> Instead, he issues orders to his subordinates who "directly" control squads of ships. .... I've always wondered if anyone's ever made something like this

See my other comment - lots of real military command training involves the trainees issuing orders to subordinates (role players) who interact with the simulation.

> It would probably be socially difficult to find enough players.

Military training finds them by using real soldiers as role-players (understanding how to handle an order is a useful secondary training effect) and there are also loads of ex-soldiers who will happily (for a small consultancy fee) support an exercise for a few days.

There are some hybrid RTS/First Person Shooter games sorta like that.

A commander who can place buildings or resources, and ping locations, and has a birds eye view, and then grunts on the ground trying to do what's actually needed.

Dwarf fortress? You can place work order but your dwarves might be too busy throwing a party to build them.

Battlefield 2 (from 2005) and some of the later Battlefield games have a dedicated "Commander" role like that. [0] The friction would be in the fidelity of how your squad spots enemies (allowing the Commander to see them on their map) and whether they actually follow orders (which on public servers was always a question). It was actually a ton of fun if you took it somewhat seriously.

[0] https://battlefield.fandom.com/wiki/Commander_(Feature)

This is how a lot of MMOs like Eve Online worked. You'd have a person or group of people leading the fight and they could see what was happening and would issue orders. But then it would trickle down to different groups and that friction made combat really interesting. Plus there was always latency between issuing a command and the ship acting on the command that was proportional to how massive the ship was. So you could find yourself out of position and unsupported if you moved out of step, and you always had to rely on someone else for the overarching strategy and target priorities.

Eve Online goes even further, with empire leadership making political decisions, alliances, etc. That said, it feels like that aspect of the game is focused on avoiding conflicts, because it's oftentimes a net loss if they cannot control the newly captured territory for long.

It's one reason why I stopped playing, it's the kind of metagame I can't get into without dedicating tons of time and communicating with others. I just want to fly ship and go brrt without fearing other players or having to cooperate with them.