"Why Gamers will win the next War" Topic

"A storm is brewing. Thousands of gamers are working to upend traditional models of training, education, and analysis in government and defense. This grassroots movement has developed across several countries, under a joint venture—Fight Club International—within which civilian and military gamers are experimenting with commercial technologies to demonstrate what they can do for national security challenges. But while technology is at the core of this initiative, its more fundamental purpose is to change culture—no easy feat in military organizations, with their characteristic deep sense of history and layers of entrenched bureaucracy.

A common obstacle to introducing transformational technology is the imagination of the user—or, put differently, the willingness of the user to be genuinely imaginative. Early testing with Fight Club, in a constructive simulation called Combat Mission, showed that civilian gamers with no military training outperformed military officers with years of experience. The military gamers were constrained in their thinking and clung dogmatically to doctrine. They discovered, to their frustration, that their speed of decision-making was lacking against gamers with greater intuition and skill…"

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Armand

Somehow I doubt gamers will have the fortitude to survive a real war.

Glup!…

Armand

I'd argue that there are two sides to this, in one sense Augustus is right. I discussed this with a gunnery instructor at Lulworth years ago, modern kids make great tank gunners because it's just a video game, track bashing is another matter. At the command level, where it's not about anything physical I'm sure the military are hamstrung by tradition, and the need to stick to doctrine [i.e. your bosses solution] to avoid ruining your promotion prospects, and I doubt that a regular army can break out of that mindset. The best war time commanders often had poor pre-war careers, precisely because they were not conformists. As with all adicts the first step is to get them to admit to the problem, maybe regularly getting beaten by civilians would do it, but my suspicion is that they will simply decide the rules are wrong.

Military doctrine is usually not written by your boss or your boss's boss (I call them my bossity-boss). It's usually written as lessons learned (or, maybe just observed) from someone who won a battle and lost a campaign. Or occasionally, who lost a battle and survived.

Combat Mission is a single tactical scenario system. It is not exactly like GW's Death Angel where if you destroy the spore chimney (for example) but kill all your space marines doing it, that counts as a victory. Someone who is willing to kill all their people has a tactical advantage over someone who isn't.

There is a similar issue with no campaign logistics. If you only have to fight one battle, it doesn't matter if you're out of ammo and fuel or whether or not you can get back home from the battlefield.

There are other concerns. That doesn't mean there is nothing to learn from the technique or the people with a different background. It just means that you have put those lessons into a broader context and maybe not draw such a broad conclusion.

Military successes who ignored doctrine were often in a situation where the doctrine didn't take that broader contextual look (not that the doctrine was "bad", just not applicable today for this battle).

About 25 years ago some war gamers visited the US Army training center and took on some Army officers on their computer-driven Brigade Combat System. The gamers won by sending all their units down one side of the screen.

I think the real benefit is using resources in a non-war game exercise. The participants perform their duties and responsibilities and coordinate with different levels of command. The instructors throw problems and unexpected situations at them to overcome.

Flight training simulators are used the same way. The instructor can create any number of situations and system malfunctions to overwhelm the trainee pilot.

Wolfhag