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The Military Games

The US Army Has Too Many Video Games (vice.com) 82

Posted by msmash from the my-army dept.
An anonymous reader shares a Motherboard report:The US Army sees itself in a transitional period. Unlike a decade ago, soldiers are training less today on how to conduct "stability" operations for a counter-insurgency campaign, and more on what the Army does best: fighting other armies. But training is expensive and requires time and a lot of space. Training a gunner for an M-1 Abrams tank means reserving time on a limited number of ranges and expending real ammunition. So to lower costs and make training more efficient -- in theory -- the Army has adopted a variety of games to simulate war. There's just a few problems. Some of the Army's virtual simulators sit collecting dust, and one of them is more expensive and less effective than live training. At one base, soldiers preferred to play mouse-and-keyboard games over a more "realistic" virtual room. Then again, the Army has cooler games than you do. M-1 tank gunners, for example, can train inside a full-scale, computerized mock-up of their station called the Advanced Gunnery Training System, which comes inside a large transportable container. Instead of looking through real sights down a range, the soldier squints through a replica and sees a virtual simulacrum of, say, an enemy tank. Push a button and the "cannon" fires. The Army fields similar systems for the Stryker, a wheeled armored troop transport that fits an optional 105-millimeter gun. Soldiers train inside another simulated gunnery station for the M-2 Bradley fighting vehicle. Another system, Common Driver, simulates a variety of military vehicles.
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The US Army Has Too Many Video Games More

The US Army Has Too Many Video Games

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  • I hacked their system and found the games! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    FALKEN'S MAZE
    BLACK JACK
    GIN RUMMY
    HEARTS
    BRIDGE
    CHECKERS
    CHESS
    POKER
    FIGHTER COMBAT
    GUERRILLA ENGAGEMENT
    DESERT WARFARE
    AIR-TO-GROUND ACTIONS
    THEATERWIDE TACTICAL WARFARE
    THEATERWIDE BIOTOXIC AND CHEMICAL WARFARE
    GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR

    -David L.

    Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
    Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
    Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
    Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
    Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING

    • Let's play GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR.

      Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
      Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
      Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.

  • Good old days (Score:5, Interesting)

    by portwojc ( 201398 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2016 @02:45PM (#52763641) Homepage

    Funny back in the early 90s we'd go to the M-1 simulator and run through that. Then go back to the barracks and play M1 Tank platoon on my Amiga 500. It was a running joke I had my own simulator in my room. M1 Tank Platoon had a little more with the driver position. The fun part was the Micropose armor vehicle identification copy protection. Didn't need have to look that up in the manual.

    • Re:Good old days (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Balthisar ( 649688 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2016 @03:21PM (#52763893) Homepage

      Our version of the sophisticated training system was a C=64 with a fake M16 and Duck Hunt-like light pen raster sensing device for learning how to shoot better (probably not a bad thing given that we were air traffic controllers and support).

      I thought I was unique in being the only soldier with an Amiga 500 in his barracks room, given that the demographics of the typical enlisted back then were quite a bit different than (how I imagine them) now.

  • Video Games Are Poor Training (Score:5, Funny)

    by Oswald McWeany ( 2428506 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2016 @02:50PM (#52763673)

    Video Games make poor substitution for real life training. Real life Gandhi didn't nuke anyone.

  • When we would send up Canadian reserve units against US active units, we found they had no idea their people would pass out inside the combat vehicles and tanks from extreme heat and dust, or deal with optical illusions from heated air, making it easy to trick them into going into tank traps that were covered by snipers with heavy and light mines. Or what happens when rocks crush your tank in a mountain pass because you fired your main gun next to an unstable rock face.

    Sims only work so much.

    You have to tra

    • Live training is (theoretically) more expensive than sim training. Just saying dump simulators because they aren't true to life means you will probably have more realistic training time but a whole lot less training overall. The people in charge of training should be trained to understand the limitations of all the training measures available and plan training accordingly to provide the largest benefit possible...again theoretically.

      • Didn't say dump sim training. Sim training (games) is very useful. But only up to a point. A lot of that is a failure of the sims, but some is the failure to realize that when stuff goes wrong it cascades into many things going wrong.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by e r ( 2847683 )
      Sure sure, your anecdotal story about how dumb the US army is couldn't possibly be inaccurate or mis-represent any facts or be just plain bullshit.

      • The discussion was the appropriate use of game sims in training. Game sims are very useful in expensive training to get basic operations skills and certain techniques down, but they tend to have certain flaws, due to the nature of how we design the sims.

        If, for example, we expect to be continuing operations in certain desert and mountain terrains, which we will (unless something happens), we need to account for the actual extremes in actual operations in those climates.

        We can do those in sims, to a certain

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      When we would send up Canadian reserve units against US active units, we found they had no idea their people would pass out inside the combat vehicles and tanks from extreme heat and dust, or deal with optical illusions from heated air, making it easy to trick them into going into tank traps that were covered by snipers with heavy and light mines. Or what happens when rocks crush your tank in a mountain pass because you fired your main gun next to an unstable rock face.

      Sims only work so much.

      You have to tra

  • Value of Simulators (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Vice, of course, has a nice click-baity title and shitty article, but it's vice, so we assume it's bullshit.

    The value of simulators is not in playing Hogan's heroes. There are two major values of the simulator. The first is that the sim allows you to do things that would be fatal in real life. Much better, in aviation, to practice the critical engine failure at rotate speed without a hundred thousand pounds of jet fuel and aluminum to burn up. The second major value is that you can replay a scenario and see

  • tic tac toe is hidden but still on the system.

    But global thermonuclear war is still the last one on the list.

  • Good at desensitizing too! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Bugler412 ( 2610815 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2016 @03:21PM (#52763897)
    Very effective at making operators forget that they are training to kill other human beings, make it easier to unthinkingly shoot when told regardless of right/wrong.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Mom? Why are you posting on slashdot?

      And seriously, you are still spouting the same arguments for me never getting to buy/play lasertag, paintball, get a BB gun, or play N64 duck hunt. You need a new line of reasoning.

    • Very effective at making operators forget that they are training to kill other human beings, make it easier to unthinkingly shoot when told regardless of right/wrong.

      I don't think video games are particularly effective at changing the way people think about real combat, when there are real people downrange.

      What does work well is what has always worked well... tribalism and intentional dehumanization, which includes calling the enemy "hun", "jerry", "jap", "slope", "slant", "gook", "raghead", "tango", "target", etc., and attributing subhuman and evil characteristics to them.

    • Combat drone operators are the group most likely to use simulators for training, and also the furthest removed from combat itself (except for ICBM personnel). So you'd think they'd have no qualms about shooting what they're told. Guess what: experience shows they have as much trouble doing that as infantry in WW2.

      For people to not care about killing others, your whole society has to be set up that way. Think Stalin's armies in WW2. Training using simulators is not going to achieve this.

  • Guess how much money real training costs? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    A hell of a lot more. Don't knock the Army for trying to save money.

  • I hate to be the guy who suggests that the US military spend yet more taxpayer dollars on the "next new thing", but perhaps some of their problems could be addresses by replacing their current simulators with VR headsets and PCs?

    Their current approach seems to be largely the "cave" approach, where the trainee sits inside a room by himself and images are projected on the walls around him. That's fine as far as it goes, but doing it that is by its nature expensive and takes a lot of space, which means not ve

    • The issue is not VR but how to combine the real equipment (the tactile) with the environment (the visual). Ideally a simulator allows someone to operate the "real" equipment while providing a visual display similar to what they see in real life, A flight simulator, for example, provides a real cockpit with 3 degrees of movement and provides a visual display of the environment they would see if they were actually flying so they "move" throughout the environment as if it were real by combining tactile and vis
    • I find that the rifle simulation systems are quite good and can even give information that is extremely hard to see on a live range. The computer can track every tiny movement of the laser shining through the barrel resulting in a "Mr Squiggle" which gives a massive insight into your breathing, trigger manipulation, position and hold, etc. Expended ammunition stoppages and others can be simulated too, which is very valuable. For rifles and some other weapons (grenade launchers etc.) 20 or so people can be t

  • I can almost guarantee that every single one of these "simulators" was built and designed by some company that lived in the congressional district of the people that voted on it.

    And I'd bet that more than one of the companies had blood ties to the same congress peoples.

  • Wat? (Score:2)

    by tsotha ( 720379 )

    At one base, soldiers preferred to play mouse-and-keyboard games over a more "realistic" virtual room.

    "Preferred"? I'm not sure the author of this article really understands how the military works.

    • Hah, yeah. Military really have no choice in our training methods. There usually aren't substitutes for a mandatory CBT (computer based training) or anything.
  • We need the military industrial sector to port all our machines control interfaces over to an keyboard-and-mouse control scheme.

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