by Corey Mead
Later in the day, the other attendees and I were introduced to the Immersive Naval Officer Training System, another video-game-looking program that is built around virtual humans. The program is designed for young officers just out of the Naval Academy who must counsel older enlisted personnel about sensitive personal issues as part of their jobs. What happens, for example, when a baby-faced twenty-two-year-old officer has to give advice to a sailor in his thirties who is worried that his wife is about to leave him? We are shown a virtual scenario in which Gunner Cabrillo has just shoved Gunner Thomas in the workplace and has now been summoned to his commanding officer to explain himself. (The user of the program plays the officer.) Cabrillo apologizes for his actions, but he says that Thomas was “talking shit” about his wife by claiming that she was cheating on him. The user must school Cabrillo on how to deal with a situation like this: he should report it to his commanding officer immediately instead of getting physical. This leads to another scenario in which Cabrillo finds out that Gunner Thomas was correct: his wife is in fact cheating on him. The issues get more complex as the program continues.
Following a long day of demonstrations, Rizzo gathered the USC faculty members and doctors in a circle to discuss what they had seen. He was joined by former army Major Thomas “Brett” Talbot, chief scientist of the Armed Forces Simulation Institute for Medicine and the ICT’s in-house medical doctor. Talbot had led the demonstrations that day, and he and Rizzo were anxious to know whether their audience would use programs such as SimCoach in their own medical facilities. For example, Talbot said, he and Rizzo were working on a proposal that would make their virtual standardized patients available for free to medical educators. Would the attendees be interested in that? Yes, came the response. Talbot explained that he wanted to develop a critical mass of standardized patients, and that required the kind of buy-in he and Rizzo were hoping to get from those in the room. “What the ICT wants from you,” he explained, “is the opportunity to connect. Maybe you could apply for your own grants to utilize our technology. Maybe you could share with us your expertise on standardized patients and give us feedback on future applications. Maybe you could connect us with the medical educators you’re friendly with around the country.”
Talbot clearly felt that he wasn’t receiving the kind of energetic response he had hoped for. “We are on the precipice of some major awesome thing with this technology,” he exhorted the room. “We want you to join us!”
Rizzo stepped in to continue pushing the argument. “We’re building on twelve years of Department of Defense funding,” he said. “Now we’re at a point where dual-use opportunities are at a premium. You can use the military-funded data we’ve collected for your own grant applications.” He encouraged the people in the room to be leaders in what the ICT wanted to accomplish.
If military-funded innovations in interactive digital training and education spread into the civilian realm, this is how the process will occur. There is no sudden explosive growth here, no concerted Pentagon effort to exert its influence in the civilian arena. There is instead personal contact, a growing network of connections, and the relentless efforts of people such as Rizzo and Talbot to make their work matter on the largest possible scale.
Comprehensive Soldier Fitness
Recently the army unveiled a new program called Comprehensive Soldier Fitness (CSF), described as “a structured, long-term assessment and development program to build the resilience and enhance the performance of every Soldier, Family member and [Department of the Army] civilian.” Coming after more than a decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, CSF is aimed at developing “balanced, healthy, self-confident Soldiers, families and Army civilians whose resilience enables them to thrive in an era of high operational tempo and persistent conflict.” The idea is that in a time of permanent warfare, the army community needs a top-down initiative that can be used before deployment to build individuals’ abilities to bear the mental and physical strains that inevitably result from battle. By so doing, the army hopes to stem what has been an explosive increase in war-related social and psychological problems: PTSD, broken families, an exhausted and demoralized workforce. Critics say that the CSF program is designed to turn soldiers and their families into automatons who, against human nature, will remain unaffected by the trauma of warfare.
Though he is fiercely liberal, Skip Rizzo is not one of these critics. He wants to use gaming and simulation technology to build resilience-training systems that will be more effective than the traditional death-by-PowerPoint briefings that teach soldiers how to deal with their stress. “We believe we can better prepare people for the emotional challenges they’re going to face when they go off to combat by using very structured, guided, story-based simulations,” he says. Specifically, he envisions a series of five- to ten-minute-long episodes like those in Band of Brothers that would have the benefit of being, like a video game, fully immersive. “You’d be right in the Humvee with a bunch of digital characters, and they’d be talking like in the helicopter ride in the first Predator movie, when they’re taking off and everyone’s telling jokes and shit,” he explains. “But you’d build that narrative, that story, so that people would start to bond with those digital characters the way they would bond with characters in a movie. And at the end of each episode, something would go south. It might involve getting attacked. Or having to handle human remains. Seeing a civilian getting killed and not being able to stop it. Seeing one of your comrades get killed or grievously wounded. Accidentally killing somebody. And at that moment, in would walk a virtual mentor to guide you through: ‘How are you appraising this? What was your experience before? What’s your hypothesis about why this happened or what your role or responsibility was?’”
Rizzo has received seed money from the military to build three of these episodes, each of which will incorporate a wide variety of physiological measures of the user’s stress reaction. “I envision this as being a thirty-episode training program that you start after you get out of boot camp, and that you do in your own barracks,” he says. “You go through the process and you have to take a test after, and so on and so forth. Point being, here you have a simulation at an entry point. And maybe you can train people how to be better copers by putting them in that context.”
You Have to Have a Champion
Early one evening, at a dingy bar on Marina Del Rey’s main thoroughfare, I met with Rizzo and Talbot to discuss their work further. As excited as he was by the MedVR Lab’s various initiatives, Rizzo was anxious to run additional user studies so that he could gauge how soldiers reacted to them. His research over the past several years had indicated that people respond most to a story—that a compelling narrative is the best way to genuinely engage people and teach them. Virtual Iraq/Afghanistan had received funding for repeated randomized trials and would eventually be implemented at every VA hospital in the country; Rizzo hoped that SimCoach and his team’s other initiatives would receive a similarly positive response.
“This shit is flyin’,” Rizzo said of his work, but where would it end up? Would the Pentagon actually dedicate the resources that were required to provide the military community with effective behavioral health care? In his years of dealing with the military, he had come to realize that “you have to have a champion, someone who wants to make change happen, who wants to make change matter for people.” In his case, that champion was Russell Shilling, who not only had provided the initial funding for Virtual Iraq but had funded SimCoach through his current position at DARPA. With Virtual Iraq, when the army learned that the Office of Naval Research was funding it, it decided not to join in. These kinds of divisions and rivalries between the services, Rizzo said, inevitably end up hurting the soldiers on the ground, not the leaders in their finely appointed offices back home.
Comprehensive Soldier Fitness is supposedly different—it is a top-down army initiative that acknowledges the past decade’s wear and tear on the force. When I suggested to Rizzo and Talbot that the pro
gram would inoculate military personnel against rational human responses to the pain and suffering of war, Talbot vigorously disagreed. “Think about these young soldiers who enter the military,” he said. “They’re joining to escape their shitty lives—they have no idea what to expect. Then they deploy, and all of a sudden they’re experiencing hell on earth. When they return home, their spouses leave them. They have no coping strategies. Stress resilience isn’t designed to make them robots, it’s designed to make them human—to make them willing to engage with their emotions and seek help. How are nineteen-year-olds supposed to deal with seeing their friends killed, with seeing babies blown up? These are normal people dealing with abnormal stress.” Rizzo said that critics should be glad that a liberal like him is working with the military and helping to shape what it is doing. He is, he said, keeping watch.
Earlier in the day, I’d been in a meeting with Rizzo and a group of his researchers as they discussed turning SimCoach into an assessment tool. They had recently received a $950,000 grant to adapt SimCoach for use in an annual assessment program in which all military health-care providers are required to participate. A few days later, the army would be visiting ICT to see how the project was progressing. Rizzo and his team wanted to sell the army on their vision while taking care to manage the army’s expectations of what could be accomplished. “This is a grand opportunity because it puts us and SimCoach in front of all these military professionals,” Rizzo told the group. “It’s a key opportunity for dissemination. We need to engage in shameless self-promotion.”
Later, as the meeting reached its halfway point, Rizzo was struck by a thought: despite the many stresses of his job, the innumerable daily headaches, was this, for him, the most productive time of his life? He had around him a team of people whom he believed in, and who believed in him and were doing this work not for the money—compared to the corporate world, there wasn’t much—but because they believed in it. He found himself caught up in an imagined moment of future nostalgia. He tried to stay in that moment, to let it fully absorb him. Then he pulled himself out of his reverie and plunged back into the matter at hand.
CHAPTER 8
Conclusion: America’s Army Invades Our Classrooms
IN 2008, THE ARMY’S 3rd Recruiting Brigade of Ohio confronted a dilemma: how could it inject the army’s presence into Ohio’s public schools when so many educators and parents were opposed to recruiting on school grounds? This is an issue that faces recruiters across the country, but alone among them, the 3rd Recruiting Brigade hit on a novel solution: it would partner with Project Lead the Way, a nonprofit educational content provider, to “promote student interest in the engineering and technical fields” by using America’s Army in high school classrooms across the state. Visuals and scenarios from the game would be repurposed for modules in a variety of courses. Because Project Lead the Way’s curriculum is preapproved in all fifty states, the America’s Army part of the curriculum would automatically be permitted in schools nationwide.
The gambit worked, and following a successful yearlong pilot backed by the Ohio Department of Education, Project Lead the Way began giving its America’s Army learning modules free of charge to public schools around the country. Richard Grimsley, Project Lead the Way’s vice president for programs, told me that the game is currently used in all fifty states, in upward of two thousand schools.
The America’s Army employees in charge of the Project Lead the Way collaboration—Craig Eichelkraut, the project head, and Catherine Summers, its education/training liaison—were quite open in confirming the army’s motives. When I met with them at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, Eichelkraut said that the army’s goal was not only to embed a positive image of the military in the public schools but also “to have a way to get into the schools [in the first place]. Because right now, in a lot of schools, if you’re a recruiter and you come to the school, they just do not want you even to talk to the students.” Bundling the game with Project Lead the Way means, Eichelkraut said, that the army “doesn’t have to fight with every single school and every single school board.” He also told me why the army chose the course “Principles of Engineering” as its first module: “Principles of Engineering goes into one of the classes that every student has to take, so we felt that this would be the one that would hit the most students.”
The army and Project Lead the Way’s shared interest is in developing school-age populations with skills in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. From the army’s perspective, these so-called STEM skills are essential to the success of the current and future fighting force; for Project Lead the Way, these are the skills that will keep our country’s workforce at the forefront of the global economy. As the two organizations collaborated, they disagreed primarily on the size of the explosions that would be allowed in the game. Equally important, Project Lead the Way “wanted to make sure that the kids were understanding the mathematics behind projectile devices, those kinds of things,” Richard Grimsley told me, “as opposed to just blowing stuff up. That was a big challenge for [the army].”
The partnership with Project Lead the Way is just one means by which America’s Army is making its presence known in our schools. Now that Casey Wardynski is Huntsville’s school superintendent, the America’s Army team at Redstone Arsenal is creating applications of the game for the Huntsville curriculum. These applications will be delivered to the classroom via iPads and iPhones; they will also be recycled into the game’s public recruiting and private training versions. Wardynski has partnered with the U.S. Army’s Cyber Command to restructure the curriculum of Huntsville schools to focus on the skills required to wage and defend against cyberwarfare effectively. Beginning in 2013, the city’s middle schools and high schools incorporated a program targeted at developing students into skilled “cyberwarriors or cyberdefenders”; the plan is for these students to enter the army immediately after high school. (The army’s Cyber Command is providing the appropriate curriculum, along with soldier-mentors.) When they complete their military service, these Huntsville graduates will return to the city to work for one of the many defense contractors in the area. They will also have the opportunity to enroll in college. Ideally, for Wardynski, this model will be replicated by school districts across the country.
While many educators are opposed to a military presence in their classrooms, Susan Tave Zelman, Ohio’s state superintendent of public instruction, is not. “When we were approached by the U.S. Army,” Zelman says, “we realized the great opportunity this project represented for engaging students in a learning environment that excites them . . . This marks a real shift in the education paradigm to utilizing a technology platform that students are familiar with and enjoy!” Equally keen on the military–public schools alliance are Brenda Welburn, executive director of the National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE), and the organization’s past president, Brad Bryant. Announcing the army-sponsored “Building Strong Futures Together” conference, held at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, Welburn declared that the conference would “stimulate, and sustain, dialogue with one of our nation’s largest employers of our public school system.” Bryant, in an open letter to NASBE members, enthused that attendees would “have the opportunity to test [the army’s] weapons simulation, ... do humvee rollover simulation, and overcome our fear of height [sic] with the Tower exercise. Can we say high school hands on learning!”
To school officials who collaborate with the military, the relationship makes perfect sense: the Pentagon has money and our public schools are starved for funds. This logic is driving the increasing corporate presence in education—the brand names that pop up regularly in textbooks, or the exclusive vending deals that schools are signing with Coke and Pepsi. But the military connection takes this process one step further: it delivers cutting-edge learning tools into the classroom, creating curricular areas where the immersion in, say, army-branded virtual worlds may define the learning experience itself.
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p; The army’s primary reason for entering our schools is, as I have said, recruiting. But more specifically, as the Project Lead the Way example shows, it is recruiting young people with certain skills. Conservative and liberal commentators share a rare point of agreement in saying that only by vastly increasing and improving STEM proficiency among our schoolchildren will America’s future be as glorious as its past. The Obama administration agrees: it is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into its Educate to Innovate campaign, a pro-STEM initiative that, in the president’s words, is dedicated to “reaffirming and strengthening America’s role as the world’s engine of scientific discovery and technological innovation.” And while the conservative Heritage Foundation has sharply criticized the Obama team’s efforts, it is not, as might be expected, for the heavy use of federal funds, but because the foundation wants state and local policymakers to have more flexibility in determining how to spend those funds.
The Heritage Foundation’s report states explicitly that a STEM- educated workforce is essential to our nation’s “global competitiveness” and “national security,” while bemoaning the fact that, with regard to STEM, American students “are now outperformed by students from Liechtenstein, Slovenia, Estonia, and Hungary.” The foundation approvingly quotes the 1983 study “A Nation at Risk,” the National Commission on Education’s notably hysterical report on America’s fallen status:
