Build us a War
p2pnet.net News:- There’s a story by Steve Silberman called The War Room and slated for the September, 2004, WIRED magazine.
Due out on August 24, it proves war is indeed a game, but that it’s a whole lot more cost-effective with Hollywood, the University of Southern California and Microsoft helping out.
Silberman lets you inside the Pentagon’s Virtual War – a, “new way to train soldiers for battle: semi-virtual environments designed by a think tank called the Institute for Creative Technologies”. It can “synthesize combat conditions on the ground in Iraq or the mountains of Afghanistan, designed by Hollywood special-effects artists,” says Silberman on his web page here, going on:
“The Joint Fires and Effects Trainer System is the ultimate immersive war game and the future of home theater systems – and the young recruits being trained in JFETS are just weeks away from Baghdad. The Army’s chief scientist told ICT:
” ‘Build us a holodeck’.”
High-payoff target
You’re looking through a jagged hole in a wall looks at a city with steady civilian traffic crossing a bridge over a river below, says the report, continuing:
“Sparrows flap through the gray haze, and Arabic music and the voices of merchants filter up from the street. An Army major beside me, Paul Tyrrell, scans the high-rises on the other side of the river through his laser rangefinder,” says Silberman. “He is the frontline eyes of the coalition, responsible for calling in air strikes. A platoon sergeant named Donald Prado tells Tyrrell that an office tower half a mile to the west is an enemy stronghold.
“In eight minutes, coalition soldiers will storm across the bridge. Prado radios in for the Air Force to drop a smoke screen for cover. He’s also spotted snipers on the roof of a hospital to the north but cautions the major that the civilian facility is off-limits to targeting.
“Then Tyrrell sees something Prado missed: Three of the antennas on the roof are tactical radio masts, a tip-off that insurgents are using the hospital as a communications base.
” ‘That’s a high-payoff target, brother,’ says Tyrrell. He gets approval to deliver a ‘limited lethality’ fragmentation bomb to the hospital roof. The office tower will receive the full treatment – a 1,000-pound GPS-guided bunker buster.
“Seconds later, the missiles smash into their targets in perfect synchrony. Smoke and dust billow out in bright plumes, followed by shouts and the keening of ambulance sirens.
“The air is thick with heat, but it’s not the merciless 120-degree swelter of Baghdad. It’s late spring in Lawton, Oklahoma. We’re in the battle lab of an Army base called Fort Sill, and the air-conditioning is on the fritz. The river, the bridge, the civilian traffic, the birds, the bombs, and Sergeant Prado are all virtual – a simulation generated by flat-panel displays on the walls, a subwoofer in the floor, and half a dozen Windows and Linux boxes down the hall.
“Only the smashed furniture, the officer standing beside me, and the adrenaline spikes are real.”
Could Virtual War replace Real War?
Part of the University of Southern California, “The goal of the ICT games project is to develop immersive, interactive, real time training simulations to help the Army create a new generation of decision-making and leadership-development tools,” it states on its web page.
“With the cooperation of the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command, Simulation Technology Center (RDECOM STC), Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), and commercial game development companies, ICT is creating two training simulations that are intended to have the same holding power and repeat value as mainstream entertainment software
“The first game, Full Spectrum Command, was a PC-based company command simulator completed in February 2003. As the commander of a U.S. Army light infantry Company, the student must interpret the assigned mission, organize his force, plan strategically, and coordinate the actions of about 120 soldiers under his command.
“The second game, the E3 Games Critic Award-winning Full Spectrum Warrior, was developed for the Microsoft Xbox. It places the student in the role of a light infantry squad leader. The nine member squad is the smallest maneuver element in the US Army. The goal is to complete missions – and come home safe.”
Virtual war will never fully replace the mainstays of boot camp life, live-fire exercises and “ass-busting field training,” says Silberman, but, “as weapons systems grow smarter, they become more expensive to deploy in real-world war games. Now that consumer gaming engines like Unreal are able to render cinematic-quality graphics in real time, even big-ticket munitions are trivial to simulate.”
After all, “Launching a rocket in a live exercise can cost $10,000 or more; the price tag for the Defense Department’s Millennium Challenge – a three-week exercise in 2002 with 13,500 participants – was $250 million. By contrast, the Army’s bill for underwriting ICT for the last five years was $45 million. Rehearsing even a single mission in the field also requires weeks of planning and construction. Using synthetic environments like JFETS, the Army will eventually be able to code new mission rehearsals incorporating up-to-the-minute intelligence in a single day.”
OK.
So replace Real War with Virtual War. Get governments to instruct their generals to fight their battles with cutting edge software designed by the likes of ICT, powered by state-of-the-art computer systems.
For the combatants, it would be just as stimulating – and bloody – as the real thing, and just as decisive. Moreover, Army A could switch with Army B the next time around and do it all over again.
And there’d still be genuine fatalities – except they’d come from apoplexy, brain siezures and heart attackes instead of bullets.
August 24th, 2004 at 4:26 am
Give some of the gamers I know a remote controlled robot with guns, a 3 flat panel wrap around monitor setup, a comfortable chair, and you got yourself a deadly force where only the enemy dies on the battlefield.