Creating a World Classroom - Military Training

[Trojan]

Creating a World Classroom

Massive multiplayer online commercial games and massively multyplayer simulation provides the services with an opportunity to transform their training and education programs.
By Marty Kauchak

The U.S. Department of Defense is cautiously studying whether computer-based games help service members meet individual and collective (unit) training requirements. A small, but increasing, number of commercial off-the-shelf PC-based games are being used to supplement traditional instruction provided in classrooms, at fixed-site simulators and other venues. At the same time, DoD has also started an evaluation of relatively new categories of commercial games that operate over the Internet, or in a wireless environment.

The monikers of these game-for-training categories include massive multiplayer online games (MMOGs) and massively multiplayer (MMP) simulation.

Dr. Mike Macedonia, the visionary chief technology officer at the U.S. Army’s Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation in Orlando, FL, shared with MT2 the untapped potential of MMOGs and MMP simulation and explained why his command is evaluating these technologies.

“The neat thing is that when you have soldiers with access to the Internet and the Army’s Knowledge Online system, you can conceive of soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq training with an Army National Guardsman in Mississippi. So, what we are doing with these games is going beyond traditional advanced distributed learning and we are creating a world classroom.”

In-Service Games

Computer-based games have been in service training tool kits since the latter part of the 1990s. These products have been bought outright as COTS products to sharpen basic warfare skills or were tailored to meet specific training needs.

Since 1997, Sonalysts Inc. has teamed with computer game publisher Electronic Arts to develop three naval simulation games that are in use in the United States and other nations. Soon after the 1997 release of 688(I) Hunter/Killer: Submarine Simulation Game, the U.S. Navy recognized the product’s potential as a tool to refresh perishable skills and reinforce hard-to-learn training objectives.

The chief of Naval Education and Training issued a contract for the company to add several components to 688(I) Hunter/Killer to further increase its value as a training aid, said Bob Kurzawa, vice president of Sonalysts. The training command soon supplied a copy of the upgraded Navy game version to each service submarine. The game has been added to the training inventories of the British Royal Navy and the German Navy.

Other collaborative projects included Jane’s Fleet Command, which was released in 1999 and provides accurate modeling of the capabilities of over 300 weapons and weapons platforms. Modified or unedited versions of the product help train U.S. Navy warfighters and students. In 2001, Sub Command: Submarine Simulation Game was unveiled in English, German and Japanese versions.

Coalescent Technologies modified for the U.S. Marine Corps the Bohemian Interactive Studios’ commercial game Real Virtuality into a new product named VBS1—a fully interactive, 3-D training system. The new program provides a synthetic training environment in which team members can practice small units tactics. VBS1 was put through its paces at the 2002 Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference as part of Corps’ Deployable Virtual Training Environment demonstration. The game has been evaluated for training onboard amphibious ships by embarked Marine Expeditionary Unit staffs.

Evolution

A natural evolution is the migration from games whose average training audiences are the size of a ship’s wardroom or other military unit (about 25 personnel) to larger scale games—including MMOGs.

This second generation of games originated as commercial entertainment products that, heretofore, have been online. Those games allow large numbers of players (often thousands) to concurrently play on a round the clock basis—or as long as the controlling data center or game publisher keeps open the competition.

Game environments for MMOGs and related products allow an individual to role play a number of characters in highly-interactive settings based on alternate histories or alternate realities.

And in a new twist, mobile MMP games based on wireless technology are also being honed. Japan-based developer and publisher Dwango’s game, Samurai Romanesque, has more than 100,000 subscribers.

DoD’s technology leaders are accelerating efforts to prove the mettle of MMOGs and other recent products as a viable training technology for DoD’s usually staid training requirements and acquisition communities. In July, the Defense Modeling and Simulation Office sponsored a seminar at the Alexandria, VA-based Institute of Defense Analyses. The seminar was to launch the idea of using a consortium to explore how to use this embryonic technology for the department’s training programs. In September, the Office of the Secretary of Defense included a panel discussion on this technology during the DoD Training Transformation Technologies Conference.

Promises and Shortfalls of Games

“We want games for training not because they are games, but because they are the most engaging intellectual thing that we have. They are the best learning tool that we have ever invented. And games are a language that ‘digital natives’ [his term for people who were born after 1974 and grew up in the digital world] understand and think fluently,” said Marc Prensky, founder and chief executive officer of Games2Train. He delivered his remarks at the September DoD training conference.

Prensky, an enthusiastic proponent of gaming technology for training, also provided another attribute of these games if they are used for military applications—their utility to furnish large-scale collective (unit) training. The current generation of commercial games supports participation from one person to a South Korean product in which “close to a million people play at once. That [approximates] the size of our whole military,” he emphasized.

Robert Gehorsam, vice president of strategic initiatives at There Inc., shared his industry colleagues’ enthusiasm of how MMOGs can benefit military training. “I think that there are joint training opportunities,” including mission rehearsal for special operations and intelligence units that could be integrated into these games, said Gehorsam.

Warren Katz, co-founder and chief operating officer, MÄK Technologies Inc., provided another positive assessment of the ability of MMOGs to supply military training, but added the DoD’s acquisition program prevents the rapid delivery of this technology.

“Technologically speaking, very good MMOGs are available, and have been available for some time,” Katz told MT2. “This would lead to the conclusion that perhaps it [absence of MMOGs in service training programs] isn’t a technological problem. At the same time, you have to observe that DoD doesn’t use any of them in large-scale applications. There are, however, small pockets of these games here and there as DoD evaluates this technology.”

“So why is it that the technology is available and is in use by the public who pays $9.95 or $11.95 for a game, and DoD hasn’t adopted the technology in a big way?” Katz rhetorically asked. He answered his own question: “There is only one conclusion—it’s a business problem.”

Possible acquisition impediments to DoD’s expanded use of MMOGs include “marketplace obstacles, entrenched bureaucracy, or some sort of other failure that prevents DoD from adopting MMOGs in a massive way,” he said.

Katz acknowledged DoD is using an increasing number of micro-simulations and other categories of games in its training programs. “There are about 20 or 30 COTS games that have been adapted from commercial games, or custom developed-which still have a ‘game flavor’ to them, that have been adopted by the military.”

But Katz added these games originated from research and development projects that “had almost no funding, and were rarely sponsored by TRADOC [U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command] and other service training commands. These are rarely recognized or endorsed by the larger training commands because they buy large products like JSIMS [Joint Simulation System], OneSAF [One Semi-Automated Forces], WARSIM [Warfighter’s Simulation) and others—because this is what the largest training industry players want. They want the large multi-hundred dollar contracts. And the service procurement organizations want these large decade-long contracts because it gives them and their industry partners security.”

Industry advocacy aside, some DoD officials are encouraging the department to further evaluate the training potential of this technology before embracing it. One individual in this camp is Dr. Ralph Chatham, a Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) program manager, who told DoD training conference attendees, “Games are not training.”

Chatham, who is guiding the embryonic DARPA continuously available training wars program—nicknamed DARWARS—through its development phase, added that the military-industry team must address a number of uncertainties and limitations in MMOGs before the games become part of service training programs. These issues include: validation of games’ physics and scenarios; their interoperability and open architecture capabilities; their ability to support a formal after action review; and their degrees of privacy and multi-level security.

A U.S. Air Force Air Education Training Command representative speaking on a condition of anonymity said that that his service’s leadership also insists that “significant” additional research should be conducted before MMOGs and similar games are used to train his personnel.

Even Games2Train’s Prensky opined that more work is required to transform a commercial product into a good training game. “We have to take the thing called content and translate it from English into ‘game.’ That might involve making things more active. This is an art—not a science. There is no machine that you can put your training program in and have your game come out,” he said.

Search for a Proponent

There is a divergence within the services on how the technology and instructional communities view these games. The Army has established a four-year, $3.5 million science and technology objective contract with There Inc. to develop a game in which multiple players could fight terrorists in an asymmetrical, virtual environment.

Macedonia said the science and technology project’s rationale was not to focus on software development, “which is already proven, but rather, to extend [the programs], and determine the utility of MMPs simulation as a training environment.” The service’s Research, Development & Engineering Command, in collaboration with the Army Research Institute, is working with the industry team to bring the program to fruition.

But TRADOC has not written a requirement for these technologies in service training plans. The failure to secure a proponent in the traditional training community is the biggest near-term obstacle in fielding these systems, Macedonia said. Nonetheless, PEO STRI views these technologies as a future product line and will continue to study the utility of these games.

Marty Kauchak is MT2’s editor-at- large. He is based in Washington, D.C.

[Trojan]

Computer Games Liven Up Military Recruiting, Training

by Harold Kennedy

Computer games—which entertain millions of U.S. teenagers—are beginning to breathe fresh life into military recruiting and training.

Earlier this year, for example, the U.S. Army launched a new computer game—called “America’s Army”—over the Internet.

Aimed at encouraging teens to join up, it enables players to experience both basic and advanced training, join a combat unit and fight in a variety of environments, including arctic Alaska, upstate New York and a third-world city.

Players can fire on a rifle range, run an obstacle course, attend sniper school, train in urban combat and parachute from a C-17 transport.

The game accurately depicts military equipment, training and the real-life movements of soldiers, said Lt. Col. George Juntiff, Army liaison officer to the Modeling, Virtual Environment and Simulation (MOVES) Institute, at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., which developed the game.

“America’s Army” features sound effects by moviemaker George Lucas’ company, SkyWalker, and Dolby Digital Sound. In addition, sound effects from the movie “Terminator II” were provided at no charge.

The game is getting considerable attention. During its first two weeks, more than a million Americans downloaded the game for free, Juntiff said.

“That’s an enormous number,” he said. “It’s the largest release in computer game history.”

Even more people are likely to acquire the game starting in October, Juntiff said, when the Army was scheduled to begin distributing it as a free CD set to a target audience over the age of 13. The developers plan to upgrade the game every month to attract new players, he said.

Actually, “America’s Army” consists of two separate games—”Soldiers,” a role-player based on Army values, and “Operations,” a shooter game that takes players on combat missions. It was developed and distributed at a cost of $7.5 million by MOVES and the U.S. Military Academy’s Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis at West Point, N.Y.

The computer game is a “very cost-effective” way to reach potential recruits, especially compared to television advertising, said Maj. Chris Chambers, OEMA deputy director. “It is also a more detailed means of showing the American people what we do.”

The game also puts the Army in a positive light, said Juntiff. “It lets people know the Army is high-tech. It’s not what they see in the movies.”

The game, in addition, raises ethical issues, Juntiff said. “The game sets rules of engagement, and if you violate those rules, you pay the price.”

Once they enlist, recruits, these days, can expect to encounter computer games throughout their military training, said Michael R. Macedonia, senior scientist for the U.S. Army Simulation, Training and Instrumentation Command (STRICOM), headquartered in Orlando, Fla. Even well-known commercial games have been adapted for military use, he told National Defense.

That process began, he said, in the 1980s, when the Army modified the Atari tank battle game, “Battlezone,” to let it have gunner controls similar to those of a Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle. The idea, he explained, was to enhance the eye-hand coordination of armor crews.

Then, in the mid-1990s, the Marines edited the commercial version of the three-dimensional game “Doom” to create “Marine Doom,” to help train four-man fire teams in urban combat.

More recently, the Army’s Soldier Systems Center, in Natick, Mass., has commissioned the games developer, Novalogic, of Calabasas, Calif., to modify the popular Delta Force 2 game to help familiarize soldiers with the service’s experimental Land Warrior system.

The Land Warrior system includes a self-contained computer and radio unit, a global-positioning receiver, a helmet-mounted liquid-character display and a modular weapons array that adds thermal and video sights and laser ranging to the standard M-4 carbine and M-16A2 rifle.

A customized version of another computer game, Microsoft Flight Simulator, is issued to all Navy student pilots and undergraduates enrolled in Naval Reserve Officer Training Courses at 65 colleges around the nation. The office of the Chief of Naval Education and Training has installed the software at the Naval Air Station in Corpus Christi, Texas, and plans to install it at two other bases in Florida.

LB&B Associates, of Columbia, Md., has modified the game engine from author Tom Clancy’s best-selling computer game, “Rainbow Six Rogue Spear,” to train U.S. combat troops in urban warfare. The game—marketed by Ubi Soft Entertainment, of San Francisco—is based one of Clancy’s military novels.

The new version—which is still being developed—will not be used to improve marksmanship, but to sharpen decision-making skills at the small-unit level, said Michael S. Bradshaw, LB&B’s Systems Division manager. LB&B has completed a proof-of-concept version, which “worked brilliantly,” Bradshaw said. The project, he explained, has been turned over to the Institute for Creative Technology for final development.

Tapping Into Hollywood
The Army established the ICT in 1999 to explore the use of commercial entertainment technology and content for military training and education, Macedonia said. It is situated at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, in order to tap into Hollywood’s entertainment industry, with its expertise in story, character, visual effects gaming and production.

The ICT is working with STRICOM and commercial game-development companies to create two additional training simulations.

Scheduled for completion in December is “Combat System XII,” a PC-based company-command simulator. As the commander of an Army light infantry company, the student must interpret the assigned mission, organize his force, plan strategically and coordinate the actions of about 120 men under his command.

The other game, “C-Force,” will run on a game console, such as the Microsoft Xbox or Sony Playstation 2. The student is a squad leader, who must lead and coordinate about a dozen men in completing a series of combat missions.

The use of entertainment technology is not new for military services, said Macedonia. Before World War II, the developer of the first pilot training simulator, Edward Link, sold the trainer to amusement parks while awaiting military contracts, Macedonia explained. During the war and afterwards, the Link Trainer helped prepare more than half a million aircrew members.

The Link Trainer, however, used levers, valves and vacuum bellows to imitate an aircraft in flight. To provide a more realistic experience, the Navy asked the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop a computer to provide flight simulation, leading eventually to the development of computer-simulation technology.

Simulation was adopted quickly in the commercial world, first in amusement parks, then in video arcades and most recently in the computer-gaming industry.

When the Internet became accessible to non-academics in the early 1990s, the computer-game community embraced it, said J.C. Herz, the New York City-based author of “Joystick Nation,” a history of video and computer gaming.

One reason for the growing popularity, according to Herz, is that computer gaming appeals to innate aspects of human behavior, including a drive to compete and collaborate, a hunger for status, a tendency to cluster and the appetite for peer acknowledgement.

When the commercial version of “Doom” was released in 1993, it spread like wildfire, she said. Annual sales of computer games now exceed $7 billion a year industry, rivaling the U.S. movie industry, Herz said.

Players don’t just buy the games, she said, they spend hundreds of thousands of hours learning how to master them, creating new scenarios and teach others the same skills.

Meanwhile, personal computers have become much more powerful, Macedonia said. “For four years, I’ve been trying to convince people that they’re not toys any longer,” he said. “They have as much capability as supercomputers had a decade ago,” he said.

At the same time, Macedonia noted, prices for a personal computer plummeted from several thousand dollars to just a few hundred, putting them within reach of almost every household. An estimated 70 million Americans have game consoles in their homes, he said. Each week, he noted, 73 percent of U.S. teenagers surf the Internet.

Computer use has become so pervasive that the armed forces cannot afford to ignore it, said Macedonia. “If you’re an 18-year-old going into West Point today, you don’t remember when there weren’t video games,” he said. “You’ve always had a computer, and you’ve never even seen a manual typewriter—except maybe in a museum.”

All the Way Up
The services’ use of computer games has spread through every level of training, Macedonia noted. Wargaming and simulation are included in the curriculum of every U.S. war college and the operations of every command headquarters, he said.

The Naval War College, in Newport, R.I., has worked with Sonalysts Inc., of Waterford, Conn., to create more than 500 games. Among them were three combat simulations that

Sonalysts developed for distribution by Electronic Arts, of Redwood City, Calif., including “Jane’s Fleet Command,” “688(I) Hunter/Killer” and “Sub Command.”

The Army’s Armor Center, at Fort Knox, Ky., has licensed “TacOps,” a commercial clone of “Janus,” a noncommercial military simulation, for company and battalion wargaming.

The Army Command and General Staff College, at Leavenworth, Kan., uses a strategy game called “Decisive Action,” originally developed for corps-level operations.

The Institute for National Strategic Studies, at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., employs a game set in ancient Greece, based upon the Peloponesian wars, of the 5th century B.C., between Athens, Sparta and Persia.

“We use it to teach grand military strategy,” said Army Lt. Col. Chip Cutler, a senior military fellow at the institute. “My 13-year-old son played it the other night. I don’t know if he had a grand strategy, but he definitely put a hurt on Persia.”

So widespread has the use of such games become that the Air Force’s Air University, headquartered at Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., every year sponsors a conference to bring together the military and commercial wargaming community.

The services have come to rely heavily upon industry, which has far deeper pockets, to invest in research for new developments in the gaming field, Macedonia said. For example, he noted, Microsoft spent more than $2 billion to create its Xbox, well above the Army’s entire annual budget for science and technology.

Too often, however, when the services modify a commercial game, they remove too much of the detail, said one industry executive, who asked not to be identified. “The military doesn’t have the money to do it right,” he said. “They try to make the games cheap and affordable, but the engines suffer.”

For their part, the military services still run many war games that don’t use computer simulations, which have their limitations, said Cutler. “It’s much easier to devise tabletop games, which don’t rely upon modeling and simulations,” he said.

Macedonia acknowledges the existence of a strong anti-simulation sentiment in the services, particularly among older personnel. “There is a sort of an attitude in some quarters that ‘we don’t need no stinking computers,’ but that is changing,” he said.

“Twenty percent of all Army officers now have their own Web pages,” he said. “And those 18-year-olds just coming into the Army have been playing video games all of their lives.”

The reality is that “computer games are not nonsense,” Macedonia said. “We win wars with these games, because they help train soldiers.”

Being a soldier is “more than how to hold and shoot a rifle,” he said. “We want thinking soldiers who can understand and articulate problems. We saw that in Desert Storm and Somalia. Just watch the movie ‘Black Hawk Down.’”

“People were amazed at how well we did in Afghanistan. I was not amazed. The most precise weapon in the world is a well-trained soldier.”
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These stories are a bit old but I was doing some research and thought you all would be interested. -Trojan

[BADDOG]

Absolutely fascinating stuff you found there Troj bro!!!!

Warmest Regards

[Trojan]

Absolutely bro. I've searched this to read it all again!

[Hellfighter]

sound like maybe JOTR & JOTR:E maybe use maybe others in this line.

really good to know the service personnal are into it.

it all about team work

[Stu]

it might work for the army, but if your just a gamer it wont give you any training of course, unless you play to much of it
-Tecceh2

[Trojan]

lol, Stu. You'll learn when you are ready to learn. The Squad Commanding level will teach you many things. When you get to my level, you should be thinking of everything 20 years of pc gaming has to offer.