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Army Game Proves U.S. Can't Lose
Alien54 writes to tell us that the latest game in the US Army's recruiting toolbox is an impressive game, simulating both weaponry already in use and some still on the drawing board. The game portrays the nation's military in 2015 but, as some critics have said, may lack even the most basic elements of realism. From the article: "For example, there's no consideration that military power or technology could fail or be jammed, she says. And the enemy doesn't learn, in contrast to a certain real-life conflict where the hallmark of insurgents is their ability to rapidly gain knowledge and evolve."
A simulation will always be a simulation. It seldom comes close to the original. You need just to choose how close you can/want come.
In games, this difference between reality and simulation is often dictated by the fun factor. I mean how fun it will be drving a car simulator and if you crash you will need to repair the car yourself after staying 3 weeks in hospital. Not fun at all, so you simulate a crash and... start again with a new one.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
This article is really just political FUD. Games are notorious for having poor adaptation in their AI, and very few FPSes have weapons that can jam or break. Complaining about these flaws which are really just industry-standard "features" is really just an excuse to accuse the US Army of shortsightedness under the guise of reviewing a game.
The game is meant to be a recruitment tool. It shows you all the cool stuff you'll get to maintain as you kick down the door to the wrong person's house and thus create a brand new recruit for the enemy. It's going for the Wow, Neato effect rather than realistic gameplay.
If they built the game so that you could lose, that would make the game interesting and eclipse the whole point of the game.
It's like when they have airshows with the Blue Angels or open house day where civilians can stand on the deck of a carrier. It's not meant to give you a realistic idea of what goes on. They aren't going to show you guys swabbing the deck or the guys emptying the latrine. They show you the good stuff and when you're sold, they hit you with reality.
As shown by the shock and awe campaign in Iraq, the US armY has a clear advantage in conventional combat. I bet the US can win a war against any naval, air and and armored enemy army. The problem is that the enemy has evolved. Any one with half a brain will not go in a frontal war against the US, but there is an achilles heel, morale
Any nation wishing to carry out a succesful defense against a US invasion has to fight a guerrilla war. Forget about the tanks, forget about the planes, forget about the uniforms. Send your soldiers home with a very lose chain of command and a clear mission. Wage a war of oportunity. Attack only from crowded places, dress as a civilian. Attack the countrymen that colaborate with the US. The goal of your attacks is to make them as shocking and news worthy as possible. The can't do anythinga bout that. They cannot fight against the people without giant political fallout. Wait long enough and you will drive them out.
I think the US Army doctrine is obsolete. These are new times in warfare, where aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines mean nothing.
It's all about finding better ways
Things are not going well over there at all. I used to hear my Commander In Chief say stuff like..."...stay the course...",..."...bring them on..."..."we'll get him (Bin Laden) dead or alive..."..."We'll prevail..." and the latest was "all major military operations are complete and the US has prevailed." Such rant is now gone.
Let's not forget that it was the same rant/rhetoric 30 years ago and because we could not escape reality, we had to face it and lost the war. Do not get me wrong. I support our troops. What I do not support is the bigotry and the "I know it all attitude" our leaders have.
If we had to fight them over there so that we do not fight them here...then let's put in mind the fact that we've lost close to 3,000 lives in this war. The number is about the same as those lost on 9/11.
Er right.
Verses the combined military might of Russia, China, France, Germany, the UK, Spain, Italy to name a few. Bring your head out of the clouds! In a conventional military engagement with the rest of the world the US would literally be slaughtered.
The rest of the world have more soldiers, more planes, more ships and more than 10 times the US production capability and land access via the rest of the continent.
If you really believe what you just posted then you are a blind moron.
In a head to head fight that is absolutely true. USA vs The Rest Of the World would still see the US winning by a factor of 10 to one.
No, in a head to head fight the nuclear weapons would come out and everyone would lose. Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) means just that. Any country with nuclear armed submarines can be farily sure they will wipe out whoever takes a crack at them.
I dont read
The game is propaganda, and should be criticised on different criteria than 'realism'.
Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped. Calvin Coolidge
I'd expect the world's single superpower to win any military conflict and roll into any place they fancy, smashing the infrastructure of the country into the stone age. But that's just the easy bit. I think you guys will be judged on how you deal with the hard tasks after that.
The US military has always had a very warped view regarding the benefits that technology in a war can give them. They seem to believe that they won't have to think (and want to get that over to their recruits!), or even see or touch their enemy, despite several high profile disasters and beatings - Vietnam being the big one (and Iraq today). Despite all the soul searching by Americans via movies and other avenues over Vietnam, everyone overlooks the inescapable conclusion - the US got absolutely ripped to pieces (saying they got beat just wouldn't be a fair reflection) because it thought it could beat an enemy by napalming everything from 30,000 feet. So it still remains today.
;-). I get the impression that some people like thinking up acronyms for things (hey, it looks as if you're doing something!) rather than actually concentrating on what they should be doing.
Judging from this game (and the disaster that is Iraq) their view of this hasn't changed, and it's something that they obviously want new recruits to believe as well. The US has the best technology in the world and it never loses!
Oh, and another thing. Does every weapon have to have a bloody acronym? It's not an IED. It's a bomb, or a roadside bomb or a mine (they're nothing new - really). That will do. I don't see any other military in the world that has ever needed to find acronyms for things that they don't like - maybe it seems less real that way
From the blurb "For example, there's no consideration that military power or technology could fail or be jammed, she says. And the enemy doesn't learn, in contrast to a certain real-life conflict where the hallmark of insurgents is their ability to rapidly gain knowledge and evolve."
Well, first it's a recruiting tool. Of course the Americans are going to come out on top. (But, in all honesty, there really isn't a peer military any where in the world.) But more importantly, these criticisms with respect to the Army are ridiculous. There isn't a game made that has meets these criteria. Everyone can pickup as much ammo as they want without ever slowing down. Everyone can carry multiple full sized guns. Guns just miraculously appear whenever you change to them. (Aparently weapons are stored in some sort of pocket dimension like Optimus Prime's trailer.) Wounds don't do anything. You can be miracuously healed in an instance. Guns don't get jammed. People don't get tired. Guns are always accurate. Everyone can drive any vehicle, from snowmobiles to tanks. Oh and the tanks? They take a crew of one, and operate at full effectiveness right up until they explode.
Sure some games have some of these things, but it's rare when they do, and they rarely have them all. Why aren't games realistic? Because they're games. They're meant to be fun, and when compared to fantasy, reality frankly sucks.
You forgot the part where you do something tedious for hours on end in order to get the money needed to buy what you want.
I think that sort of simulation would be too realistic for most people to handle.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Remember Vietnam. An army can win almost all the battles it is engaged in and still lose a war for non-tactical reasons.
American army technical superiority is great when they need to go somewhere, do the job and get away quickly or simply sterilize an area from the stratosphere, but when they have to stay somewhere, they suffer from their low headcount.
So, you're saying that it's "political" and it's about "fear, uncertainty, and doubt". Well, it is, and it should be. The military is not a game, it's about loss, fear, boredom, injury, limited career and advancement options, destruction, bureaucracy, disease, grief, killing, and being killed. If you don't have "fear, uncertainty, and doubt" about that, there is something wrong with you as a human being. And when the military recruits impressionable young people with games that give them a completely unrealistic picture of the choice they are making, it is perfectly justifiable to criticize them.
Note that I'm not saying that the military is an overall bad career or that military service is intrinsically wrong. The military serves an important function in the defense of our democracy, and we should be grateful to the people who choose military service. But we don't do anybody a favor by pretending that it's all a just a fun game.
Dude, Give the US m,ilitary all the best weapons we can muster. Give the Chinese rocks.
China would kick our ass so hard we wouldn't know what happened, yes, that is even if we use NUKES.
Technology cant trump a horde.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
First off, the parent poster was obviously being sarcastic. That is what the little emoticon at the end of the post signifies. Second, US military hegemony is unmatched, especially at the point at which the US military spends more in a year than all the other nations in the world combined. Also, nuclear weapons. The US is the only nation who keeps thousands of nukes well-maintained and has an fleet of AEGIS-style cruisers capable of shooting enemy nukes down.
First of all I agree with you that in USA vs rest of world the USA would _probably_ lose, but it's not as clear cut as you propose... nor would that actually be the scenario. We do need to worry about the US military, and yes, from a global standpoint.
The USA spends 466 Billion of the entire world's 900 billion dollar expenditures on military. China alone has more soldiers than USA has regular people, but that doesn't necessarily count for much in modern warfare.
Simply put in a conventional (modern) military engagement between USA and the rest of the world, there would be no winners. Our entire planet would be totally messed up, billions would be dead.
But even that isn't the likely scenario... some countries would undoubtedly side with the US, and the game of diplomacy would begin (which is what happens in nearly every war). Try to think of the world as a big ol' Risk board game right now. Then put yourself in the shoes of a born again Christian who is driven by faith (and thus has a moral excuse for his actions), and has significantly more little army figurines than most other countries combined.
In such a scenario, there's no clear cut winner -- like I said before, everyone will lose.
If you really believe what you just posted, then you are the one who's blinding yourself.
Actually, the modern US Army is a surprisingly agile and adaptive force. It's not like the Cold War Army of the 80s that used mass and raw firepower as a replacement for training.
We used to joke about how dumb the Yanks were - nice guys, but dumb as rocks. Things like the Dragon ATGM manual being a comic book didn't help that impression very much. Yank training was very focussed on accomplishing a specific job for a specific soldier, with little to no contingency training. Compare against Canadian doctrine, which was to train everybody as broadly as possible so their soldiers were more flexible and adaptive.
The Yanks aren't quite there yet - there's simply to many of them to train to that level - but in the last 5 years or so, they've come up with all sorts of great innovations in the training process such that they get maximum bang for their training buck. We're adopting Yank training techniques left, right, and centre - because they work, and work well. It is not unheard of for a lesson learned in the field to be incorporated into the next applicable training course a week later.
And while there is still that Yank tendency to swat flies with nukes, they ARE learning - go Google "the strategic corporal" and "three block war" for examples.
They don't have the experience with protracted insurgency that the Brits do (thanks to Northern Ireland and the IRA) but that is coming as well.
And not everything is unconventional war these days. The operations in the Kandahar area the last couple of months were classic combat team in the advance, fighting large enemy fighting formations in the field. Army on army combat has NOT gone away.
The American failures are with political leadership, not with the troops on the ground.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
You're thinking the MOAB. The standard Fuel Air Bombs can be dropped by almost any plane that can drop bombs.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
If only this were true. Russia has a nuclear arsenal of roughly equivalent size to ours, and neither of us are in a big hurry to completely be rid of all of them. Second, AEGIS cruisers may be capable of shooting down a missile in flight, but so is a complete idiot with a bb gun (it's called the "golden bb theory"), and I'd posit they'd both have about an equal chance of succeeding. AEGIS is for doing simultaneous radar tracking of multiple land, air, and sea targets. That's as far as the cruisers go. What may be confusing to some people is that there is ALSO an Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System in the works based on the same AN/SPY-1 radar that the AEGIS Cruisers use to do target tracking.
;)
It's also worth noting that all the attempts to actually shoot down missiles in flight so far have failed miserably, or succeeded accidentally. Of course, they'd say that even if they were glaring successes, but... If the US actually had a capable Theatre Missile Defense System you'd see all kinds of fallout on the international stage, along with a new arms race. If you remember, this was a very big topic in the news before 9/11 (along with North Korea's nuclear ambitions and rocket tests, and China 'accidentally' downing one of our planes in international waters) that suddenly just disappeared after the planes hit.
While I consider myself a bit of a nationalist, and a definite "military enthusiast," I'm not at all willing to say that we can shoot down a long range missile with anything approaching reliability or regularity, much less a multi-stage ballistic missile with MIRV bomblets. If the nukes ever fly we're just as dead as everyone else who doesn't have a doomsday shelter. If nuclear war ever looks eminent I'll probably be taking a trip to the Greenbrier to "play golf" and "take in the sights."
--Obyron
lots of countries in the world have nucler weapons. only one country in the world has actually used them.
sarcasm:
-noun
1. harsh or bitter derision or irony.
Economics. Exactly. The US government is actually worried that the world will begin trading gold based in Euros rather than the US dollar. If that were to happen, it is very likely that the US dollar will devalue against all other currencies. Followed closely would be the trading of oil in Euros. Global demand for the US dollar will drop, and the US economy's ability to purchase foreign goods will decrease.
The economic impact from something so simple as changing the default currency for trading commodities is so detrimental to US economics that you can pretty much bet your life that the US government is doing all it can to protect their dollar.
If it were a world vs US war, the world would win by simply cutting off all ties with the US. Simply put, the US's worst enemy is itself.
Live forever, or die trying.
The US is the only nation who keeps thousands of nukes well-maintained and has an fleet of AEGIS-style cruisers capable of shooting enemy nukes down.
And yet we have the audacity to tell North Korea and Iran they can't have any. What's good for the goose is good for the gander I think.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Of course it will never happen(fear is the key),
That's assuming no one launches the first batch thinking they are going to get 70 virgins out of the deal, or that Jesus is coming back and all the 'good' folks are going straight to heaven, so it doesn't matter if the rest of us get cooked...
Deluded folks don't fear the same things you and I do.
Ehmmm...you are aware the Germany's military power was nowhere near to be superior at the start of WWII? It was the underdog in any military branch. Airforce: British Spitfire's were superior, Navy: Anything but submarines were better from the Brits, Germany not even possesed a single carrier throughout the whole war, Army: It took Germany 'til 42 until they had anything that could kill the Soviet's T34 with a front shot, not to mention the JU-1. It took until 43 'til the Tiger and Königstiger and Pz. V (Panther) arrived at the scene. The only weapon capable of effectivly fighting those russian tanks was - ironically - an AA gun, the so called "eighteight" (8,8 cm caliber). High frequency and high range and caliber strong enough to make it through the heavy front armor plates of the T34. That's why the Tiger was equiped with the "eighteight" as well. The only advantage Germany had, was their superior commanders, from general down to platton leaders (that fortunately changed when Hitler took over general command) and tactical knowledge ("Blitzkrieg", anyone?).
So, given all this: WWII, Afghanistan (both the Soviet invasion and the nowerdays trouble), Vietnam, current Iraq, to just name a few, teaches the lesson that tactics have a much greater impact on the battle's outcome than numbers/equipment.
Use your head.
Declare war on a member state of the EU and the rest of it will come running to their defence. Remember that the EU is a strong bind between the member states, much stronger than the bond between even the UK and the US (people here generally dislike the fact we're so close to the US politically). That's Europe, you know, which has population as large as the US and an awfully more experienced military record (i'm being quite serious). Besides, Italy and Spain's military power aren't to be underestimated, the US has had a rocky ride capturing a small isolated middle eastern country, let alone a well developed, wealthy western nation, or an entire coalition of them.
I'm just applying a bit of common sense here. I don't really care who wins, but you're being very naive when you swipe aside the entire rest of the developed world as if you could trample on all over it. The US has limited resources and would never attack another developed country, because it would be political suicide. The US has enough enemies at the moment, don't you think?
I've got the spirit, lose the feeling.
When I was in "the Nav" (1984-1988) I loathed some of the ridiculous scenarious I read in some pubs, and some of the exercises we participated in.
I suggested this: the Soviets don't NEED to sink a carrier. Just do one or two or both of these:
A. send a low-yield/radiation, high-blast effect nuke or exotic violently explosive bomb over the CVNs. Warp the flight deck and jame the steam catapults. Now, no jet planes (other than Skyhawks, Harriers and smaller training planes) would launch. If you get lucky and jam the retractable arrestor gear, then no big planes will land. The birds in the air, far out to sea, will ditch, if they can't make it to a shore landing field or another CV, which, after a blast like that will be bugging out to avoid being ravaged.
B. Send mini-nuke warhead torpedoes after the ship. They don't need to HIT the carrier, just penetrate the screen defenses. Ships will zig-zag and collide jockeying for terminal defense to save the carrier, or blow the warhead to divert the screen, or get lucky and damage the shafts of several of the ships. No NEED to SINK them, just immobilize them outside of missile-to-shore range.
And, to deal with Aegis, just send in a very long barrage of missiles with sticky-foil like filaments to stick against the planar faces, short out the aerials from mast to superstructure, or just send a few non-radioactive types of EMP bombs to saturate and blind a squadron, SAG,or BG.
I was NOT an officer. I just did a LOT of reading, thinking, and re-hashing. Ideas like these, if actionable, render meaningless and as boondoggles all the money taxpayers around the world spend for governments to stroke themselves in their games of stratego.
But, those 3 ideas and others like them got me the nickname "TAO", for Tactical Action Officer, aboard my second ship. On my first ship, thoughts like that garnered from my shipmates comments such as, "Damn, I'm glad you're on OUR side and not the RUSSIANS..." Hell, I'm on NObody's side but my own. I call it like I see it, and if I'm wrong, I have the guts to still express myself despite the group-think mentality.
These boys can exercise all they want, but I hope fate deprives them of any significant opportunities to actually do any grand or WWII style campaigns. We don't need that shit anymore. Keep it to exercises and to fiction. Period.
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