Stop Playing Games

For all the press releases and talk about the availability of video games as a reliable training tool, there aren’t too many that bring any real benefit to training the troops.

By Mark Brian
Available at- http://www.military-training-technology.com/article.cfm?DocID=1202

Today, everyone loves to talk, write and pontificate about the importance of games, usually off-the-shelf-products, in training military forces. I’m tired of people just talking about the cool stuff that games bring to training the force. It’s about time for some real action.

What am I talking about? Well, for all the media attention on using computer and video games to train the force, there aren’t any real programs or an evaluation process to support this euphoria. I challenge anyone to look through the federal budget process documentation—the POM in Pentagonesse—or recent funding actions and find a production program that has an approved requirement for commercial type computer/video games to support training.
Don’t give me the “America’s Army” story; that is a recruiting tool, planned, funded and executed that way. My buddies in the training business in Orlando don’t appear to have anything real in the production pipe.

Now there are lots of ideas kicking around in the labs, the Army Research Institute’s VECTOR lab, but that doesn’t get it to the field. Why is this so frustrating? Let’s rewind back a few years. Remember the all the excitement when a Navy ensign used Microsoft “Flight Simulator” and his own initiative to go to the head of his class in Naval aviation training? That was in 1999, almost seven years ago. In 1997, the National Research Council published a book on DoD and industry working together using modeling and simulation to enhance training and an analysis of making use of games and other simulations. But what happened to these ideas?

There are many books, papers and presentations on this concept—it is hardly new. I think most of them were killed by culture, not that they didn’t or couldn’t add value to our warfighters. And it is common knowledge that the field of computer/video games has been exploding and the training community is watching it all pass by. The mind power is out there; we need to get off the dime and move into the information age.

The Marines tried “Doom” in an early effort and have been using “Operation Flashpoint” for a few years. The Army has used “Spearhead” and other games with the Armor School, “Steel Beasts” at the U.S. Military Academy; the Navy has used “Fleet Command” at the Naval Academy, and the submarine fleet has a commercial game they use.

This has happened long enough that by now the services should have an appreciation for what can be done and begun to develop the requirements and funding necessary to bring a successful capability to our warfighters—but no.

The Institute for Creative Technologies helped develop the game “Full Spectrum Warrior” as a training tool that could also be commercially viable, and where has that gone? The only results I’ve seen are articles saying how much a waste of money it was for the Army to fund part of the game’s development. Critics argue the game was more entertainment-based from the start.
Are there any visionaries out there who have the courage to step up and champion this cause? Is our process asleep at the wheel or do our senior leaders shy away from the idea of using games to train? Maybe they just don’t understand what the young soldiers of today, and especially tomorrow, expect. Just like in Iraq, this is a culture issue, not a technology issue.
What is really disheartening is that Hezbollah, a terrorist organization of some note, figured out that games were the way to go by reading U.S. press clippings. It took them only a couple of years to get a product developed, to market it, and then it went into the hands of their intended audience—prospective recruits and those who might need a little training. An adaptive enemy is effectively using our ideas against us and our allies.

Imitation may be the sincerest forms of flattery, but it indicates that right now our adversaries have the agility edge—they are transforming rapidly, inside our decision and innovation loop. This is an adaptive and skilled adversary. It is only a guess, but I’d wager that during raids in the past few years in OIF and OEF copies of “Special Force”— Hezbollah’s recruiting and training video game—have been found, as training material, on more than one terrorist’s computer.

Yet years later we don’t have a real plan forward. Or, if we do, it is very, very well hidden from view. Where is that agility, adaptability and flexibility we always hear about? It’s apparent that our enemy has it, and I’ll bet that our adversary has a plan to move forward with his success from “Special Force.”

So, how do we fix this? Well, I’d start by developing a strategic plan that looks at desired capabilities (if we have to put this into the requirements hopper you can dust this article off in about five to seven years). And how do we get there quickly? In the Army’s case, I would make TRADOC talk to itself. The recruiting command part of TRADOC put out “America’s Army” as a blockbuster recruiting tool, which is about to copied by the Navy. But they couldn’t seem to talk within the command with the trainers (or outside the command to the acquisition community) to make it a real training product for the entire Army. What we have here is a failure to communicate, and that should stop now. It’s about our warfighters, not about press clippings.
We really need to pry programs out of the tech base and PowerPoint presentations and into a real production effort. Then we’d fund the program so everyone would understand that we mean business. The hard part? You have to have people who can evaluate commercial games, see what they can do for you and be innovative. Very few commercial products will be perfect out of the box, but that’s okay—a good enough solution will give us the increased agility and the flexibility we keep talking about. Here for example, our institutional Army needs some help, manpower help. The training developers were stripped out years ago, and the Army is paying the price now. We also need to have a change of culture at all levels. A realization that the young people of today know how to make this work, and that the senior leadership doesn’t know which end of a GameBoy is up, is critical. Without a culture change, we will continue to fund programs that are usable today, but not looking toward the future expectation of our warfighters. What do our warfighters do in Iraq and Afghanistan do when they have down time? They play video games. The Doonsbury comic strip that ran on September 11, 2005, was another great example of this.

Why can’t we make a training product that our soldiers, Marines, sailors, airmen and others want to play? We have a superb pool of combat veterans who I believe would step up to this challenge—they have proved their agility, innovation and courage; let’s leverage it.
The use of computer and video games, commercial games, consoles, hand-held and otherwise, need to be part of our training culture, not “toys.”

It’s time to take action to better support the warfighter. Conferences don’t produce capability for our soldiers. This is not leading-edge stuff anymore. Innovation and culture is necessary to compete in the marketplace of training. We must partner government with industry, as we have done with some success in limited efforts in the past, and get on with it. Take a little risk, move out and draw fire.

The Army’s chief of staff often says that transformation is a journey, not a destination. I agree, but it is time that we stop walking and do a little “double-time” to support our warfighters with the training tools—in this case games—they need for victory.

Editor’s note: Mark Brian is a veteran of the U.S. Army. He was involved with implementing training technologies during his military career and now works in the defense industry.