War Play

by Corey Mead

  The most significant effect of the military’s learning-related efforts in the twentieth century was tying education and advanced technology inextricably together—not just technology in the sense of electronics and fiber optics and digital files, but technology as the center of our economy. This is not to suggest some Pentagon-driven conspiracy; any number of issues and players have influenced the link between technology and education. But the military’s seminal role in this link is both essential and ongoing.

  Remaining on the cutting edge has not been without its pitfalls. In practice, while the military’s efforts at instructional innovation have led to a number of lasting changes, there have been numerous cases in which the promise and hype of new educational technology has far exceeded its actual benefits. Yet such recurrent disappointments have not dampened the military’s enthusiasm for technology-driven instruction.

  There is, however, a crucial difference today: for the first time in its history, the military wants to teach even junior personnel not just what to think but how to think. In the past, as we’ve seen, innovations have primarily been in the service of functionality and standardization. That’s what makes current developments so remarkable: they break this mold. The complexity of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq forced the military to accept that functional training for specific military purposes was no longer enough. As we will see, this is one major reason that the military is now investing so heavily in video games.

  CHAPTER 3

  “Everybody Must Think”: The Military’s Post-9/11 Turn to Video Games

  And for pleasure, there was the simulator, the most perfect video game that he had ever played. Teachers and students trained him, step by step, in its use . . . It was exhilarating to have such control over the battle, to be able to see every point of it.

  —ORSON SCOTT CARD, Ender’s Game, 1985

  IN THE LATE 1990S, with the Cold War still fresh in its coffin, military officials began to hypothesize that the skills and attitudes of modern teenagers differed from those of their elders in ways that would benefit the fighting of wars against America’s new stateless enemies. A 2001 Army Science Board study laid out the specifics of these skills and attitudes. Teenagers, the study said, were excellent multitaskers; they could listen to music, talk on a cell phone, and use a computer at the same time. They preferred concrete reasoning, not abstract, deductive philosophizing. No longer did teens want to learn through passive listening; they wanted their education to be hands-on, experiential, based on specific examples. Even their definition of literacy had changed; it no longer referred to texts alone but also referred to images and multimedia. All these attributes, officials claimed, were relevant to the technology of modern warfare—and were fostered by playing video games.

  Not coincidentally, these were the same skills and preferences considered essential to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s “revolution in military affairs”—otherwise known as “transformation”—which held that the U.S. military’s high-technology combat systems and heavy reliance on air forces had dramatically reduced the need for large numbers of troops on the ground. In 2001, as the George W. Bush administration swept into Washington, “transformation” became the Pentagon’s buzzword, the presumptive answer to post–Cold War uncertainties. The future of war was not lumbering tank battles between two superpowers; it was “asymmetric warfare,” battles between opponents of vastly different strengths and capabilities. Transformation required a wholesale technological upgrade of the armed forces, with the goal of changing the military into a lithe, agile, easily portable fighting force that could be instantly deployed to any of the world’s future hot spots. To do so would require “jointness” and “networking”—in other words, extreme cooperation between the military’s four services, all of which would be connected by advanced technology. The events of 9/11 only increased Rumsfeld’s push for a wholesale reduction of ground forces, one of the key elements that would lead to such disastrous results in Iraq.

  And yet “transformation” did get one thing right: in the twenty-first century, the role of American soldiers had indeed become more complex and was being driven by advanced technology at every level. As a result, the military began to emphasize the battlefield importance of “situation awareness”: recognizing that important information was available, understanding and interpreting the information’s relevance to the mission, and using that information to forecast future plans and events. According to Jim Korris, former creative director of the Institute for Creative Technologies, the military “decided that it needed to think less about educating people on the physics of artillery tubes and start teaching them how to make smart discriminations very quickly in close urban fights—training in cognitive decision-making.” Adaptive thinking, collaboration with others, system and information management: these competencies became (and remain) the order of the day. The belief that soldiers needed only the skills required to comprehend field and weapons manuals was superseded by the drive for digital expertise, for the highly advanced information-processing capabilities that video games supposedly promote.

  This belief was highlighted in the Pentagon’s 2003 study “Training for Future Conflicts,” which argued that American soldiers needed to develop their thinking skills as much as their weapons-handling skills. Dr. Ralph Chatham, coauthor of the study and at the time a program director at DARPA, wrote that twenty-first-century warfare had increased “the cognitive demands on even the most junior levels of the military.” As the report more bluntly stated elsewhere, “Everybody must think.” At the time this represented a significant break from many of the calcified traditions of military training. In the principles it outlined and in the scope of its influence, “Training for Future Conflicts” laid the groundwork for the military’s new game-based approach to learning.

  The Rise of DARWARS

  In his report, Ralph Chatham emphasized the idea that military proficiency depends as much on the soldiers who are operating today’s complex technological systems as it does on the technology itself. (This was a continuation of the military’s long-established man-machine emphasis.) Chatham said that the “speed, degree, and duration of complicated cognitive tasks” that soldiers were expected to perform meant significant improvements in military training were required. What might this mean in practice? The answer, Chatham claimed, lay in popular culture. Specifically, he argued that contemporary military training should be modeled on the massively multiplayer online video game (MMOG) world, where hundreds of thousands of participants play simultaneously in virtual environments.

  The relevance of this model can be seen in Dutch scholar David Nieborg’s analysis of the game America’s Army. Players, Nieborg points out, are required to manage the game’s multiple streams of data, keeping in mind such questions as “where are the opposing forces, who is talking to me, where are my teammates, where is my medic, how much time do I have left to complete the mission, how many bullets do I have left, what is the quickest way out of this hospital, what is that noise[?]” These questions and more dominate every moment of game play, indicating just how complex MMOGs can be.

  For Chatham, writing in the wake of the American invasion of Iraq, MMOGs represented the next leap forward from the simulation-based combat training centers the armed forces had used in the 1970s and ’80s. This time around, the focus would be on teaching soldiers how to process and react to information. Chatham’s vision of overhauling military training through video games was the product of his uniquely extensive experience in that realm: during his time at DARPA, he had led the development of the groundbreaking DARWARS program, a set of digital “universal, on-demand, persistent training wars” that was used from 2003 to 2008 on U.S. military bases throughout the world. Though the graphics were a step below those of a commercial video game, they were far better than those in any previous military venture. Among the areas emphasized in DARWARS were cross-cultural communication, convoy operations, infantry tactics, and rules of engagement. The program
focused on individualized instruction, direct feedback on performance, just-in-time training, and collaborative and self-paced learning—the same elements highlighted in Chatham’s Army Science Board study. In a pioneering twist, which represented a significant development from earlier military simulations, soldiers could create new scenarios in DARWARS based on their own battlefield experiences. DARWARS showed a generation of military officials that video games could be uniquely effective training tools for America’s twenty-first-century wars.

  One of the most popular DARWARS tools, for example, was the game Tactical Iraqi, which trained soldiers in Baghdad Arabic and Iraqi culture. Chatham says the game—and the larger Tactical Language and Culture Training Systems program, which is still used today by both the army and the Marine Corps—stemmed from the belief that in today’s wars, “nonverbal messages are as important as verbal ones.” American soldiers in foreign countries are supposed to become as proficient in basic cultural and gestural cues as they are in basic vocabulary. In Tactical Iraqi, players interacted with virtual Iraqi civilians in various states of distress, with the success of the interaction depending on how players navigated both major and minor details of cultural communication. (For example, a thumbs-up gesture was highly offensive to Iraqis, as was a soldier’s failure to remove his or her sunglasses before addressing civilians.) The game’s emphasis on training even junior personnel in cultural difference represented a new phase for the military; in the past, understanding the culture in which one was fighting would have been seen as the purview of the State Department, not the armed forces.

  In Chatham’s view, decoding commands on today’s battlefields had become only the most basic prerequisite for competence. Video games, he argues, are perfect for teaching soldiers what has become the essential twenty-first-century battlefield skill: how to “receive, triage, assess, decide, and act on masses of incoming data,” even as “the sight of your buddy” is replaced by “icons on a screen.”

  From DARWARS to Real World

  This refrain, which emphasizes the data overload that typifies contemporary warfare, explains why the post-9/11 military first grew so interested in gaming’s cognitive benefits. Early on, Colonel Casey Wardynski, creator of America’s Army, described the new challenges for American soldiers: “Our military information tends to arrive in a flood . . . and it’ll arrive in a flood under stressful conditions, and there’ll be a hell of a lot of noise . . . Most of it hasn’t been turned into information and it’s still data . . . How do you filter that? What are your tools? What is your facility in doing that? How much load can you bear?” At the time these questions were bedeviling military thinkers and planners struggling to adapt to the realities of war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

  Wardynski, for one, argues that the gaming generation possesses an innate ability to dominate visually chaotic space. This is a key advantage against today’s enemies, he says, who are not “stupid enough to chase us out into the desert where we can get them” but instead are going to hide in cities, where all is “chaos and clutter, and there’s noncombatants and all that junk.” Against this chaos and clutter, somebody who can pick a key piece of information out of a scene and decide in a split second what to do about it is a strategically important person for the army.

  What DARWARS and America’s Army and similar games gave soldiers, Wardynski says, was “a virtual classroom . . . a place in the world where you can take your mind—your body can’t go because of distance, time, money, or danger—and you can separate your experiences from the limitations of the world.” His vision proffered a high-speed human-computer interaction as the only viable tool for delivering effective instruction. The point of this instruction, like its method of delivery, was different from that in previous wars: its goal was to significantly improve the cognitive capabilities of recruits. “It’s not a traditional way of thinking about training,” Wardynski notes. “We usually think about training in terms of, ‘I’m going to give you a set of answers, and a set of circumstances; you’re going to memorize them, you’re going to regurgitate them in the right order and in the right circumstances.’ The [video game] way of thinking about training is, ‘We’re going to train your brain to better process what you take in, no matter what it is.’”

  This notion of training the brain was a response to what the military termed the “three-block war,” the paradigm of battle outlined by General Charles Krulak after the United States’ experience in Bosnia, Somalia, and Kosovo. As he explained (in the video game Full Spectrum Warrior): “In one moment in time, our service members will be feeding and clothing displaced refugees—providing humanitarian assistance. In the next moment, they will be holding two warring tribes apart—conducting peacekeeping operations. Finally, they will be fighting a highly lethal mid-intensity battle all on the same day. All within three city blocks.”

  Dan Kaufman, project manager of the DARPA video game RealWorld—the follow-up to DARWARS—made this same point: in the twenty-first century, American soldiers were no longer just war fighters. Adding to the pressure, Kaufman said, is that while following the chain of command used to be effective, there was no longer time for it. Soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq had to be able to act and react immediately, and so they needed to make decisions that in the past would have been made by commanders. Kaufman, like Chatham and Wardynski, was one of the officials trying to figure out how to prepare soldiers for this situation—and coming to the conclusion that video games were the answer.

  Kaufman may have been biased in this conclusion: he was a long-time veteran of the commercial game industry and had joined DARPA to apply the knowledge he’d gained there to a military context. Kaufman argues that games like RealWorld can make the cognitive load on soldiers more instinctive, like a kind of sixth sense. “Not in a mystical way,” he says. “A sixth sense is just experience and awareness.” He points out that there are different kinds of intelligence. Although a professor of physics, for example, might have the edge in a physics lab, “who would you want next to you if you were suddenly thrown into the middle of Baghdad—the physics professor or the nineteen-year-old kid who has been playing video games all his life?”

  Kaufman acknowledges that the nature of the all-volunteer force means that some soldiers possess substandard reading and writing skills. Lots of people join the military, he says, because they did poorly in school, or because they hated school, or because they simply couldn’t get other jobs. Video games, he argues, are often better matches for the particular skill sets and preferences of a large swath of today’s recruits.

  Still, Kaufman notes that soldiers in training are honing themselves for very specific, very difficult jobs, ones in which they need skills that earlier methods of instruction can’t deliver effectively. Soldiers want to come home safely, he says, and video games are faster and better at helping them learn those skills. It comes down to what is “compelling,” he reasons. Soldiers are compelled to use the most efficient tools “for teaching them how not to get killed.”

  What You Can Do with a Six-Year-Old

  Along with Chatham, Wardynski, and Kaufman, one of the most prominent architects of the military’s post-9/11 game use was Michael Macedonia, whom we met in Chapter 1. In the early years of the twenty-first century, Macedonia was the chief scientist and technical director of the army’s gaming and simulation office, PEO STRI (the Program Executive Office of Simulation, Training, and Instrumentation). During his stint at PEO STRI (then called STRICOM), Macedonia’s job was to guide army investment in simulation- and video game–based training technology, which fit well with his love of science fiction and computers. He used his bully pulpit to publish influential papers with titles like “Games, Simulation, and the Military Education Dilemma.” A student of military history, Macedonia argued at the time that the military’s use of video games was but the latest manifestation of a centuries-old tendency: “People have been using simulations for thousands of years, as long as there’s been a military. They told stories,
drew pictures in the sand, invented chess . . . They made these abstractions in the hopes that they could understand the nature and dynamics of war. If you look at what a scientist does with mathematical equations, what an artist does, or a writer—they’re trying to abstract the universe.”

  Today Macedonia is vice president of the defense contracting giant Science Applications International Corporation. From this powerful perch he remains a strong advocate of the military’s use of video games, in part because he thinks games overcome the key obstacle in soldier preparation: a lack of time. Time, he says, is “the tension in education. At one point in the history of mankind you could send somebody to school for two years and know everything there was to know. Nowadays, just college itself is four years. So with military training, time is the big problem. If I had enough time, I could prepare you for anything.” This issue is hardly unique to the military, but the life-and-death stakes in that profession raise the ante on trainers and soldiers alike. “Colleges don’t care whether you succeed in four years or eight years. The military can’t afford that,” Macedonia says. “I’ve been in arguments where they have argued about one day in basic training for a specific kind of training that everyone said was needed. There’s always an argument about how much time do we need to get soldiers physically fit, how much time do we need for chemical-biological training, how much time do we need to make sure the soldiers can run UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles].” Video games enable the military to compress the learning process.