I suppose I could’ve just checked wikipedia, I was sort of right but also sort of wrong:

Development Tom Clancy met Larry Bond in 1982. The two discussed Convoy-84, a wargame Bond had been working on at the time that featured a new Battle of the North Atlantic. The idea became the basis for Red Storm Rising. “We plotted out the book together, then, while I researched the military issues, Tom wrote the book,” Bond said.[5] “I’m listed as co-author, but I wrote like 1 percent of the book,” Bond stated in a 2013 interview.[6] For research on the Politburo scenes, Clancy and Bond interviewed Soviet defector Arkady Shevchenko.[7]

Clancy had purchased Bond’s wargame Harpoon as a primary source for his future novel The Hunt for Red October (1984).[8] Clancy and Bond used the board game’s second edition miniature rules to test key battle sequences, notably the Soviet operation to seize Iceland and the attack on the carrier battle group in the “Dance of the Vampires” chapter.

Dance of the Vampires This refers to the chapter where the Soviets lure a NATO carrier group into a trap and almost manages to wipe it out.[9]

The game sessions typically involved several players on each side (Clancy among them) acting in various roles.[10] with Bond refereeing. The games did not influence the outcome - the chapter’s ending was already decided - but they gave Clancy and Bond a “better understanding of what factors drove each side’s thinking”.[11][12]

This attention to detail made Vice consider Red Storm Rising a “great example of fictional military history.”[9]

The collected and annotated notes on the three Dance of the Vampires scenario playthroughs would later be published by Bond.[11][13]