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The US Army Has Too Many Video Games (vice.com)

Posted by msmash on from the my-army dept.

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.

3 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. Good old days by portwojc · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Good old days by Balthisar · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Our version of the sophisticated training system was a C=64 with a fake M16 and Duck Hunt-like light pen raster sensing device for learning how to shoot better (probably not a bad thing given that we were air traffic controllers and support).

      I thought I was unique in being the only soldier with an Amiga 500 in his barracks room, given that the demographics of the typical enlisted back then were quite a bit different than (how I imagine them) now.

      --
      --Jim (me)
  2. Re:Or... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...they could just stop being the world's policemen.

    Not in this dangerous world, no. The police, contrary to your idea, are not meddlers, but a necessary system for the management of a peril-fraught world.

    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.

    Except Mexico, Canada, the Caribbean, China and Japan.

    Not to mention countless Native American tribes.

    You know fuck-all about America's sins.

    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?.

    Now now, you know it's really about spreading Democracy and securing the flow of Spice, er, Oil, I mean Oil.