Slashdot Mirror
The US Army Has Too Many Video Games (vice.com)
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.
...they could just stop being the world's policemen.
I had so much respect for the pre-1940s US (the US itself, not some of the bullshit of the individual states) - they understood the value in leaving your neighbour the fuck alone.
Now it's all about a weird combination of military domination and literally sending your own people to murder other people for the sake of profit for a few friendly armaments and security firms,
Doesn't this embarrass you, America? Don't you feel ashamed that this is what you've become?.
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.
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
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.
You need Safespaces, even in the Army. That's why soldiers prefer mouse action these days.
Video Games make poor substitution for real life training. Real life Gandhi didn't nuke anyone.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
America's Army is the name given to a game technology platform used to develop first person shooter (FPS) games published in 2002 by the U.S. Army. Didn't see this in the story, but this is a free video game from the U.S. Army. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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 train for the bad things that happen, like your tank getting stuck in loose soil with water, and people who are actively trying to make you do the wrong thing. That requires actually taking vehicles into those actual types of terrain and obstacles.
Game that.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
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 how it can come out differently with different actions. Although live flying and live training is cheaper then the sims, it doesn't allow either of those.
Additionally, simulator training allows you to train to environments that are expensive to fly to. I can dial in Afghanistan in the sim. I can't do that without, say, deploying to Afghanistan for live training. I can dial a thunderstorm into the simulator. Bad form to take a real airplane through a thunderstorm, but better to have practiced in the sim before doing in the real airplane. Additionally, it takes about 20 minutes for me to fly back to the beginning of an instrument approach and about 2 hours to get everyone refueled after a live fly scenario at Red Flag. However, in the sim, it takes about 85 seconds for the sim to reset.
Sure, some are collecting dust because they dont' work, some are collecting dust because we've downsized away the operators or defunded the support contracts. However, simulators as a class are extremely useful tools and a whole lot cheaper than bleeding in combat.
Look at the title, your done. We are in he era of video game wars. Hook the children up to the real world bullets and we are done!!
tic tac toe is hidden but still on the system.
But global thermonuclear war is still the last one on the list.
good for kill bots let's make them think its not real shooting the wrong thing is not that big of an deal.
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.
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 very many people can be using the simulator at once, which limits the military's ability to train groups of trainees how to co-ordinate their behavior with each other.
Replace that with a networked gaming PC and an Oculus Rift (or similar) for each trainee, and I think you could provide a similarly immersive experience to a lot more people simultaneously, for about the same price.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
When you start talking about the costs of things about the Military, you need to take into account a lot more crazy risks that you would never have to worry about in the civilian world. "Oh, we'll just fly everyone from a war zone back to the states for some training, that costs less money than these expensive simulators".
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.
Get it together, editors.
I'd be glad to take those dust collecting sims of your hands.
Wait -- are you saying black guys are actually using guns to protect themselves against cops?
I can't keep up with the latest information. I thought they were using them to rape the white women, steal from the Asian stores, and gun down other black people in drive by shootings.
Who am I supposed to hate right now? I forget.
"Preferred"? I'm not sure the author of this article really understands how the military works.
We need the military industrial sector to port all our machines control interfaces over to an keyboard-and-mouse control scheme.
How on earth is Hillary going to take all the guns when Obama is going to take all the guns?
Don't forget that Hillary will set the US army to invade Texas (using Texas soldiers no less), or did Obama do that already as well?
So hard to keep track of all the whackjob conspiracies.
Plenty of international imperialism prior to the 20th century. I used to think the Chinese/Japanese derogatory attitude towards Americans, especially in cinema as boorish violent thugs was jigoism/racism, until I found out the history surrounding American involvement in that region during the 19th century. We were as big of assholes on the eastern international stage at that point as we were in the western and south american stages during both similiar and later times.
The US is also in the top 5 current countries for total genocide committed (Mongolians under Atilla etc all and a few other groups may compete, but since none of those civilizations/countries still exist per-say...)
Good and Evil are subjective and depending on cultural and religious views the US has often been both Good and Evil depending on whether you were Christian and of an 'accepted' culture/racial stock.
That said, America has been a force of progress globally for the past 250 years, from stealing patented technology from Europe to enhance our farming and industry (and by extension other 'vassal countries' industry under our plantation holders/companies) to forcing natives to learn more about the outside world, technology, or entertainment/culture, the US has shaked a lot of groups loose of their 'primitive' lifestyles, for better or worse.
There have been some game vendors who have made money peddling their games for use as simulations, and this is probably a mix of a scam and military people looking for cheaper ways to train. If it's the latter then I'm all for it as it saves taxpayer money or allows the use of more money elsewhere like on aircraft maintenance.
Simulatos however have long been a vital part of military training. In WWII most pilots were trained in electro-mechanical "Link Trainers". Some airborne gunners used simulators too. While flight sims became more computerized by the 1980s, I know that the Navy was still using actual ship models in basins in San Diego and other places to train for naval operations. These were not the models in tow-tanks which are used for hydrodynamic analysis of new designs. These were scale models of ships with electric motors and propellers scaled to move the ship at accuate speeds and to accellerate and decellerate accurately so sailors could practice ship maneuvers in harbors without crashing into other ships or piers.
If it is accurately portraying things and accurately responding to a user's input and the results of his actions, while not awarding bonus points/lives, it just might not be a "game".
Typically in a military acquisition, Congress approves funds, either for a specific large project (think F-35 design), or for a function (you get $XXB dollars for training). The military branch then determines how best to spend that money to achieve their objectives, issues requests for proposals, and selects the "best value" proposal for purchase.
You don't really think Congress votes on every purchase the government makes, do you?
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.
Do you understand how a majority vote works? By your logic, every company that built these "simulators" (why the quotes? they ARE simulators), live in the congressional district of a majority of Senators. In other words, you can almost guarantee that a US company "lives" in the US.
I bet the M2 Bradley simulators in Georgia still run on UNIX System V. :D