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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.
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.
Doesn't this embarrass you, America? Don't you feel ashamed that this is what you've become?
Absolutely, but only in that we've become like everyone else. History seems to just be a series of different groups coming to power, acting like dicks, using up their resources and then being surpassed by someone else who hasn't used theirs up yet. The USA is the country which was in the right place at the right time to dominate everything for the last couple hundred years. Before that, it's been other countries.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Video Games make poor substitution for real life training. Real life Gandhi didn't nuke anyone.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
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! --
Doesn't this embarrass you, America? Don't you feel ashamed that this is what you've become?.
So seriously live in another country for a while, or just try dealing with stuff in somewhere in Europe or Africa, then tell me how shitty it is in the USA. I was born in poland and I go back every year, dealing with anyone on any level of the government there makes me want to pull my hair out. People bitch about the DMV or IRS in the US, but they are awesome compared to most of the things I've had to deal with in Poland, you almost need a lawyer to come with you just so you can get an ID card, the bureaucracy is horrible.
Someone doesn't know their history. its you. Look at the wars america was in before 1940. For example- the Spanish-American war. Basically caused because we wanted some of Spain's stuff in the Carribean, and trumped up on an explosion in port that ended up being an accident.
The Mexican American war- because we wanted to move our southern border to the Rio Grande.
The War of 1812- multiple causes and may have happened anyway, but at least part was a desire to annex Canada.
The Indian Wars- all undeclared, but we took each tribe's land one at a time.
The US has been an imperialistic war monger from the beginning. We just kept it to our own continent until the 1900s.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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.
...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.
I'm afraid that your "pre-1940s" view of the US is either rose tinted or just plain incorrect. While Teddy Roosevelt spoke of the need to speak softly and carry a big stick, the foreign policy of the United States has been largely the opposite of the isolationist position that many people seem to think is our norm. There's a reason the USMC's Battle Hymn starts with "from the Hallf of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli." We've invaded both Canada and Mexico in our history, and (prior to the 1940 date you remember fondly) had been at war on every continent save Australia and Antartica. We took the vast majority of our nation away from the people who already lived there. I'm reasonably certain that every single US extraterritorial possession (i.e. Guam, etc) was in our possession prior to the second world war, except for a bunch of tiny atolls in the Pacific we built bases on during the war and maybe kept afterward.
I personally think that, on the whole, we've been a stronger force for "good" (however you want to define that) than "evil" but I do have my biases.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?