I heard this referred to in a CSIS talk about air land battle and it seemed as if everyone was very familiar with it, but the only references I can find are glancing- does anyone have more concrete data? I understand it was a series of simulations of land war in Europe and nuclear escalation.
Air land battle was the name of the US Army's tactical doctrine in the late Cold war era. The people on CSIS may be referring to a computer game used at the Army War College, back in the 1980s, but I know nothing about it.
I do know that companies like SSI and Micro Prose did offer computer games about warfare on the strategic level, back in the 1980s and early 1990s, but these games did not sell well and are practically extinct. A good example of this would be the 1983 Micro Prose game NATO Commander. This game ran on Commodore 64 or Apple IIc personal computers and it had clunky graphics. Micro Prose had a lot more success with their Railroad Tycoon and Civilization games. PC based war games since 1995 tend to be combat flight simulators or first person shooter games. Games that put the player in the role of a three star general in charge of moving divisions around Central Europe just do not sell very well.
Going back to the 1970s, there was a company called SPI that produced lots of cardboard and paper map sheet games. They produced three games of note, that might be what the people of CSIS were talking about.
NATO: Operational Combat in Europe in the 1970's (1973)
The Next War: Modern Conflict in Europe (1978)
NATO Division Commander (1980)
NATO (1973) had a single 22 inch by 35 inch gameboard, 400 counters and a twelve page rule book. It was a playable game, that could finished in less than four hours.
The Next War (1978) was a monster game. Its game board was three 22" x 35" map sheets. It had a 32 page rule book and 2400 counters. It was not a playable game.
NATO Divisional Commander was another monster game. SPI claimed it was used to teach a class at the Army War College from 1982 thru 1985, but I have never seen an independent confirmation of this claim. The wargaming community gave it bad reviews and did not like its excessive complexity.
After 1982, the cardboard based wargame industry died a slow death. Fantasy games like Dungeons and Dragon became far more popular and personal computer based games pretty much killed off what was left of the industry.