War Play

by Corey Mead

  At Defense GameTech, VBS2 was the Kool-Aid that everybody drank. In presentations, panels, and interviews, military officials and defense contractors alike sang the program’s praises. Given that it is now the military’s most widely used video game—fully 50 percent of the army is training with it, as is the Marine Corps—the particulars of VBS2 are worth examining. It is designed to plan mission training and mission rehearsal and to provide education—hence the inclusion of language training, cultural training, and medical training, along with a captains’ career course focused on leadership. While the game’s graphics aren’t quite at the level of today’s commercial blockbusters, they are close enough for users to be easily drawn into the action. In VBS2, players operate avatars on the ground, in vehicles, in the air, or at sea as they run through scenarios they will encounter in battle.

  Administrators (higher-level military personnel) create the scenarios beforehand using a vast library of characters and objects; they also watch and intervene during training from a Tactical Operations Center, which enables them to make real-time adjustments. One of the game’s more notable advances is its inclusion of geospecific databases. A soldier training stateside can thus be provided with a database of the exact location to which he will be deployed overseas—the buildings, the roads, the surrounding environment—well before he even arrives. The game also allows commanders and soldiers in war zones to input scenarios from the battlefield (an IED attack, say, or an ambush) immediately after they occur. Within ninety-six hours, those scenarios will be available to the soldiers back home in the States, keeping soldiers who have yet to deploy up-to-date on the opposing forces’ latest tactics. In addition, PEO STRI is enlisting soldiers who have returned from Afghanistan and Iraq to develop scenarios based on their battlefield experiences.

  VBS2 records players’ actions so that administrators can conduct review sessions, known in the military as “after-action reviews” (AARs). This enables leaders to take the soldiers back through the scenarios and point out what they did correctly and incorrectly. The soldiers will then run through new scenarios, in which they can sharpen the skills that need improvement. “Simulation isn’t training unless you do a very thorough AAR,” Colonel Espaillat says. “That’s what makes it training—the feedback you get about the things you did right and wrong.” VBS2 also records audio of the soldiers communicating with each other during the game, which Espaillat says is especially useful when soldiers attempt to deny their errors: “‘That wasn’t me,’ they’ll say, but the audio lets you show that it was them.”

  One of the game’s distinctive properties is the flexibility it gives administrators: it offers both offline mission editing, which lets them build scenarios before training, and real-time mission editing, which lets them intervene during a training session. Administrators can also input terrain from a variety of shared data files, so they can create virtual worlds that mirror any number of physical locations. (To demonstrate how quickly this could be done, the game’s maker, Bohemia Interactive, unveiled an explorable 3-D simulation of Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad complex just days after the raid that killed him.)

  At this point, the VBS2 content library features more than four hundred military and civilian vehicles; hundreds of characters representing at least five national militaries, press agents, and civilians; dozens of weapons; and countless varieties of animals, signs, buildings, natural objects, and paraphernalia, such as alarm clocks and soda cans. The newest iteration also shows variations in avatars’ texture and body heat, tides that conform to a region’s latitude and longitude, an accurate star field, a face texture editor, and lighting effects that simulate night vision and light blindness. The game’s field of terrain can cover as much as 124 square miles and accommodate as many as 256 players at once. In addition, its open platform—which, among other things, allows soldiers in the field to plug in the latest battlefield data, just as Ralph Chatham’s DARWARS did—gives the game a wide degree of flexibility. Since 2010, user input has grown by more than 1,200 percent.

  A U.S. Army Research Institute study of 165 soldiers found that “the training [positively] impacted how well the Soldiers felt they could work together as a team, as well as their attraction to the unit, including their attraction to their tasks and other group members.” The soldiers in the study felt better prepared for tactical convoy operations following their training.

  Beyond the ARI study, the military has little hard data on whether the game produces physiological and emotional responses similar to those in battle itself. “We haven’t done any formal, satisfactory analysis,” Leslie Dubow, PEO STRI’s project director for Games for Training, told me, “just because it’s so difficult to do. So we don’t have hard data; we have anecdotal data about how effective VBS2 is.” Marine platoon commander First Lieutenant Roy Fish reports, for example, “You can’t simulate the dust, dirt, heat and stresses that you inevitably feel in combat situations, but I think [VBS2] gets as close as you’re ever going to get to Afghanistan.” Fish first encountered VBS2 in 2008, when he was training at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and he insists that the game has saved his soldiers’ lives in Afghanistan. “Every time we go outside the wire and react to an I.E.D. or small-arms fire, it all translates to what we did [in VBS2],” he says. When his troops finish a round of VBS2 training, he continues, they are “sweating from head to toe. It’s amazing how realistic it was. It’s literally the same terrain.”

  More Than a Game

  To find out how VBS2 training works in practice, I paid a visit to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, home of the 101st Airborne Division Screaming Eagles—and, since early 2011, site of the Kinnard Battle Command Center’s cutting-edge Virtual Training Facility (VTF). Located on Air Assault Street, the VTF’s plain brick exterior gives little hint of the technological focus inside. Enter the building, however, and you find a windowless classroom containing rows of tables lined with computers—enough to fit a company-sized group of one hundred soldiers at a time. Across the hallway sits the Tactical Operations Center, smaller than the classroom but similarly filled with computers, a digital projection system, and a sound system. From here commanders and administrators, unseen by the trainees, manage the training occurring in the classroom, adding a Truman Show–like element to the proceedings. Built for the meager sum (in military terms) of $750,000, the VTF is where soldiers from the 101st spend up to a week training on VBS2 before deploying to Afghanistan.

  At the VTF I met with virtual team chief Adam Williams—an ex-Marine, Williams works for the defense contractor SAIC—and Jeff “Beast” Jackson, a gregarious, heavily muscled former drill sergeant with a quick wit and a deep, occasionally impenetrable southern accent. Both men exhibit a combination of seriousness and playfulness that befits their roles as military trainers who work with video games.

  Depending on the commander’s wishes, some units train on VBS2 until the day they deploy overseas, while others do it earlier in the training cycle. (Some units even take VBS2 along on their deployments.) Before a given session at the VTF, the company’s commanders meet in the Tactical Operations Center with Williams and his technicians. The leaders tell Williams exactly what they want the day’s training to focus on and the specific location in Afghanistan or Iraq where it should be set. Most commanders want to focus on conducting convoy and dismounted operations, including small-arms fire, experiencing near and far ambushes, requesting casualty and medical evacuations, reacting to IED attacks, and requesting bomb-disposal teams. Some units pay Afghan interpreters to join the training sessions as role players. By the time Jackson has finished describing how to use the keyboard, Williams and his team have pulled up the proper scenario (or scenarios) on VBS2.

  If a scenario or setup is particularly innovative, Williams also posts it on the Army Training Network, an online tool for army instructors. “The best part,” he says, “is that you get to network out. Hey, what’s Fort Lewis doing? What’s Fort Drum doing? Each site is focusing on different things, so that reall
y helps us grow. I’ll ask Fort Bragg, how are you using VBS2? What’s worked for you? Do you have any scenarios that I can share?”

  When a company of soldiers sit down at their computers for their training session, Jackson starts with a lesson in keyboard functionality, showing them how to operate their avatars. “A lot of times, soldiers don’t understand how to put their fingers on the keyboard and type and things like that,” he explains. “So you say, ‘Hey, if you want to walk forward, you have to press and hold the W. If you want to do a basic run, you tap the W twice and hold. If you want to run fast, push down with the left ring finger on the left hand, which holds the shift key, and tap the W twice. You can make the avatar slide to the left by pressing the alpha [A] key, or straight to the left by hitting the delta key. You make him get in the crawl position by hitting the Zulu key. There’s also crawl forward, crawl backward, land down, come up, roll left, then right. When you’re looking at the soldiers, you can see some of their expressions, the ones that aren’t keyboard-savvy, they don’t like it. So you have to make sure you go slowly.”

  Once a training session begins in earnest, soldiers must navigate the various scenarios in the game while sticking to the standard operating procedures and battle drills they’ve already learned. And here, predictably, is where the trouble begins. The hardcore gamers among the soldiers invariably begin their sessions by trying to operate outside the system. They make their avatars run around shooting everything and everyone in sight, including their commanding officers. This is where Jackson steps in. He begins gently enough. “Normally, if I see gamers not doing exactly what they’re supposed to do, I’ll talk to them, or I’ll get the leader to talk to them, and explain that they’re not supposed to play around. I’ll put my hand on their shoulder and emphasize that what they’re doing is training, that it’s something they can learn from. Because they have to go over that pond to Afghanistan. Here I can push restart and begin the scenario again and they’ll still be alive. But I say, ‘When you cross that pond, there is no restart, because those bullets coming at you are real.’” If the soldier continues to play around, Jackson simply relies on his intimidating presence to adjust that soldier’s attitude, as he did back in his drill sergeant days. “He can just draw up and give the soldier a look,” Williams testifies, “and the person immediately gets in line.”

  Williams can also intervene in the game from his position in the Tactical Operations Center. “If I see them doing something that I really don’t like—say we’re in a training exercise and they’re shooting when they’re not supposed to be shooting—I have the power to just go in the game and strip them of their ammo, kill them, and then put them in a forest twenty klicks away. They get the idea pretty quickly that way.”

  Scott Rosenberger, another VTF trainer, estimates that 80 percent of the soldiers who go through the facility play video games regularly. (A much smaller group, he says, are hardcore gamers.) After the initial horseplay, a sense of realism usually descends on the training sessions, in part because of VBS2’s replication of real-world dynamics. “If you had to run from here across the street and run back, you’d be breathing hard,” Jackson says. “And if you then had to take your weapon and aim it at that wall, you’d be breathing even harder. And that’s just how it is for the avatars in VBS2. To control your breathing, you have to right-click and hold down. But you can only hold it for so long. In real life, if you aim your weapon, in about ten seconds your eyes will start getting blurry and then you’ll have to take your cheek away from it, take a breath, and start over. Same thing in VBS2. The avatar will start trembling and he will lose sight. So you have to recock and do it again. Reset, take your hand off the right mouse button, and then reengage the target.”

  With VBS2, each soldier can switch between first-, second-, and third-person mode to view the action. Headphones transmit the ambient noise of the battlefield, including radio transmissions, the sound of helicopter rotors, gunfire, and explosions. Because all one hundred soldiers are linked together in the simulation, the same hierarchies that would exist on the battlefield soon emerge in the classroom. Soldiers who are better at moving their avatars, for example, help those soldiers whose avatars fall behind, while soldiers who have a better grasp of standard operating procedures help soldiers who are still learning them. “You really find out who the leaders are within a group, regardless of the troop commander or the vehicle commander sitting there,” Jackson says. “You end up having your gunners or one of your passengers step up to the plate and tell the troop commander what to do, because the TC may be nervous, and he or she can’t handle all that pressure.” The platoon leaders, who observe the training from the Tactical Operations Center, often force the issue. “The leader may tell us to kill the convoy commander, just to see who steps in and fills that vacuum.”

  Williams cites this as perhaps VBS2’s greatest benefit. “It allows commanders to evaluate their junior leaders, to see their strengths, see who is hesitant, who is aggressive. Okay, I just taught you this directive. How well can you execute it? Or, Are my NCOs stepping up, or are they getting walked all over? As a commander, is my intent being executed right now? And we’ve seen that when you have leadership at that high level driving things, it’s even more effective. Because when you have a full-bird colonel sitting in a room like this one, watching a platoon leader operate his platoon on the ground, that platoon takes him pretty damn seriously. Because they’re not learning anymore; now they’re executing.” VBS2 also gives commanders greater freedom than traditional muddy-boots training can. “The commander might say, ‘Hmmm, I want to do an air assault from this location, dismount here’—you can start trying things that may be too dangerous to try out there in the field, because of the amount of fires that are involved or the coordination with aircraft. That’s when they start doing it here, virtually,” Williams says. “It’s great if you have real pilots playing their roles, because that gives that young platoon leader, those platoon sergeants, those NCOs, an opportunity they very rarely get to talk face-to-face during the after-action review with a pilot. And the pilot can say, ‘Hey, when you’re in theater, this is how I want you to talk to me, this is the information I need.’”

  As a training session wears on, Williams continues to guide the action—in response to the commanding officer’s wishes—from his perch in the Tactical Operations Center. “Say the players are just not generating the type of response their commander wants to see, and so he decides to ping them with mortars. I can literally just hit Artillery Strike, point where I want it to go and what kind of munitions I want to use, how many guns, how many rounds, the impact radius, and then say go. And the players will react: ‘Oh my god! Incoming!’ Or let’s say they’re flying in an Apache. I can take that Apache, crash it, and generate a Black Hawk Down scenario.”

  Williams then proceeds to demonstrate exactly that—except that the helicopter fails to explode on impact as it’s supposed to. “One thing about DARWARS that I liked more than VBS2,” Williams admits, “is that it was more stable. There are still glitches in VBS2 where for some unknown reason the system will crash. Software problems, stuff that I can’t touch.”

  Even with the occasional software glitch, VBS2 manages to generate a level of emotional intensity that mirrors real-world conditions. “I’ve seen people cry,” Williams tells me. “I’ve seen certain people in certain positions get so stressed-out and upset—and we’re purposely stressing them out—that they have stormed out of here and sat in their car for fifteen minutes, because they just couldn’t take it. I’ve seen people who were so upset with their performance . . .” He stops. “You get all sorts of reactions.”

  Williams says things can get especially heated during the after-action reviews. “We don’t lead the AAR. The NCO or the officer, whoever’s in here, leads the AAR. And the soldiers will argue with each other. ‘Well, shit, I told you to frickin’ take your squad and go up that hill!’ ‘Bullshit!’ You let them handle that. It may sound aggressive, but tha
t’s how they talk to each other. If that helps them figure things out for later, then it’s a success in my book. They don’t necessarily have to like what happened in here.”

  This displeasure on the part of soldiers can extend to the training session as a whole. “Sometimes you get this poor E3 whose only job in the frickin’ scenario was to get blown up, and he’s pissed! He’s like, ‘This sucks! I sat here staring at a black screen for three hours!’ That can be construed as looking negatively on us, but in reality it’s what the unit wanted. So I always try to focus on what the leadership wants to do. I always ask the commanders, ‘Who’s your target audience? Is it the whole platoon? Do you want to evaluate your squad leaders? What do you want to see happen here?’ And we always get positive remarks on that.”