, said Friday.
- Sure, a few of the more zealous and enterprising ship owners will man their vessels with numbers sufficient to repel pirates. But then their overhead will go up and more business
will shift over to their cheaper competition that is perfectly prepared to risk the lives of their third world sailors in the interest of higher profits. Simple economics nearly guarantee
that fully manned ships in pirate-infested waters will remain the exception rather than the rule. - Italian cruise ship “MSC Melody” had Israeli private security forces (deemed to be the best available) on board. When attacked by pirates the security detail returned fire, startling the pirates, who gave up and turned around. Use of weapons on board were at the discretion of the commander and the security forces.