Army Discusses MMO Troop Training Sim

An anonymous reader writes "Over at GameSpot, there's an interview with Dr. Michael Macedonia of the U.S. Army about the AWE training sim, a 'massively multiplayer simulation [based on the There 'virtual world' game engine] that will be used by military personnel to train troops in urban situations before they are airlifted to a battle zone.' Macedonia says 'We built downtown Baghdad in this environment', and also says 'we call our games tactical decision aids. Our thing is not making people shoot better; it's making people think better.'" We previously featured an initial announcement of this project in January.

Comments

What can't they simulate?

[ObviousGuy]

Battlefield confusion when the commander dies? Their own death? A commander in chief willing to sacrifice American lives for a people who would be better off left to their own devices?

Ender's Game, anyone?

[heironymouscoward]

How long before war game training/simulation slides into becoming real-time tactical control of the battlefield?

It's probably already technically possible, and just requires a generational change for the generals to accept it.

Re:Ender's Game, anyone?

[Realistic_Dragon]

The military seem to think that micromanagement of small units remotley is not a great decision as 1) it removes general's attention from the big picture 2) it removes leadership from the unit officer who has to gain the trust of his men and keep it.

Instead the complex information systems seem to be more geared up to provide line officers with the same information the generals see so that they can consider more factors (without undue performance penalty) in making their own decisions. For example if they can see a tank brigade over the hill in their link from Dark Star/Division Intelligence, they sure as hell will chose to sit on the ridge with anti tank rockets rather than saunter over holding machine guns and not expecting any trouble.

Re:Ender's Game, anyone?

[Monkelectric]

Um actually, I worked for a research lab which recieved a presentation on the Air Forces "Global Battlesphere" Initaitve, what you're describing is *EXACTLY* what they want to be able to do. Communicate with every platoon, vehicle, troop, aircraft, weapon etc from one console.

Inquiring minds want to know?

[Killjoy_NL]

Will this also be available to the general public (possibly in a dumbed down version)?

If so, will "terrorists" be able to learn from this as well, to see how the US soldier gets trained?

Personally, I'm interested, could be a fun game, IMHO there's nothing wrong with virtual killing (in RL I'm kind of a pacifist)

This is all well and good ...

[supersam]

'we call our games tactical decision aids. Our thing is not making people shoot better; it's making people think better'

hmmm ... if only they could build a game to help the leaders think better rather than shooting their mouths off!

In any case, these games will only take the soldiers upto one point. After that, comes the most important aspect of urban warfare... the mind of the enemy. That is where the battles are won or lost. And every adversary is prone to thinking differently in a given situation!

Flight sims too

[Jesrad]

Austin Meyer, the author of X-Plane has been working with some military and implemented some functions for them so that they could turn X-Plane into a UCAV pilot training program. The details can be read in the Beta new features announcement.

Not funny- it's happened

[edremy]

I trained at Ft. Knox on SIMNET, the granddaddy of MMO war games. Battalion on battalion combat in full M1 mockups+3d virual world back in the late 1980s. (And people use "military intelligence" as an insult- they are vastly ahead of the civilian world in a lot of things.)

We were explicitly told not to ever drive off the map. Doing so reset your height variable to 0. Driving back onto the map didn't change this, so you became a "submarine tank", able to see (and kill) everyone but nobody else could see you. They'd had several simulations ruined by people doing this, and SIMNET was very, very expensive to run in terms of time, money and personnel. It was cause for serious disciplinary action.