Another old Harpooner checks in
Posted: Sat Nov 02, 2013 12:36 pm
Hi all,
I was anxiously watching the reviews and such for CMANO to see how it was received and it appears to be a success so I just picked it up and am having a blast with it. I even broke out all my old pencil & paper Harpoon stuff for the nostalgia of it. I used to blow off classes in college in the late '80s to get together with a group of friends to play Harpoon. I usually was the referee and I used to get huge rolls of graph paper and paste the walls of my buddies apartment with it and we would double-blind play. We were so into it that we considered getting sheets of plexi to make a sort of CIC. At some point real life struck amidships and we were dead in the water...
Anyway, I recently retired from the Army after 32 years, and one of the last things I did was complete C&GSC. The school house uses the GAAT scenario (Georgia/Armenia/Azerbaijan/Turkey) and I was so intrigued by it that I spent most of my class time daydreaming about gaming GAAT with Harpoon. Then comes CMANO, and now I feel like a kid at Christmas.
In a nutshell the current GAAT scenario for those not familiar with it uses a rogue secession of northwestern Iran from the mother country after the regime loses control. The new state, called Ahuristan, also inherits a large portion of the Iranian military. Their primary focus becomes reunification of ethnic lines regionally to the north, which involves an Ahuristan invasion of Azerbaijan. The C&GSC culminating exercise revolves around planning the US response to all of this.
My task right now is to keep playing CMANO and to learn it inside and out so I can dive into the editor and start creating my own adaption of GAAT. I have volumes of information from the school and it is all unclassified & open source. I must say they really did their research to come up with the amount of background information they have on the scenario, to include political & military goals and even locations and composition of forces. The challenge will be to create scenarios in CMANO for air & naval operations and not so much with maneuver forces on the ground which was the focus of what we did with GAAT in C&GSC. Hopefully I can make it work.
Cheers
I was anxiously watching the reviews and such for CMANO to see how it was received and it appears to be a success so I just picked it up and am having a blast with it. I even broke out all my old pencil & paper Harpoon stuff for the nostalgia of it. I used to blow off classes in college in the late '80s to get together with a group of friends to play Harpoon. I usually was the referee and I used to get huge rolls of graph paper and paste the walls of my buddies apartment with it and we would double-blind play. We were so into it that we considered getting sheets of plexi to make a sort of CIC. At some point real life struck amidships and we were dead in the water...
Anyway, I recently retired from the Army after 32 years, and one of the last things I did was complete C&GSC. The school house uses the GAAT scenario (Georgia/Armenia/Azerbaijan/Turkey) and I was so intrigued by it that I spent most of my class time daydreaming about gaming GAAT with Harpoon. Then comes CMANO, and now I feel like a kid at Christmas.
In a nutshell the current GAAT scenario for those not familiar with it uses a rogue secession of northwestern Iran from the mother country after the regime loses control. The new state, called Ahuristan, also inherits a large portion of the Iranian military. Their primary focus becomes reunification of ethnic lines regionally to the north, which involves an Ahuristan invasion of Azerbaijan. The C&GSC culminating exercise revolves around planning the US response to all of this.
My task right now is to keep playing CMANO and to learn it inside and out so I can dive into the editor and start creating my own adaption of GAAT. I have volumes of information from the school and it is all unclassified & open source. I must say they really did their research to come up with the amount of background information they have on the scenario, to include political & military goals and even locations and composition of forces. The challenge will be to create scenarios in CMANO for air & naval operations and not so much with maneuver forces on the ground which was the focus of what we did with GAAT in C&GSC. Hopefully I can make it work.
Cheers
) and recently early retired from work.