Honor, a video game that has come under a great deal of fire because it was revealed that – in its newest iteration – players would be able to assume the role of Taliban fighters and fire on American troops. As you can imagine, this led to protests and complaints, so the publisher, Electronic Arts, made a last-minute decision to rename the terrorists in the game, calling them “an opposing force” instead of the Taliban. The controversy is hardly a surprise, given that the game addresses an ongoing conflict, a fight where moms and dads, brothers, sisters, and friends are still in harm’s way. What is surprising is that playing a video game where players can assume the role of terrorists is something that the US Army not only understands, but actively develops and plays on a regular basis.

To understand why the Army (and other branches of the Armed Forces) are playing video games – and playing as insurgents – first it’s important to understand why. When the United States mobilized its forces and headed to the Middle East nearly a decade ago, some in the public, media, and politics assumed it would be a quick fight. Here was the most advanced fighting force the world had ever known – its soldiers were well trained and they had access to technological weapons worthy of science fiction novels. Their foe was a disparate group, underfunded and fighting with outdated weapons in various states of disrepair and munitions left over from a handful of other wars.

But then the unexpected happened. Instead of rolling over, the enemy’s guerrilla tactics, specifically the use of roadside bombs, changed expectations of a quick victory. These improvised explosive devices (IEDs) have accounted for about half of all coalition casualties. It took a while for the Army to react, as most large organizations do, and most of the initial reactions to the IED problem weren’t entirely successful. In fact, it wasn’t until 2004 when John Abizaid, chief of US Central Command, insisted on the equivalent of the Manhattan Project to come up with real solutions to counter IEDs, that the Army was able to kick it into high gear.

Many organizations were born out of Abizaid’s request (and the funding that accompanied it) and it’s one of these new groups that is tasked with using video game tools to help soldiers and commanders understand how to not only train smarter, but also to understand how their enemy thinks. Part of that mission is occasionally playing the role of insurgent in these games.

Making Training As Complex As The Actual Fight

Tucked away in a nondescript strip mall in suburban Virginia are the offices of the Joint Training Counter-IED Operations Integration Center, or JTCOIC, and it is here that the Army has adopted video games. Mark Parent, Director of Operations, explains their mission, “In the past, the usual turnaround for training has been long; sometimes it takes many years to make changes. We’re tasked with getting that information out sooner. Our goal is to make the scrimmage as hard as the game.”

Tasked with that mission, JTCOIC began exploring how to best leverage existing information – reports and databases – and analyze how to use that information to train soldiers better. As JTCOIC ramped up, they began looking for ways they could get training and information out to as many soldiers as possible, as quickly as they could. Technology emerged as the most sensible solution and the group began pursuing a wide scope of activity.

It was under the guidance of former First Sergeant Mark Covey that JTCOIC began to really find its way. Covey heads up JTCOIC’s Systems Integration Modeling and Simulation (SIMS). With a team of artists, programmers and videographers, they set about to challenge the way the Army thought about training. “When I joined the army in the early 80s, most of stuff was canned and scripted and it took weeks or months or years to change training content. Often it was based on a target that didn’t exist, a made up location like “Transnovia”. Today, we make training based on actual locations, actual villages and actual events. The geographies are accurate and, more importantly, the activity is accurate.”

What SIMS does now is miles beyond the borders of Transnovia. While the team offers a variety of services, machinima movies of downrange incidents, playable scenarios based on battlefield engagements, movies and playable scenarios strictly for specialized training and many more products (basically if it can be dreamed up, SIMS can deliver), it boils down to training via game software. The team takes a scenario – whether based on actual events or invented by a trainer – and using a variety of software – creates a 2D or 3D virtual training event of that scenario. The closest comparison is a last-gen Call of Duty, but with very real consequences.

“I think one of the very first [simulations] we did followed an event that took place in Mosul,” said Richard Williams, Technical Director of SIMS. “There was a five vehicle convoy. The first vehicle turned the corner around a park, went up about 100 meters and got hit by 400 pounds of deep-buried explosives. Every soldier inside that vehicle died. Following that, there was a complex attack: insurgents to the east at about 300 meters, insurgents to the north on top of a mosque at 300 meters and insurgents to the south on top of a building, attacking. We produced this product, created the terrain … everything … and had it done in 4 days. When it was done, it was amazingly powerful because what we did was create a transition from the real world of photographs and reports into the virtual world’s polygons and there was a feeling of “now we get it”. Now we can see what the bad guys are doing and what their point of view was, what the trigger man’s aim point was.”

For soldiers in the field to be able to visualize enemy strategy and see the battlefield through the enemy’s eyes; it was a breakthrough. But the SIMS unit was just learning their craft at that point, says Williams. “it was just four of us. It was very rough, we were using Camtasia, we didn’t have hardware capture cards, we didn’t have professional videographers or anything like that. But when we finished, we knew we were going in the right direction. And we’ve kept adding resources, capabilities, components, and expertise.”

Using Game Software To Train For Serious Situations

The SIMS group has grown since that first simulation. From humble beginnings, Covey, Williams and the rest of the team moved their operation to the Virtual Battlespace 2 (VBS2) platform, based on the Armed Assault PC games. It’s a nice match for JTCOIC because VBS2 ships with 6000 pre-rendered objects, including many vehicles, weapons and characters, plus the ability to create and add new objects. “[Since moving to VBS2] we’ve added about 100 vehicles and 300-400 other objects,” says Williams. They’ve created everything from a pack of cigarettes to a Patriot missile battery.

“When the men and women in the field identify a new combat tactic the enemy is using, we take all data from that event and run it through a variety of toolsets – through constructive-based simulations if you need a physics-based result – and then pipe it through the game software,” says Covey. Because the Marines, NATO, the Army and all major allies have purchased VBS2, SIMS can produce a single product and distribute unclassified products to all its allied partners.

Plus, for a growing audience of five to six hundred trainers worldwide, the SIMS team add roughly as many object and programming requests to their queue as they turn out each week. “Our customers are used to having to fill out forms and dealing with a process that’s pretty bureaucratic,” says Williams, “but we try to make things as easy as possible for them. All we need is an e-mail request and we get to work.”

Of course, not everything the SIMS team does can be done with a quick turnaround. Some videos and simulations can take much longer, depending on their complexity. One of the biggest hurdles can be the terrain. “There are various databases where terrain models can be found,” says Covey. Some terrain can be created quickly or adapted from existing maps. Other geography has to be created from scratch, which can take time.

One of the few downsides of the operation is that the models and animation look dated. While there are certainly alternative solutions that look better, provide more realism and come closer to meeting today’s expectations for life-like models, animations and particle effects, every other option adds days (or months) to the process and, with those time increases, dollars to the bottom line. Machinima offers a fast turnaround and a cost efficiency, as well.

Workflow for the group is indeed fast. Today, the SIMS team has taken a page out of Hollywood’s playbook. They begin by creating a storyboard of what happened downrange or what a trainer wants to create. Based on those needs, objects are pulled from the VBS2 library or created for this project. In the case of new vehicles, some are drawn from scratch. Other world objects, like buildings, are assembled from a Lego-like assortment of pre-drawn windows, roofs and walls – a system that allows the team to quickly create new environments to fit a wide variety of situations. In most cases, the team does the voiceover work, as well, allowing the process to be streamlined even further.

The tools that they use are largely like what you’d find in any game development office: 3ds Max, Maya, and Photoshop are used for the heavy lifting. A VBS2 add-on called Oxygen is used to port between Maya & VBS2. Like most of what SIMS does, this is a well-thought out decision. If the Army decides to move to a platform other than VBS2, models developed in 3ds Max or Maya should be able to port to a new platform with minimal pain.

VBS2, while not the prettiest solution, offers some very realistic physics. The SIMS team prefers to work from CAD drawings, but in certain instances they have to make due with photographs, technical drawings and manuals. One such vehicle led to some programming challenges. “We were building the OH-58 Delta from scratch,” says Covey. “We couldn’t get that thing to fly worth a darn. Every single time it would take off and crash, take off and crash. So our lead programmer began adjusting where the mass was located on the vehicle. He ended up putting almost the entire mass of the OH-58 Delta in the rotor tips and it flew like a champ. We didn’t think it was physically accurate, but it worked. We sent it down to the aviation center at Fort Rucker with the caveat – it will fly, the optics work, the missile systems work, but we put all the mass in the rotor tips because we couldn’t get it to fly. They wrote back “That’s where the mass is.” I’d like to say we were smart, but we got lucky on that one.”

Covey and his team have also used the game engine to create training simulations for vehicles. While Covey is quick to admit he isn’t trying to create anything as in-depth as a flight simulator, they can replicate basic controls for other vehicles. The HUSKY mounted detection system is a vehicle that Army engineers use to seek out anti-vehicle land mines and other explosive hazards. The operation of the vehicle takes a little getting used to and – rather than let a new user learn on (and beat up) a very expensive piece of equipment – the SIMS team created a simulation showing the controls via the GUI in the game. This way users have a fair amount of familiarity before sitting behind the controls of this valuable machinery.

Another example of what the SIMS group can do is weapons training. “The XM25 is not an official piece of Army equipment,” says Covey. “And before ARCIC – the Army Capability Integration Center – purchased them, they wanted a way to evaluate them and train soldiers on the weapon system.” So SIMS studied what the XM25 did and created a virtual training center. “My guys got down to the drag coefficient on each individual piece of shrapnel, allowing our damage model to take all this into account,” said Covey.

Giving Soldiers The Tools They Need To Get The Job Done

In another part of the building, another team is hard at work on User Defined Operational Programs or UDOP. These applications cover a variety of tools to help soldiers in the field, but probably the most interesting is the Army’s adaptation of Google Earth. Using their own mapping system, JTCOIC has created a Web site where soldiers can log in and download .kml files that are updated daily for specific locations. Based on situation reports, important details are added to a region’s maps. Schools, mosques, and roads are all defined. Additionally, callout windows will describe attacks in recent days, explosions and other important data that a driver or unit commander can review before setting out for the day (or night). Additionally, UDOP creates maps with 3D flyover capabilities. These maps allow the user to virtually walk the streets of an upcoming route. In addition to noting key elements like the other maps, the 3D maps give soldiers a sense of what a route will be like, what rooftops, cross-streets and alleys to be aware of and potential fields of to keep in mind.

A couple of doors away from UDOP, is what appears to be a small sound stage. In the center of the room is a cube with sides about eight feet square in size, one of the sides is slid open like a porch door. The floor is slightly elevated in what the JTCOIC refers to as “The Cave”, a moniker that conjures up the notion of a dark, damp space. In reality, The Cave is anything but that. The air is crisp, since there are plenty of machines to keep cool. The walls are a bright, white fabric for displaying images projected on them. There is no ceiling to the cube, but images can be projected on all four walls and the floor, creating an immersive experience. This is achieved by running a single simulation on what is, essentially, five displays, using five different in-game cameras.

A simulation of the Battle of Kamdesh is loaded and moments later, we are hovering above Command Outpost Keating in eastern Afghanistan. The simulation, created using the SIMS team’s VBS2 tools, illustrates how insurgents attacked a soon-to-be-deserted combat outpost in the mountains of the Nuristan province. As Taliban commanders hid in a mosque, directing the attack, U.S. and Afghanistan soldiers in the valley below fought off attacks from all sides. Using the VBS2 software and The Cave to illustrate how the battle progressed, Army commanders and analysts were able to look at the battle from all angles, including enemy positions, their movement and also the Army’s defense and response tactics.

It’s easy to see why JTCOIC has invested so heavily in the SIMS team. Despite the rough polygons and bland textures, in The Cave, the fight comes to life and it’s easy to imagine the battle developing around you. As Covey puts it, “Before we started, there were reports that no one wanted to read, then there were PowerPoints that put everyone to sleep. Now, in The Cave, we put you in the battle.”

It’s been a short three years since the JTCOIC was sketched out on paper. In the months since its inception, they have made great inroads on how the soldiers in today’s Army are trained. Resistance has popped up now again in the middle bureaucracy, but the commanders see the efficiencies and benefit of this type of training and the frontline troops, raised on Xbox and Playstations, expect it.

And, yes, there are times when the role of insurgent is played in these games, but there are stark differences between a gamer playing Medal of Honor for fun after school or work and a professional who’s trying to learn how to keep soldiers safe in the future. And that’s what JTCOIC has done – via SIMS and UDOP and the many products they produce – they have found ways to improve the safety of our soldiers. And for the moms and dads, brothers, sisters and friends out there in harm’s way, there really is no better mission.

Disclosure: The US Army provided transportation and lodging for GeekDad to visit the JTCOIC.

Authors: Dave Banks

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