Military Simulations

The Economist reports on how some computer simulations are related to the real-world tasks they attempt to mimic:

As video-game technology has steadily improved and the gadgets of war have grown more expensive, America's military is relying more heavily on computer games as training tools. Some games which the military uses are off-the-shelf products, while others are expensive, proprietary simulations. A 2001 report by RAND, a think-tank, boosted the enthusiasm for military gaming when it concluded that the middle ranks of the army were experiencing a "tactical gap". Because most lieutenants and captains had not commanded troops in battle, or had not trained extensively enough in mock battles, they lacked the know-how necessary to do their jobs well. Fixing this, either by keeping infantry commanders in their jobs longer or by stepping up the pace of training, proved difficult — which led to a proliferation of initiatives in different branches of the military to develop games for training purposes.

The "tactical gap" may now have disappeared, as a result of the war in Iraq. A paper published this summer by Leonard Wong of the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, asserts that the "complexity, unpredictability and ambiguity of post-war Iraq is producing a cohort of innovative, confident and adaptable junior officers". Nonetheless, games remain a far cheaper training method than invading countries and waging wars. Yet their true effectiveness is far from certain. An eagerness on the part of the military to save money and embrace a transformative mission, and an eagerness on the part of the gaming community to see itself as genuinely useful, rather than as merely providing frivolous entertainment, may be obscuring the real answers.