Slashdot Mirror
Ender's Game Influences US Army Training
PortWineBoy writes "Although we've been bombarded in the last few weeks with techno tales of the U.S. Army, I found this
story in the NY Times (FRRYYY) to be quite interesting. The director of the Army's simulation technology center said that Ender's game influenced how and what they will build for future training." Begin Mazer Rackham Analogies...
Didn't Ender's tactics involve genocide?
Like so
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Ender spend the rest of his life paying for his evils......
Given the skillz of the Iraqi army, "whack-a-mole" is a better training simulator.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
What parts were they emulating?
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
Ender's Game and the following books are all great. But I'm not sure that we need a bunch of army commanders who haven't hit puberty yet who are lied to and told that they are really playing a top-secret version of C&C Generals, that just happens to play out in real time and not have a pause?
Also, the whole book is basicaly about child abuse sponsored by the governemnt. Interesting reading, but maybe not the ideal way to create well-adjusted officers.
Your statement about the British view of war versus the American view of war reminded me why Americans kick butt and why the British are only so-so.
See, Americans go into war with one objective: to win. They bring bigger guns, better trained forces, and strategies that will ensure complete and total victory with a minimum of casualties. The interaction with the people is more of an afterthought. After all, if you can't win, it doesn't matter how well you interact with the local populace.
The British treat it like it is a damn dress-up game. I've even heard that they take off their helmets and put on those ridiculous berets when they enter a city. They say it is to show respect. I think it is to do the Americans a favor and draw out the snipers. Sure, they may interact better with the people, but dead people aren't as nice as live ones.
And the British can joke about the Americans all they want. They came all dressed up in uniforms and organized neatly not too long ago. A bunch of farmers kicked them out for good. I don't think those farmers knew the first thing about manners, but you know what, it was only their skill with the musket that mattered.
And your silly comment about war not being a video game just isn't true anymore. Most of the killing and destruction is done from miles away in the cockpit of a jet fighter, from the cabin of a tank, or on board a missile carrier. It sure seems like a video game from that range.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Orson Scott Card is one of the best writers in todays time. Ender's game had brilliant military strategies. Ignoring the Xenocide and child millitaries it has some wonderful concepts. Ender had few advantages over other 'armies' but he always pulled out ahead. Why? Because he kept the enemies guessing. They had no clue what was comming next. I think this is a good idea for our future millitary. Just so long as we keep ourselves controled.
Here in the US Army, and the US Marine Corp, we use various computer simulations and "games" to train for combat. Helo pilots use these fancy simulators, as do the mechanized armor guys. Not only do we use graphics simulation, but also there are computer generated missions/scenarios (not like video games) that adapt to how you chose to execute a mission. For instance, you are given a situation, and you have several choices you can make, and then the system responds to your decisions (sometimes increasing the difficulty if you make a stupid decision) and presents you with a changed situation. I'm sorry, the Army psychologists do a better job at describing these new tools.
Anyway, these are in their infancy, but the Army plans to expand upon this to help soldiers expand their ability to make sound decisions. I.E., think about the consequences before you do something. The goal here is that if you can become comfortable with making logical, thought-through choices at the computer, then in battle or what-have-you, you will fall back on this "naturalized" ability.
What happens when the lines between simulation and reality are blurred to the point where it IS Ender's game. Where are battalion of super soldiers swoop down and decimate their opponents with no though to reaction to it all. Like in Ender's game, where what seemed like another game was war, genocide.
While I think it would be absurd to be less efficient than possible, the spirit of American warfare must be upheld. We are not interested in conquest. After WW2, America could have taken over the world. McArthur was about to! If we are truly interested in liberation, freedom, and the plight of all men then these ideals should be a the forefront of the military's thinking. Not saying they aren't, but it certainly is not a part of "tactical simulations" like Counter Strike or Unreal Tournament.
The Marine Corps also encourages the reading of Sun Tzu's Art of War - centuries old and still a great set of military insights. Also encouraged is Starship Troopers - which is best read as an ode to the infantry, and exemplifies the esprit de corps that the Marines strive for.
A pilot, in those days, was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth.-Mark Twain
You have grown so complacent in your lifestyles, you have so lost touch of 'reality' (oh the irony of your reality TV), that you have elevated even warfare to the status of competition.
The original poster's point wasn't that British troops are sissy's and have better tea time manners, it was that the US troops have become the newest form of "GI Joe" toys that you can buy shrink wrapped at a Toys'r'us.
War isn't that... War is dirty. War is evil. It's going to the very edge of humanity and looking into the abyss. You people think you can handle it all because you're the best trained, best equiped... You aren't worth squat...
If you want to somehow pride yourself in warfare, you should go and bow to the ground in front of the people you call "camel jockey's"... These people, terrorists, are the shit... they are people who've carried and used Kalashnikovs out of necessity, not boredom, from when they were 12.
You should go see people who've lived their entire lives with the constant threat of sniper fire in Sarajevo... kids in their early teens.
You should go see african children, 8 year old children, who hack down an old man crossing the street with a machete just to grab a journalist's attention...
To come back to your striving ideology, you might think putting money into your national soccer team is gonna make you good, but the reality is that kids like Maradona grow up in slums in Brazil having nothing else in their lives... that is why they are so good... not because they bought it.
In other news, many birth order analysts have also been heavily influenced by Ender's Game, and have written a new book entitled Seeking the Third, in which they compare children's traits to the three Wiggin's children based on the order of their birth.
"First-borns tend to have strong world domination tendencies" says Dr. Oliver Knapthf, one of the contributors to the book, "they are frequently deceptive geniuses who should be watched closely and never trusted."
In chapter five, "Embracing the Seconds", second-borns (called "Valentine's") are referred to as the glue that often holds families together.
Though the book seems to favor third-borns (a surprising number of the authors are "Thirds"), giving them such titles as "the Saviors of mankind" and "misunderstood saints", Dr. Knapthf claims this is not true. "They are all necessary. The evil first-borns and the torn, empathic second -borns; you can't achieve a Third without a First and a Second."
Or even better, simply add
199.239.136.212 www.nytimes.com
199.239.136.212 nytimes.com
to your hosts file to fix the "problem" for all normal nytimes.com URLs. The only negative side effect is that the front page no longer works.
Check out http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ for more hosts file goodness.
http://www.usna.edu/Library/Marineread.htm
The main focus of the book for me was that Ender's primary character trait was the ability to get people to want to do as he asked them to do (OK, ordered - it took place in a military setting). As they did so, they learned that their abilities were more than they'd ever imagined. The conclusion of the book is a warning that Nuremburg was real, and that everyone is responsible for his own actions. And yes, that war is not a game.
Think, write, think, edit, think...then post.
As if there ever was a question whether the Iraq could stand up to the United States militarily. Not even the Iraqi government claimed any chance to defend the country indefinitely.
The US might well sport the most dominant military force in all history, but the fact that you can - surprise, surprise - bomb the hell out of a repressed, deprived and embargo'ed third wirld country certainly doesn't entail that you can do the same to other countries. The goal should not be to "free" Iraq, if anything the goal should be to "free" Iraq with certain other premises: few to no civilian casualties, low to no damage to civilian infrastructure, effective ways to bring in humanitary aid, a smooth transition to a just post-war system.
Also, the United States have bought what you call the most dominant military force at a time when a dominant military force has lost many of its uses: you can't (and don't need to) conquer the world with it, and you can't even defend American citizens with it - an army is no use against domestic terrorism.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
As unsettling as I find this, I also find it appropriate.
History has always demarked a division between civilians and military, both in the traditions of service, and deeper, in the psyche. Plato demarked the guardian's education as beginning with fiction [337a]. And it was a key to this education that it twisted the basic nature of those who would be guardians, demarking them mentally from the populace. This is a key concept in the training of warriors that has survived in literature and drama through the ages (in our time, you need only see the unifying concepts behind group-identity put forward in studies of the German troops of WWII, or Card's work, let alone the psych studies that _do_ point out a greater tendancy to follow orders and act cohesively with a rigorous group-constructed identity).
Is it any wonder that a society adept at mass production would find ways to mass produce those things that still must be men and not machines?
Is this a criticism of the men and women who serve? By no means. The psychological conditioning they receive is no less responsible for their survival and success than their physical training.
Is it grounds for a critique of an immature, and childlike race (mankind) who still finds war regrettably necessary? Perhaps. At least, however, it's highly unlikely that the children of those so trained will value war as highly as we do today.
Indeed. Here's what happens when it goes wrong. Looks/sounds sadly familiar, don't it? (Start with the top item.) Right down to bickering over who gets the spoils of war.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I'm surprised there was no mention of Americas Army in that article - I'm aware that the games primary focus is as a PR tool, however I would have thought it could also be used as an effective tool for training and simulation. Hell, even better on the PR angle, let the players who clock up 10+ hrs of AA per week that they can continue playing the game when they join up and it counts towards their training time, and watch them line up......
My hippie parents have told me my whole life that the video games I've been playing are just part of a government scheme to train an entire generation into an army of super-soldiers. Because locking, loading and firing an M-16 is just like pressing the CTRL key. Yeah, I thought it was funny too, until I got drafted. The B2 I fly controls just like Star Fox.
Oh, yeah, we went to Japan, and said "If you don't start wearing blue jeans and eating hamburgers, we're going to murder your children and rape your wives!" We went to Germany and said, "Because you stupid Krauts lost, we are going to torture you with shopping malls and action movies!" And we turned around to China and say, "Soon, your daughters will be our slaves because we will conquer you with the might of our FREE TRADE AGREEMENTS!"
Or did we just luck out with Japan? I guess we also lucked out with Korea, Taiwan, Germany, Italy, the UK, France, Spain, Eastern Europe, Russia, and far more countries you will never know about. I guess we are still lucking out with Vietnam, China, Afghanistan, Iraq, and yes, even Cuba. I guess our policies of "kill the bad guys, let the others vote, and leave unless they want you to stay" just doesn't work, does it?
What could be more tactful than that? We see a dictator, building up weapons that can harm us. We realize that there won't be a peaceful resolution to this, so we're going to have to disarm him forcefully. Sooner is better than later because if we wait too long, he might actually get the weapons that can really hurt us. And while we're at it, it's not a bad idea to upset the entire history of the country by setting the people free and letting them create their own government. So we go in, and ruin thousands of years of culture by banishing slavery, "murdering" treacherous people who oppose freedom, and encouraging people to think about their own future rather than place it in the hands of a dictator. When things become stable, we slowly pull out, and let the government, elected by the people, take over. We get a more peaceful world, they get a peaceful government, and everyone is happy. But at what cost? I can't see any negative effects, other than the disruption of their culture as they move away from being slaves who live in hovels into full-fledged equal citizens in their country.
Now there is one more intersting point. Why do McDonalds and Burger Kings and shopping malls dot the landscape of Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, UK, France, Germany, and any country that is free? Why do they wear blue jeans, drive big cars that produce that dangerous chemical CO2, and try to earn as much money as they can?
The answer: It is not because we force them to adopt it. It is because it is actually a better way of living than anything else. We seem to like it, because we choose to live in it. They seem to like it because they adopt it. Nobody is forcing anyone here. They do it because they want to.
Our "empire", if you could call it that, is an empire of FREEDOM. We give people freedom, knowing that it will only make us and them more powerful, rich, and happy.
Our founding fathers saw the day when people would come to us and ask us to set up their governments. Our founding fathers knew that we would be a "shining city on a hill". Now that we are, are you complaining because everyone in the world wants what we have, and we are more than willing to share it with them? Are you complaining because they are richer and happier and freeer than they ever have been since the beginning of their history?
Or are you complaining because freedom really does work, even for poor peasants and backwards countries like Japan once was? Are you really complaining because your "ideals" (ie, communism or socialism) are really a horrible nightmarish world, where no one is safe, and no one is rich, and freedom is the only answer to cure all of the world's ills?
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Those who plan their wars based on Ender's Game are doomed to fight wars based on Dune.
The thing I find most interesting about this discussion is the way people keep referencing the novel as if it really happened. Almost as if it were a story from our history instead of a work of fiction by an extremely creative mind.
I read a few pages of Ender's Game everyday at work. It's one of only a small handful of non-technical books I keep on my desk. It's a very worn paperback copy, and it rests between my two copies of Paradise Lost and my well-worn copy of Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus. I've probably finished the book 10 or 12 times in the past four years. And I think I know the reason we keep referring to the story as if it were fact.
Ender is a geek. He's bright and talented to the point where the only way people in competition with Ender can hope to succeed is by bringing him down. I know we've all read story after story and post after post about how difficult it is to grow up exceptional. (Remember the post-Columbine stories?) We don't simply relate to Ender. We aren't simply empathizing with him. Ender is us, and we are him.
Now that I've said all of that: It's cool that Mr. Card wrote a book that tells some of the truth about leadership and building a team. It's neat that he got it so right. But let us not forget that it is a work of fiction, and it worked out for Ender because that's the way the author wanted it to. Just because it worked in the story doesn't mean that it'll work in reality. We should glean what we can from Orson Scott Card's insight into human nature, but I can't imagine using any work of fiction as a training manual.
Ender's emotions and reations are real to me. I relate to his experience in some way. But we can't lose sight of the fact that Ender's actions and successes were part of a plot in a work of fiction. Any similarity between the fictional environment of the Battle School and reality is a testament to the imagination of the author, and not a sign that this book should be taken as Gospel.
This space for rent.
The rush to Baghdad. The enemy's goal is down!
The goal should not be to "free" Iraq, if anything the goal should be to "free" Iraq with certain other premises: few to no civilian casualties, low to no damage to civilian infrastructure, effective ways to bring in humanitary aid, a smooth transition to a just post-war system.
yep. in progress.
Also, the United States have bought what you call the most dominant military force at a time when a dominant military force has lost many of its uses: you can't (and don't need to) conquer the world with it, and you can't even defend American citizens with it - an army is no use against domestic terrorism.
how about making the world a safer, better place (exactly what its being used for now)?
a completely dominant military force does everything better than a weaker military force:
- wins wars faster
- takes less casualties
- causes less civilian casualties
- inflicts less enemy casualties since they surrender faster
it would be irresponsible for a country to have the most successful social and economic system in the history of the world and NOT buy the greatest military in the history of the world too.
I joined the Navy in '92 (left in 96) and worked on a destroyer as an Electonic Warfare technician. Sitting on watch staring at a SLQ-32 console often had me thinking I was playing a video game. A big part of the job was figuring out who was who. The first "long" cruise we went on (only two weeks - heh) standing 12 hours of watch a day, working for 6 more hours, and getting 4 hours of sleep a night warped my thinking in that I was no longer figuring out who the ships were on my scope, I felt I was creating them! I'd pick up a signal, build a track, decide who it was, and viola, there it was! These ships were nothing but signals and icons to me.
Getting off the ship in San Diego was a huge wake up call... I had been "creating" the USS Rubin James, USS Ingersol and others. But as I walked down the pier, there they were, very real ships with hundreds of very real people walking off heading out to the bars and night clubs...
Scared the hell out of me.
Never never never smoke crack before geometry class!
"the West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do."
----------
Samuel P. Huntington
Ever been to Japan lately? Besides the occasional McDonalds, you will find that things are really quite different there. People's notions of freedom are very different, and they have very different motivations than Americans.
Bombs only change the landscape. If the world were to agree on the main virtue of its American ruler, it would be the accuracy of which its bombs land.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
Is there anyone else that is good at getting people to do what they want but no longer does so for moral reasons? People aren't toys to manipulate to your own game. I used to be a major sociopath that sort of viewed humans as toys or pets. Controlling the majority of people is really easy.
c io .htm
Life is much MUCH harder now that I've decide it's wrong to behave that way. It seems you can't really advance much in life unless you are an asshole. (I can say that about sociopaths since I am one.)
The main reason I decided being manipulative was wrong ss that it's very easy to have less and less respect for the people you manipulate. It becomes easy to abuse them in other ways. You tend to think of people as belonging to you as livestock might. It's easy to get into brutality and sexual abuse and things such as that.
When I see somebody that seems to have a lot of power or be some great leader I have to wonder how they got there.
http://home.datawest.net/esn-recovery/artcls/so
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
zulux wrote:
> War is not evil.
Well, there is the concept of a just war, where war was/is considered acceptable under certain special circumstances. But even a just war is a last resort when all else fails, and with today's communication technology and organizations like the UN, there are a whole lot of other things for a civilized nation to try before going to war.
> War can be waged for liberty,
It can be, if it is yourself you are liberating (American Revolutionary War). However, if you try to liberate another nation against the will of its people, you have violated a principle of liberty called "sovereignty", and are no longer going to war for liberty's sake, but to conquer.
"World Book" gives a slang definition for "liberate": "to rob or plunder, especially in wartime." This is the definition Iraq learned for the word when the British showed up the first time to "liberate" them.
> self-defense
Perfectly acceptable when nasty conquerors show up at your doorstep and start bombing the heck out of your beautiful capital city. But in these modern times, you might want to look up UN resolution 377 (Unite for Peace). Under that resolution, if the poor invaded country can get either seven Security Council members (no veto allowed) or a simple majority of the General Assembly to agree to it, the UN can form a posse and ride to the rescue. Of course, the naughty invader runs around trying to bully and bribe their way into "no" votes, but the resolution has been used successfully ten times in the UN's history. Iraq is working on number eleven, and our tax money is going into yet more bribes.
> or to stop a genocide.
Saving lives, always a great cause. Just be careful not to kill more of the victimized group than the genocidal maniac was planning to. Otherwise, there isn't much point...
> War is a tool, a nasty sharp tool. It's what you use it for
> that make your endevor evil or, perhaps, good.
Tanks, bombs, and bullets are nasty sharp tools. War is the action of sending thousands of your people out armed to the teeth to kill their people until they surrender and let you have your way. Actions generally have moral values attached to them. Mass murder coupled with mass property damage (the end result of war) is generally considered very evil. In certain very special circumstances (the just war theory) humanity has pretty much agreed to overlook the evil of the action because of the intended result is necessary and unable to be gotten without going to war.
Except for the just war exception to the rule, war is utterly evil, and is close kin to tyranny, genocide, and terrorism, sharing the same tools. To the Air Force pilot, he seems to be delivering a "package" with his plane, and releasing it with video game like controls. To the civilian it hits by accident, it is like being inside the World Trade Center towers on the morning of September 11, 2001: terror, agony, a very ugly death, grief and rage on the part of the surviving loved ones. One's country better have a seriously good reason to inflict this on another country.
That's why it is so important to go the last mile, then fifty further miles, using diplomacy to solve the problem peacefully. Well, it is for the rest of us; for genocidal maniacs who get off on pictures of mutilated dead people, of course war is going to be a favorite pastime (btw, such people are sick as well as evil).
"The path of peace is yours to discover for eternity."
Japanese version of "Mothra" (1961)
a completely dominant military force does everything better than a weaker military force
A funny thing about military power is that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy: Build yourself a great military to deal with the "world's threats", and the world's threats will build a military in turn. i.e. The US continually built up arms to counter what they saw as a great Soviet menace, causing the Soviets to do so in kind. Of course if you build your military too powerful, such that smaller countries don't have a chance to make an exercise at least restrictively costly for you, smaller countries who feel threatened will resort to alternatives: Is there anyone who doesn't think that the Iraq situation has done more to proliferate WMDs than every before? Hint: Every little country, say the Irans, Cubas and North Koreas, have more of a motivation than ever to acquire a force to counter what could be the next "regime change". I'm not speaking politically here, and am making no commentary on the war but that the logical conclusion is that it will naturally lead to the militarization of "evil" nations.
And how do you plan on doing that? Attacking every country that is anti-american? Doing that will only fuel more terrorism. And to counter that terrorism, you attack more countries, which fuels more terrorism ad infinitum
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Maybe I should have. I knew Card was a Mormon. So was the founder of Cardston, one Joseph Ora Card. His little homestead is preserverd at the southern end of town. There is a little plaque there, saying he was the first Mormon to leave Utah and settle in Canada.
Orson Scott Card's book "Seventh Son" takes place around 200 years ago in a parallel universe where magic works -- little magic -- not world-shaking magic. In the sequel his little hero spends some time learning native magic.
And Scott dedicates that book to an ancestor of his, whose life was saved by natives on the Canadian frontier.
Well, I heard the native's version of this story too.
First a little context. The Blood Reserve is about 600 square miles. Their own name for themselves is Kainai, which translates as "Many Cheifs". They were part of the Blackfoot Confederacy. They were one of the Plains Nations which had depended on the Buffalo.
Well, their version is that Joseph Ora Card arrived on the land Treaty Seven had granted them, and threw himself on their mercy. His wives and children were ill. Would the natives feed them? Would the natives let them stay, over the winter, in this little valley?
The elders were compassionate. They let Card, and his sick family, stay over for the winter.
That winter they were struck by a horrible smallpox epidemic. Two thirds of the natives died that winter. They had more serious problems to deal with than to wonder why the Card family had not left, as they had promised.
In their version Card wrote to Utah, and invited all his friends to come join him.
The Oldman River forks just upstream from Lethbridge. The natives oral tradition is that Treaty Seven granted them all the land between the two branches of the Oldman River, to the border with the USA. There is a Blackfoot Reservation just the other side of the border there. Is possession 90% of the law? Mormons settled all the land south of Cardston, to the US border.
The natives believe that Card stole a big strip of their land.
Personally I think Orson Scott Card was extremely insensitive to write that dedication, given the animosity between the natives and the Mormons in that part of the world.
What is the genocide connection? Where did the natives get smallpox? Might it have been from Card's family? His wives and children were sick. That would certainly be tragic. In fairness, there are other theories of how the natives came to become infected. Still Joseph Ora Card doesn't seem to have hesitated to take advantage of the natives who had been kind to him.
(*) The Canadian government calls them "reserves". The American government calls them "reservations".