I magine yourself, one balmy morning, on patrol in the Sadr City section of Baghdad. You and your US army unit advance along abandoned streets strewn with the burned-out shells of cars. Minarets peek out over dingy apartment blocks. Suddenly, a young Iraqi boy appears in the street. You halt, guns raised.
"Milk!" he yells, holding aloft a jug.
You give him a few dinars. Pressing on, you find a dead horse lying in the street. One of your men reminds you to be careful of improvised explosive devices. But your suspicions aren't piqued until you notice a pile of decaying steers nearby. This suggests something especially lethal, you surmise. And sure enough, not far away, you and your unit come upon a dubious warehouse. Entering it, you find a stash of anthrax. WMDs, at last!
Such are the vicarious thrills of Every Soldier a Sensor, a video game which was demonstrated for me recently. I was not in Iraq, but rather in an air-conditioned theater at the Institute for Creative Technologies, a think-tank that designs simulation programs and games for soldiers. It is funded in large part by the Pentagon and run by the University of Southern California.
ICT is housed in a nondescript tower in Marina Del Rey, California. Its casual offices, thought up by a Star Trek production designer, look on to the Pacific Ocean. They are full of animators, graphic artists, video game designers, artificial intelligence researchers, engineers, screenwriters and directors emigrated from Hollywood.
If the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned of nearly a half century ago has turned into a military-entertainment complex, as certain theorists like to assert, then the ICT is surely one of its most laid-back new outposts.
During the 1990s, Hill explains, the army came to two important realizations. The first was that, in the media and Internet age, its operations abroad were subject to public scrutiny as never before. The second: in a new era of urban combat and asymmetrical warfare, leadership decisions in the field were originating farther and farther down the chain of command. Young soldiers would have to be trained in more than just riflery and marching in unison.
Hill then unveils ICT's latest offering to that end: an interactive learning program called Army Excellence in Leadership (or AXL -- everything at ICT has an acronym).
The first part consists of a short film, Power Hungry. The setting is Afghanistan. An impatient young American officer has been assigned to oversee a delivery of food relief. He must deal with forbidding terrain, limited resources, confusion within his own ranks, and a pair of treacherous Afghan warlords named Omar and Muhammad. The situation deteriorates, guns are drawn, and Omar ends up nonchalantly shooting one of his own hungry tribesmen.
In the second part, a digitally animated head appears in the corner of the screen to quiz the player on the movie. The player, in turn, can ask the talking head questions, and then pull up characters and grill them as well. Hill summons Omar and inquires after his motives. Omar gives a facetious-sounding response. I suggest asking: "What do you think of the American presence in Afghanistan?"
Omar's reply to this is, on the whole, rather evasive, but at one point he launches in to a subtle point about the clash of cultures in the Afghan war.
"You Americans don't want to believe that someone who offers to help you would do something you don't like," he says.
I find this to be a fascinating observation. Hill explains that ICT gets input from cultural anthropologists.
A large percentage of American soldiers now carry personal DVD players and game consoles, Hill explains. Army Excellence in Leadership has already been shipped out to soldiers in the field in Afghanistan and Iraq. The response, apparently, has been enthusiastic.
ICT was started in 1999 by Richard Lindheim, a former television executive. In the 1980s Lindheim, 65, oversaw the television division at Universal Studios, helping to put such shows as Magnum PI and Miami Vice on the air. At university he studied computer animation before it was a recognized discipline.
In 1997 the National Research Council, a government agency in Washington, published a report suggesting the military look to Hollywood for ideas on how warfare and training might look in the 21st century, and later that year Lindheim, known to be a technology enthusiast, was asked to take part in a conference in Los Angeles sponsored by the army.
"I was never involved in the military and never wanted to be," Lindheim says. "I was just an entertainment guy."
Nevertheless, he says, he left the conference asking himself whether "there was a way to use story and character, the elements of entertainment, to make simulations that put people in situations and help them make decisions."
Lindheim was especially taken with the idea of introducing gaming into the mix. If the Vietnam generation had been raised on television, he reasoned, today's young soldiers had grown up on video games. According to army research, about 90 percent of the 75,000 men and women who join the army each year are "casual" gamers, while 30 percent consider themselves "hardcore" gamers.
"The [army] said, `OK, but don't let anyone know we're working with Hollywood,'" Lindheim recalls. "And the Hollywood people said, `OK, but don't let anyone know we're working with the military.'"
Six years on one could easily imagine the simulations, a few generations of development down the road, being indistinguishable from real life. The day when the army will be able to react in real time to events in the battlefield with detailed simulations may not be too far off.
The army spends roughly US$2 billion a year on research and development projects. One way that ICT funds its exploits is through the sale of its videogames. Last year it licensed Full Spectrum Warrior, an offshoot of its most successful training game, to the game publisher THQ. It has been a top seller. Now Microsoft has entered into a deal with ICT to provide Xbox game stations to the army.
Finally, I get a peek at the more baroque "immersive technology" that is being shipped out to certain lucky army bases.
Housed in a windowless, unmarked warehouse, the facility has the Swiftian moniker of Flatworld. Its name refers to the panels used to create backgrounds in movies. The environment the Flatworld technicians have set up today -- a rifle position in a dishevelled apartment in a "generic southwest Asian city" -- mimics something they are constructing at Fort Benning, in Georgia.
The experience is indeed immersive. I stand in a room meticulously decorated with Middle Eastern-looking furniture, looking out on to a steamy cityscape. Suddenly a digital mock-up of a generic south-west Asian insurgent appears on a rooftop and begins firing an AK-47 at the street. An army helicopter appears as a network of super-subwoofers below the floor simulate the sound and feel of the landing, shaking the entire room. A door is flung open by an irate commanding officer. He begins yelling at me. Some PhD with a sense of humor has programmed the soldier to use lines from Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket.
Even at a low volume, the blaring and rattling frays the nerves. Turned up to actual simulation levels, it seems to me, the experience would have been overwhelming.
Fortunately for US soldiers, though, the ICT is not limiting its attention to airstrikes and Afghan warlords. One of its next projects is a game designed to help veterans deal with the effects of post-traumatic stress syndrome.
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