Last year, ahead of the inaugural SDHistCon East at the U.S. Naval War College Museum in Newport, Rhode Island, we held several Zoom sessions with notable gaming figures that were exclusively open to attendees. With SDHistCon East again set for that facility this year (from August 8-11: very limited tickets will go on sale April 6 at noon Pacific), a July 1, 2023 session featuring the college’s Pete Pellegrino is particularly notable to relay now. There, Pellegrino (who would also attend that convention, and give attendees a walking tour of the grounds and buildings (seen above) that was a highlight for many) talks about his background in wargaming (both institutional and commercial), the college, its wargaming history, what attendees would see on campus, and more. Here’s the video, and an AI-generated transcript, lightly edited by SDHist’s Akar Bharadvaj.
The transcript, and some shorter videos of relevant parts:
My background: I’m an accidental war gamer. My original orders to the War College back in 2004 were to the teaching side of it. If you’re not familiar with the War College, it kind of has that classic university split: one half of the college is focused on students and the education side, and the other half of the campus is focused on research. As for the wargaming department, it lives on the research side of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies.
I was on my way to the teaching faculty, and about six weeks before my orders to come to the college, I get this message from the Personnel Department of the college and they’re saying, “Hey, the guy you were going to relieve”—at the time I was still active duty in uniform—”he decided to extend, so you don’t have a job, because the guy you were going to relieve is still occupying the building. But look: the big Navy, the Bureau of Personnel, really doesn’t know where people are once they get to the War College, because for them, it’s just one unit code, and again, they don’t know what happens once you cross the gate.”
So, they said, “Why don’t you come up? We can stick you in the wargaming department. They’ve got a spot opening, you’re a senior aviator, that would be great. They’re happy to have you, so we’ll just hide you in wargaming for like a year and then we can move you over to the teaching faculty. I said, “Okay, wargaming, all right.” I played Risk; I played Stratego. That’s about the limit of my gaming at that point. So I show up, and that year goes by and they say, “Hey, we can move you over to the teaching side. I said, “You know what, I’m good; leave me where I am.”
And that’s how I just stumbled through it in 2004 and I’ve been in the department ever since. I’ve been retired from active duty since 2007, and just stayed on there at the War College. Although there’s this little period of time in 2007 when I did retire, there was a federal hiring freeze at the time, so I could not go from active duty to just joining the faculty as a government civilian. And the dean of the wargaming center just said, “Look, I’d hire you in a heartbeat, but I understand you’ve got to keep beans on the table, you got to somehow stay employed for the next year. So whatever you can do and stay local, we’ll be happy to hire you when the opening comes.”
So I thought, “Okay, good to know.” I wandered back down to my office and the lead contractor who is on site comes over and knocks on my door and says, “Hey, I hear you’re trying to figure out what to do when you grow up. Come on down to my office.” I’m thinking this is going to be a fatherly chat, right? George, an old retired helicopter pilot, had been in the contracting side of the house for a long time, so I thought this was just going to be a mentor thing, you know.
So we go down there and we sit in his office and he’s like, “So what are you looking to do? What are your priorities?”, that kind of thing. We’re just chatting, and he’s giving me little bits of advice, and he says, “What have you thought about how much money you’d need to make for all this to make sense?” So yeah, I did the back-of-the-envelope stuff, the spreadsheet, and so I told him the number I was looking at, and he goes, “Okay, we can do that.” I’m like, “Wait, what? Oh crap, this was a job interview, and I just blew the salary part because I would have gone higher.” But I got hired on for that period.
And again, the idea was to do that for a year, apply to the government position when the hiring freeze is over, then off we go. But in that year, because the college hadn’t anticipated bringing on another contractor in that period, there was only a little bit of college funding for additional wargaming work out of me. But at this time, across the country in Redmond, the senior vice president for legal affairs at Microsoft had just lost a case, an anti-monopoly suit in the EU.
This shocked Microsoft, kind of an arrogant organization when it comes to their legal department, a little bit. And they were thinking, “Come on, this is going to be a no-brainer. We’ll just go through the motions here, but we’re going to win the suit.” And they lose. So this sends Brad Smith, who’s currently the president of Microsoft, he’s wondering what to do. And he remembers, he’s reading a book at the time, War Plan Orange by Ed Miller,
He goes, “You know what, we need some wargamer, that’s what we need.” So he turns to his executive assistant and says, “Go find me a wargamer.” Nicole doesn’t know what to do, so she Bings it (we joked she couldn’t Google it because she’s at Microsoft, so she has to use Bing), and it comes up with the Naval War College. Because again, we’ve been doing it since 1887.
And so, they reach out to the War College and they get a hold of my old military boss there. And of course, the college can’t help them; they’re a private corporation, so they really can’t make use of government facilities. But they said, “Well, you know, there’s a guy, he just retired, and he’s kind of in between things, and he’s with a contractor, so maybe he can help you.” They get a hold of me, and next thing you know, I’m doing wargaming for Microsoft.
So I did a stint kind of looking at wargaming through the business lens and how do you apply the principles of that people making decisions in a competitive environment within the business context. So I did that for a bit for Microsoft, I also had some opportunity with General Electric for a time. All right, so that kind of gave me some of that perspective on gaming applied in the business out of the house.
Then, fast forward, I’m working on a Habitat for Humanity project, I’m just talking to the guy next to me as we’re tearing out a sink out of a bathroom and he’s like, “Hey, what do you do?” “Oh, I’m at Hasbro. What do you do?” “Oh, I’m wargaming at the War College” stuff. “Well, really, tell me more about wargaming,” and I was like, “Well, tell me more about commercial games.” So we trade stories, and the next thing you know, I’m doing consulting work for Hasbro.
And so I’ve got this triangle going in terms of gaming through a business lens to do it for competitive business purposes, gaming in the classic entertainment perspectives for Hasbro board gaming and toys, and then the classic wargaming for the government. Eventually, we joke that the War College had a car wash, did a bake sale, scraped some money together, and they hired me back.
So most of my time now is spent at the wargaming department. I do primarily game design and adjudication, that’s kind of my niche within the organization. I’ve been doing it now since 2004, so it’s 19 years and whacking at it. And in that time, I’ve been able to leverage all three different perspectives.
And probably one of the biggest things that that all of that reinforced is that games are games are games, humans are playable creatures, and how we can leverage that part of our brain and our genetic. Whether it’s for business purposes, entertainment purposes, or “serious” purposes, it’s all a subset of games and play. And so there’s huge amounts of intellectual overlap in terms of how we look at problems when we’re trying to design a game to get at something.
So part of what I’ll do then in August (at the SD Hist Con East Convention) is a walking tour of the campus. You can trace the War College’s development architecturally and its buildings and whatnot through wargames, because it was the dominant instructional technique since 1887. The college was founded in 1884, and since 1887, wargaming has not been part of the curriculum; it was the curriculum.
So, as a preview of the Naval War College campus, where you’ll be this summer: right over here is Founders Hall, and that’s where the tour starts as well. Founders Hall was originally the Newport Widows and Orphans Asylum, and it was purchased by the Navy and opened as the War College in 1884. Admiral Stephen B. Luce was the first president.
That’s the museum now, where a lot of the events will occur this summer, and the early gaming. If you’re on the tour in the summer, we’ll talk about what kind of gaming was going on and how the War College even came to gaming, and Luce’s connection to Kriegsspiel. There’s a connection to Fort Adams down the bay, William Livermore, and McCarty Little. The characters are important in this story, and we’ll talk a bit about that on the tour.
But then from there, we’re going to proceed just across the street over to Luce Hall. Luce Hall was the first purpose-built building on campus, because we rapidly outgrew the Founders Hall. So this was built just prior to the Spanish-American War, and it was the whole kit and caboodle. Luce Hall had gaming spaces, classroom spaces, office spaces, dormitory facilities, it kind of was the entire College, and it’s in the two gaming floors that were in Luce Hall where much of the interwar period wargaming occurred, when people get all misty-eyed about war planning.
So from Luce Hall, we’re going to stop around the corner over to Pringle Hall. Pringle Hall looks structurally very much the same as Luce Hall, but when Pringle Hall opened in 1933, it was the most sophisticated wargaming facility of its time. It has this huge floor, and the checkerboard floor isn’t there anymore; we think it’s under the carpet, which is under the linoleum, which is under a bunch of other stuff, because this space has been renovated, but you can still see the bones of the wargaming facility that was in Pringle. So we were in Pringle through the 1930s and 1940s and then into World War II.
And so that’s when our tour then will take us out to the back side of the campus where Sims Hall is. Sims Hall is an old barracks that the college acquired in 1947 after the war. It has this interesting history, and how the college used it over the next 60 years. Sims Hall’s first use is for overflow gaming. The gaming floor there is actually still accessible, and it looks an awful lot like Pringle games until the 1950s, when along comes computer-based games.
This was the advent of NEWS, the Naval Electronic Warfare Simulation system, which is our big wargaming system. That resided over in Sims Hall through the Cold War. We’ll talk about the history of computer gaming and how that changed both the student experience at the college as well as gaming’s role in the fleet. And then from Sims Hall we’ll stomp on over to McCarty Little Hall.
McCarty Little Hall is the newest facility on campus. It is the largest purpose-built wargaming facility for DoD at 110,000 square feet. We joke that the Marines are building a wargaming facility down in Quantico, but it’s at 100,000 square feet, so we’re still bigger. Between Penn State and Michigan, we fight about who’s got the biggest stadium in terms of seating right. It changes as each of us modifies our stadiums, and the stadiums have grown, the Big Bouse versus Beaver Stadium.
So again, McCarty Little Hall is 110,000 square feet, and she is opened in 2000, as the home for the Center of Naval Warfare Studies. That’s where all our gaming, that and Sims Hall building four, which I talked about. We dumped in about 12 million dollars, and we’ve done a remodel/refit for Sims Hall so that Sims is our primary high-security gaming facility, so games at the Top Secret level and up are played over in Sims Hall, and our Secret games and below can be played in McCarty Little Hall. All of this is driven by wargaming, and having the capacity to game the game bigger, to game more complex, and to game for higher and higher classification levels.
So that’s our lovely campus. And again, if you do the tour in August, I’ll give you all the skeletons and all the stuff and where all the bodies are buried over the course of the college. The College is kind of a standard college, except that we take students in August that typically graduate in June. We do have what’s called a rolling admissions program, so we do admissions in the fall and again in the winter. Students that come to us in the fall are just here for about that August through June period, so you can kick them out the door back to the fleet.
If they come in the winter then they have to summer over. And it’s usually those students that we’ll get involved in advanced research projects and other activities during the course of the summer. In the summer, the teaching side goes into hiatus, but the wargaming side is a 12-month-a-year organization, sitting in the largest building. We have the largest standing staff.
So our total staff, to include all my technicians and my enlisted support, runs about 120 personnel. The core faculty is about 36, which is pretty evenly divided one-third contractor, one-third civilian government civilians, and one-third active duty military.
So because we’ve got the manpower, we are programmed to do eight major war games a year. At any given time, if you run your finger vertically through our event calendar, six games are ongoing. They’re in some stage of either pre-game work, design, execution, rehearsals, execution, or they’re in post-game analysis. We try to get eight wargames within a calendar year.
Like a lot of things, the Navy wants more. We’ve said “Well, there’s a cost.” So we’re currently trying to expand our faculty numbers, because that’s probably right now one of our biggest limiters. The building is a bit of a limiter, but because we expanded back into that old Sims Hall, and refurbed her, we do have a greater capacity again.
Often what it boils down to is the humans. Our games are about a six to nine-month cradle to grave, from the time someone says “Hey, I’ve got a problem,” to the time I’m handing you your report, it’s about nine months.
The War College, we used to be masters of our own fate in terms of what we gamed. But now we’re pretty much so driven around by the Chief of Naval Operations and his office at OPNAV, where the fleet now basically submits war games, or problems they have that they think might be appropriate for wargaming. We go through a huge prioritization, rack and stack process, or the Pentagon. And eventually eight games are selected for us to do in a given year.
The gaming unfortunately is not as strong as it was in our past, and now we’re kind of coming back to it. There was a period of time through the 1980s, where gaming for students—it’s not that it fell out of favor, but if you’re at any institution where they keep adding requirements to your curriculum, but they don’t want to take anything off…there’s only so many classroom days that can be executed. So as they’ve added requirements, one of the things that fell to the wayside, for a variety of reasons—we’ll talk about that if you’re up on campus during the tour—was the student-centered war game at the Center for Naval Warfare Studies.
Despite the fact that I’m there at the Naval War College, actually there’s very little student gaming. We game for the fleet, we game for the Pentagon, we game for Fleet commanders. Obviously, U.S. Pacific Fleet is a huge consumer of our time. So that’s kind of how it’s been focused.
But during the day, we’ll probe about the War Plan Orange side of the house. If you Google me and War Plan Orange, you’ll find on Georgetown University’s website, the talk I gave them. There’s one on Invicta, the history site, as well, that you can hear me rattle on for 45 minutes about War Plan Orange. But the important part that I want to underscore for War Plan Orange is the idea that everyone could keep saying [Chester] Nimitz’s quote that “The war with Japan had been re-enacted in the game room here by so many people and in so many different ways that nothing that happened during the war was a surprise.”
We have Nimitz’s speech recorded. He spoke to the students in 1960 and 1961, and he wrote a letter to the president of the War College in 1965. It’s been taken out of context from my viewpoint. And what I think Nimitz was trying to explain in terms of his wargaming experience. Now think about this: Nimitz is the class of 1923. Think about the Navy in 1923: dreadnoughts, biplanes, submarines are finally coming up about as equal number of times as they go down, so it’s not the Navy he’s going to fight with 20 years later in 1943. Yet when asked about his wargaming experience, he said one of the most invaluable parts of his military training was his wargaming experience at the college.
Yet the Navy he played with little lead ships on the floor of Luce Hall was not representative of the Navy he fought with in the Pacific. So it clearly wasn’t about memorizing answers with dreadnoughts and the rules. We know from hindsight that some of the rules that we used in the 1920s and 1930s when he was a student were wrong.
Our rules got the Japanese Long Lance torpedo wrong, we got night fighting wrong, we got radar implementation wrong, we got the Japanese naval aviation wrong. We assumed they just mirror imaged us, when they had a very different approach. We got submarine employment wrong. We got the vague outlines of amphibious warfare about right, but a lot of things, not so much.
Yet, Nimitz doesn’t say “Ah, my wargaming was irrelevant because it was old, and in hindsight, it had a lot of things wrong about the Japanese.” By the way, nobody jumps up and down about War Plan Black, the war plan for Germany (in the color coding system, orange was for Japan, black was for Germany, red was the UK, and other colors were for other countries) which involved fighting the Germans in the Caribbean. We had nothing that looked like the Battle of the Atlantic; it had no real considerations in terms of the submarine warfare that ended up being the dominant feature of the Atlantic. So no one runs around going “We got War Plan Black right.” But because we happen to get War Plan Orange, broadly speaking, “right” in hindsight, that’s what everybody beats on about.
But in truth, Nimitz didn’t see the value of wargaming for the explicit representation of the enemy. It gave him a mental tool kit, it built for Nimitz and his staff—and as a matter of fact all flag officers but one had been a graduate of the world college at the outbreak of the war—a common understanding of things that didn’t change. Geography, the challenge of logistics, the tyranny of distance: these were all things that they would have had to wrestle with in the games.
And whether they were playing with dreadnoughts or the Missouri-class battleship, it didn’t matter whether they had Langley or eventually got to Yorktown and Enterprise in terms of air power, it didn’t matter. It was that that planner’s rhythm of trying to understand what were the relevant pieces that I had to consider when looking at the threat before me. So while there are things that we know that the games didn’t cover, over the course of the interwar period, we played about 318 games in the course of that time period.
And there’s some things that popped up that didn’t get covered and engaged. There are things we gamed that didn’t manifest in the war. We gamed a lot about the Panama Canal, and there was no real threat to the Panama Canal. But we gamed that, because it was all about giving the students an opportunity to use a technique, wargaming, to gain that appreciation for how to think, not memorize the right answer. And that’s the power of gaming, and it continues to be.
We emphasize the fact that there’s this human cry right now that we need more models and simulations than wargaming, we need more accurate, realistic, validated data on the enemy to be able to wargame. But no, we don’t, because if you’re hinging everything on getting the model exactly right—and we know “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”—George Butler—then we’re setting ourselves up for failure, as opposed to building a cadre of officers who are going to have to fight with whatever Navy they’ve got. It’s the old “You go to war with the Navy you have, not the Navy you want.”
I understand the desire to have a tool to help inform decisions about fleet acquisition and future force design. But by and large, I keep looking to the student side of things. And quite frankly, the admirals that we work with now; statistically, given how old they are and how senior they are, when the next war breaks out most of them will be retired in rocking chairs eating applesauce at home. They’re not going to be the ones fighting the fight, it’s my O-4s and O-5s today. They are students who are going to have to fight the fight with the kit they got, and it’s them that should be getting the maximum opportunity to wargame.
So, that’s me on my soapbox. I get worked up about gaming and who should be doing it and its value.
With that, we have the opportunity to play a game. Up until World War I, the game to play and the battle to understand was Trafalgar. Trafalgar was this touchstone in the Age of Sail, in terms of understanding tactical advantage, being innovative, and what you could do at the time.
And so everyone studied the hell out of Trafalgar, until we came out of World War I, when Jutland became the battle to understand during the interwar period. They emphasized playability over “accuracy.” But the only thing that they were hypersensitive to was maneuver.
In the old rule sets—and this would have been the same time that Fred Jane and Fletcher Pratt were coming up with their games—a dreadnought was a dreadnought was a dreadnought. It did not matter whether it was a French dreadnought, a German dreadnought, or a U.S. dreadnought. We had but one class of ship; it was called a dreadnought. Same thing with destroyers, cruisers, etc.
So there’s no distinguishing for individual characteristics. There was no consideration of the fact that, ‘Well, this ship has got a thicker deck armor than this one.’ They didn’t care. Dreadnought to dreadnought, the angle that you’re shooting at, whether you’re shooting at a target broadside, you’re shooting at a balance turn, it didn’t matter. We’re not going to get into that aspect; we don’t care.
We will consider how many guns you can bring to bear broadside, you can bring more guns. And then what hits you get is deterministic. If you’re at 10,000 yards and I’m shooting at you with an eight-inch gun, you get X number of hits. We don’t roll dice, we don’t do probability, we don’t spread shots around, we don’t do salvo modeling, that’s the rule.
Because at the time, the thing that mattered the most was learning how to maneuver your ships to put the most number of barrels pointing downrange at the start and maneuver. That was measured to an excess for maneuver. We had these big templates that kind of look like protractors with different speeds, and every knot’s marked off on how many degrees deflection the ship will drop. We have a different template for destroyers than we do for battleships, etc. So it’s all about maneuver.
But then we get to gunnery, measure the range, and all the gunnery was based on what’s called the 14 hits rule. Which basically said you look at the ship, the largest caliber gun to float for the time, and for a while, it was 14-inch rounds. And they then tried to come up with an estimate that if you put a target ship 5,000 yards away from a ship with 14-inch guns and you just hammered the hell out of the target, how long before the target sank.
Alright, that’s now the baseline, and everything else now is a percentage of a 14-inch shell hit. So maybe an eight-inch shell does half the damage of a 14 inch, so it’s 0.5 hits. Everybody worked up a clever formula, and this is what was proprietary about the Fletcher Pratt system versus the Fred Jane system versus the Naval War College one, how many points a ship should be worth. So a dreadnought should be worth 20 points, but a cruiser should only be worth 17 points. And all ships die linearly, right? So when you’ve got half your health gone, you’re half your speed, half your propulsion. Alright, it’s not the way ships die. But it was all about keeping it playable.
World War I comes along, and we look at the rules, we look at Jutland, and we say, “If we were to play Jutland with our current rules, would we get a Jutland result?” The answer is no. We’ve got to include more stuff in our rules; we’ve got to make our rules more detail-oriented.
So suddenly, I go from a game where it was three-minute moves, everything’s three minutes on the floor. We start to make the rules more complex. Gunnery rules get much more complex. Now we’re worried about spray light, salvo range, plunging fire versus flat trajectory, target aspect, pitching role of the shooting ship. There’s about eight pages of calculations you’ve got to go through in the old rulebook once we come up with what’s called the fires effect system to be able to work out whether you get a gunnery hit.
Everything was in super detail, and it now takes about a half hour of real time for the umpires to work up an answer every time the students move the ships around. It takes almost a half hour to work through all the tables and charts and everything to come up with who got hit.
There are people who have criticized that tempo of play, in that it lulled naval officers into thinking that naval warfare would have a bit of this analytic activity. Where you could study the horizon, study the radar plot, study the problem, think about it, commit to a course of action, communicate that. And you’d all be coordinated in doing our thing.
Savo Island comes along, and this is where this criticism comes from. Savo Island is the most violent 20 minutes in the surface navy’s history. It’s a miserable defeat. And some people pointed back at the kind of wargaming we were doing because the rules were so complicated, the gaming pace was so slow that it gave off this false sense of tempo. The Brits have also come up with a similar type of analysis looking at how they were doing wargaming at the time.
But if you go back to that, no one ever said wargaming miniatures on the floor was a simulator, right? I’m not splashing water on you; I’m not rocking your world as you get hit by shells. I’m not trying to simulate the combat environment on the bridge of a cruiser circa 1940. I’m trying to give you the ability to think about the problem ahead of time, so you’ve built those habits of mind that might help you to survive when you actually run into it for real. So gaming has always been that balance.
Currently, we’ve got a game course coming up that we teach for government agencies. You’ve got to be affiliated with education or a government agency. We do a course in August, and one of the feedbacks we got, we usually teach the wargame design course once a year in January. We’re teaching again this year, both in January and August, and one of the things we’ve changed is demonstrating types of games. So, we demonstrate a matrix game.
Matrix games always look so easy, low overhead, and easy to put together. But when you try to do one, you realize how much of a matrix game hinges on a skilled facilitator to be able to pull off an effective matrix game. It’s not suited for all types of problems, but we demo a matrix game for them, and we give them some board gaming examples. In fact, now we have a design exercise where, throughout the two-week course, they basically design and develop a Titanic game.
And I have them doing stuff with Titanic, and vampires, and zombies. And people say, ‘Why do you do all that and don’t do like, you know, navy stuff?’ I go, ‘Well, because the course is open across the government. Oftentimes I’ll get folks from the State Department, I’ll get folks from other agencies, or I’ll get a group that might be Navy-heavy or Surface Warfare-heavy, but I got nobody who understands submarines or nobody understands air.”
“So I never know what the experience or talent pool will be in any given class. But everybody knows something about the Titanic, zombies, and vampires. So I use those because the principles are the same.’
In this year’s August class, they’ll be designing a Titanic game. Originally all they had to do was come up with the broad outline of a design, but now we make them make it. Over the course of the game, we’ve got a wargame construction kit with blank maps, blank this and that, magic markers, dice, and all sorts of arts and crafts crap. Then they suddenly discover, “Oh, it was easy to throw the idea on a whiteboard, it’s a hell of a lot harder to manifest it with a playable rule set.” So that’s a change this year.
The other change is with wargaming, one of the things that we weren’t demoing in terms of types of games, was that classic government put people in different rooms to have them play over a computer environment. So we’ll be doing that with this one coming up. We’re not playing the Trafalgar game; we’re actually playing a Battle of Midway game. It’s easy to play, it auto-adjudicates, so it’s appropriate for the course.
But it checks a lot of the boxes in terms of what you have to think about when you put together one of these games where you’re going to separate players and what’s the communication elements between cells. Why are you separating players? Is that actually meeting a design and research requirement that you put them in different rooms, or can you just pull the blue team in one big room and not worry about it? Again, all things that we want people to think through and consider.
One of the problems with the course is, you know my experience, remember I gave you my background, so I tend to come at it when I talk about government gaming from an embarrassment of riches. I grew up in a huge facility with lots of space, lots of computer support, lots of money, lots of people. So I tend to build big. The War College tends to be what we call the apex predator of wargaming, in that because I’m so big, therefore, I eat big problems. I do big games because I can.
And that’s not to disparage. There are lots of organizations that can run much smaller games. In fact, often we try to encourage people, “Look, if your problem can be solved with a relatively small, 10-person game, in a single room, looking at it an open adjudication type thing, then we recommend you don’t come to us. We can do it, but if I take on that project, it means I’m not doing a 400 player multi-cell game that’s going to run over the course of a week, and I’m one of the few agencies that can do that.”
So we tend to always have to reset ourselves when we’re working with smaller groups or folks that will be going back to wargaming organizations that don’t have that type of resources. What are really the fundamentals and not to get roped into the, “Well, this is how the War College does it.” Well, you’re probably not us, simply because we’re big.
Thanks again to Pete for this presentation, and for all he did at the first SDHistCon East. We’re excited to have more people experience the Naval War College and the history there this August 8-11. Again, the event is very space-limited, and an extremely limited number of tickets will be on sale April 6 at noon Pacific. Stay tuned to Conflicts of Interest Online and our SDHistCon social media feeds on Twitter, Bluesky, Instagram, and YouTube for more information.