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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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!