Calling all SH4 Superstars -- The Navy needs your help

[I'm goin' down]

Navy recruits gamers to help in piracy strategy


WASHINGTON (AFP) ---8211; The US Navy is turning to the wisdom of the crowd to forge military strategy, inviting the public to join an online game in which Somali pirates have hijacked commercial ships.

The Office of Naval Research plans this month to launch the US military's first online war game to draw on the ideas of thousands of people instead of the traditional strategy session held inside the Pentagon's offices.

The approach "is designed to produce ideas and potential solutions to our toughest problems and challenges," Lawrence Schuette, director of innovation at Office of Naval Research, told AFP.

"Piracy off the Horn of Africa has been an enduring problem that has many stakeholders. We selected this topic for the pilot scenario," Schuette said.

The scheduled starting date for the project had to be delayed by a month as about 9,000 people have signed up, instead of the 1,000 that planners expected, officials said.

The Navy hopes the project will take advantage of a wide range of expertise not only from military officers but also academics, politicians and technology specialists, he said.

"The hope is that via collective intelligence and the wisdom of many -- we?ll be able to have a conversation about a tough, geopolitical problem and come up with solutions that would?ve never occurred to us," he said.

The game will have three rounds over three weeks, with players in the first stage faced with a piracy scenario and asked to propose brief, Twitter-length solutions.

Players will be presented with boxes labeled, "Innovate" and "Defend," with questions such as: "What new resources could turn the tide in the Somali pirate situation?"

In the second round, there are more scenarios to grapple with and then in the third, players are grouped in teams and will come up with a more detailed "action plan."

"In the action plan you?ll be awarded innovation points and allowed to add more text and illustrations to your original idea," Schuette said.

The precise details of the war game scenarios are being kept under wraps for the moment by the game designers, the Institute for the Future, a non-profit group based in Palo Alto, California.

In true Pentagon fashion, the gaming platform has an unwieldy name, the Massively Multiplayer Online Wargame Leveraging the Internet, or MMOWGLI.

(For starters, aaronblood should send them MOBO!)

[Anthony W.]

Link?

Also - I have a strategy! Sail an Iowa class BB over there and point all the guns at a single tiny ship. If they don't surrender -

[magic452]

The better solution may well be to point the guns at Somalia.
Next ship that gets hijacked, start shooting.
Not really a good solution.

Magic

[Platapus]

Convoys.

Even a small warship can defend against these pirates.

[magic452]

The problem with convoys is that they would be very time consuming and expensive. Till the pirate thing starts costing more money than is currently I don't think you'll see them, unless all the shipping companies pool there resources. There is no doubt they would be effective.

Magic

On second though, there must be some old medium freighters in mothballs or something.
Outfit them as Q ships with combat trained crews. Just have them sail around the area and be targets.
Let the pirates come aboard and take them on. The pirates won't know what is a Q or not.
If you can capture or kill a number of them they might start to rethink the situation.
This may have been discussed before but I don't remember it.

[Daniel Prates]

Will this open game be a naval sim, or a first-person shooter sim? The somali pirates thing is clearly the work for spec-ops teams. What could naval-warfare related minds sugest to help? Firing upon a hidjacked ship full of innocent passangers?

[I'm goin' down]

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp...908500ee61.1b1--The article was posted today.

The point is that some of our superior gamers might find this right up their alley. I once hid in an enemy boat slip to avoid dds in TMO, so I am sure others have imaginative input they could offer up when the site is operating.

[Mush Martin]

Sea control is for carriers not frigates, sea denial is for submarines
not frigates. Hey what do frigates do ?.(kidding)

[I'm goin' down]

Originally Posted by Daniel Prates

The somali pirates thing is clearly the work for spec-ops teams. What could naval-warfare related minds sugest to help? Firing upon a hidjacked ship full of innocent passangers?

Great point, he remarked saracastically. You will have a great future counting change at the hot dog concession at a major league baseball stadium--they count very methodically and really, really slowly.

[Rockin Robbins]

I have to agree. The only way to deter pirates is to kill them individually, surgically and in as violent a means as possible. If they know they will die, they will stop.

Now shooting at the mother ships and the speedboats could well be a naval scenario. Because then you can be a bit less surgical in that you are not targeting individual people. So the spec-ops people would have one mission--rescuing already boarded ships. And the naval forces would target the mother ships and speedboats.

[Stealhead]

You guys are forgetting all the local innocent small boats out there that the pirates try to blend in as.This is why they have all the ships and planes and choppers out looking then when they find something they have to send a Navy,Marine,or Coast Guard boarding team(not Spec Ops though the boarders are trained they are not in most cases Spec Ops the Spec OPs would be good for Rockins scenario) to check out the vessel if they are legit and have no weapons they are free to go about their day if they are bad guys they get detained and the little boats get sunk by gunfire.

The complex nature of the situation must be why they are doing this program if it was as easy as some of your posts they'd have done it by now. Clearly there are many maritime laws as well as LOAC rules in play here.

Link to the "game":http://mmowgli.nps.edu/mmowgli

You give them your e-mail and they let you know when its ready it seems...by the way First on Subsim to sign up!!!!!! Ha ha suckers

sorry could not resist.

I had to search all of the ONR site:http://www.onr.navy.mil/ to find that they had no link so I Googled mmowgli to find it how inconspicuous.

Would you like to play a game? (WarGames reference)

[I'm goin' down]

Originally Posted by Stealhead

First on Subsim to sign up!!!!!! Ha ha suckers

sorry could not resist.

[Stealhead]

Hey just having a little fun.

It is a really good idea though the "war game" there is name for this type of thinking process I forget what they call it they did the same thing when trying to figured a way to get Apollo 13 back.

[I'm goin' down]

subsim--mate

pirate--matey

[Daniel Prates]

Originally Posted by I'm goin' down

Great point, he remarked saracastically. You will have a great future counting change at the hot dog concession at a major league baseball stadium--they count very methodically and really, really slowly.

Ouch.