Thousands of Videogame-Playing Soldiers Could Shape the Future of War (theatlantic.com) 216
An anonymous reader quotes the Atlantic:
As far as video games go, Operation Overmatch is rather unremarkable. Players command military vehicles in eight-on-eight matches against the backdrop of rendered cityscapes -- a common setup of games that sometimes have the added advantage of hundreds of millions of dollars in development budgets. Overmatch does have something unique, though: its mission. The game's developers believe it will change how the U.S. Army fights wars. Overmatch's players are nearly all soldiers in real life. As they develop tactics around futuristic weapons and use them in digital battle against peers, the game monitors their actions.
Each shot fired and decision made, in addition to messages the players write in private forums, is a bit of information soaked up with a frequency not found in actual combat, or even in high-powered simulations without a wide network of players. The data is logged, sorted, and then analyzed, using insights from sports and commercial video games. Overmatch's team hopes this data will inform the Army's decisions about which technologies to purchase and how to develop tactics using them, all with the aim of building a more forward-thinking, prepared force... While the game currently has about 1,000 players recruited by word of mouth and outreach from the Overmatch team, the developers eventually want to involve tens of thousands of soldiers. This milestone would allow for millions of hours of game play per year, according to project estimates, enough to generate rigorous data sets and test hypotheses.
Each shot fired and decision made, in addition to messages the players write in private forums, is a bit of information soaked up with a frequency not found in actual combat, or even in high-powered simulations without a wide network of players. The data is logged, sorted, and then analyzed, using insights from sports and commercial video games. Overmatch's team hopes this data will inform the Army's decisions about which technologies to purchase and how to develop tactics using them, all with the aim of building a more forward-thinking, prepared force... While the game currently has about 1,000 players recruited by word of mouth and outreach from the Overmatch team, the developers eventually want to involve tens of thousands of soldiers. This milestone would allow for millions of hours of game play per year, according to project estimates, enough to generate rigorous data sets and test hypotheses.
Yeah, totally real war! (Score:5, Insightful)
I wish there was a game, that did the oppisite of traditional shooters: Not show any of the "fun" of serial murder, but show all of the pain and suffering caused.
Semi-dead people, bleeding like pigs, begging like children to save them. The horrible screams. So much blood and torn flesh. Your closest pals with everything below the hip ripped off. Children running screaming through the street. People snapping and getting crazy. Having to look everyone and their relatives in the face! Flashbacks for decades.
Or just huddling in a half-bombed building, with snipers everywhere around, and no bullets or radio left, deciding whether to starve to death or run into certain death.
It should be illegal, to show something without its real consequences. These kids have no fuckin clue what awaits them if real combat happens. So in a way, making such a game, is at least partially responsible for their deaths and the deaths of those they murder. It is not so much better than that 70 virgins in heaven fairy tale, is it?
Re:Yeah, totally real war! (Score:5, Insightful)
A Sanity bar - you have to maintain your sanity by looking away from your dying friend's mutilated bodies, especially the eyes. Hearing their screams also decreases your sanity, so you need to quickly zip passed people who are suffering (or end it with your trusty shovel) to get through levels.
Savior Points - You accrue points by putting people out of their misery, and you get a bonus combo multiplier that counts up if you save people within one second of each other, again with your trusty shovel or one of several savior's items, such as crow bars, wrenches, wooden crates or your foot.
World-wide Locales - There are so many awesome environments this could take place in, including deserts, cities, the countryside and even soon, the border between China and North Korea.
Achievements - This would tie into how you save people, whose models would have many different hit locations (think Soldier of Fortune). You could save someone by stoving their head in, or by crushing their arms off (so that they stop thrashing, which would give you a thrasher bonus). Blood and entrails would obviously be realistically modelled using PhysX.
I dunno man, I think you're really onto something here. You should probably create it, you'll want a suitably fucked up game engine for such a fucked up idea. Say, Amazon's Lumberyard?
Re:Yeah, totally real war! (Score:5, Interesting)
Legacy of Valor - Returning home missing an arm or a leg, being passed over for employment because, it turns out, limbs are helpful. Having to pay for your groceries with food stamps while everyone cheerfully tells you "Thank you for your service". Then as the teenage boy loads your pickup, you hop in and drive with hand controls.
Hero's Courage - Players can experience constant flashbacks (maybe this can be shaped by sanity bar or savior point balance) to that time when you saw your friends torso blown off, or when you had to mercy kill them.
Defender of Democracy - As you lay on your deathbed, decades too early because of some drug they gave you before being sent to the field that hadn't been fully vetted, you can witness yourself in a gurney hooked up to a dialysis machine watching the guy who was the director of the research team that produced that drug, who has since been promoted to CEO, receive his multi-million dollar golden parachute as you finally suffer one last stroke and die.
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You forgot "Personal Pride" where after stepping on an anti-personal device or IED an electric shock is given to your genitals simulating crippling damage to them.
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... no, you should NOT look away and censor it yourself! You should look right at it
You would still be missing the smell. The pungent odor of sweaty clothes that haven't been washed in weeks, burnt cordite, smoke and diesel fumes from burning vehicles, and the smell of your hole-mate's entrails: feces from his ruptured colon, the smell of vomit from his stomach, and piss from severed nerves to his urethral sphincter.
Anyone that thinks war is glorious has never smelled a battlefield.
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Wasn't Soldier of Fortune [wikipedia.org] a bit like that?
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It has a scene where you accidentally bomb a bunch of civilians, and the go through a nice walk through their neighbourhood.
They have that (Score:2)
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Sigh. A couple of million years ago, the line that led to us became organized enough that the big cats could no longer hold down their numbers. After that, humans had to become their own predators. The times they do this are known as war. However, it's not in the gene's interest to fight all the time, only when the consequences of not fighting are worse than fighting.
So in good times, the population grows until it has expanded to the limit of the environment to feed them. Then there is a glitch in the
Nothing ever changes. (Score:4, Insightful)
The Future of War should be an absence of it. Greed will never allow that to happen.
We pretend replacing humans with bots on a 21st century battlefield is "progress". It's not. We've won a battle, but we're still waging war for profits sake.
Re:Nothing ever changes. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure but that's not just humans, that's just the very nature of existence. The whole universe and certainly life itself is built around conflicting forces to some degree or another.
You're basically arguing that reality is harsh, you're right. Our biggest achievement will be resisting the very nature of existence if we manage it.
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Sure but that's not just humans, that's just the very nature of existence. The whole universe and certainly life itself is built around conflicting forces to some degree or another.
It's a hell of a lot easier to understand and accept the why of organic chaos than it is to understand or justify manufactured chaos.
It's been long proven that warmongering is run as a for-profit business. The problem with that morally bankrupt justification is profit is measured by putting a price tag on something that should be priceless; human life.
You're basically arguing that reality is harsh, you're right. Our biggest achievement will be resisting the very nature of existence if we manage it.
Our biggest achievement will be solving for the disease of crippling Greed before it becomes the very cause of our own demise. The chasm continues to widen
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It's a hell of a lot easier to understand and accept the why of organic chaos than it is to understand or justify manufactured chaos.
It's funny that you think there's a difference.
Humans are just another animal, trained by billions of years of evolution to fight as viciously as possible to gain and exploit every single advantage we have. Just like every other animal that exists. The only difference is that we are more effective, which means that we fight all the more viciously. That's just the natural order of things.
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"It's been long proven that warmongering is run as a for-profit business. The problem with that morally bankrupt justification is profit is measured by putting a price tag on something that should be priceless; human life."
The people making money off of wars can't make money off of wars in isolation by themselves. They need people willing to fight those wars because they sure as hell aren't doing it and that's still fed by entirely organic tribalism, the will for conflict is still part of that entirely natu
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What you call "greed" is basic survival mechanisms. I want to eat and reproduce. I want as many of my children to eat and reproduce.
You are welcome to suicide yourself and your offspring for this abstract retarded concept you've invented. In fact, I'm going to actively encourage you. You're a great person!
Meanwhile, enjoy watching my 5 kids playing at the park when you're 70 and childless. I won.
A nominal amount of Greed in order to survive is one thing. I'm not talking about that. When I speak of crippling Greed, I'm talking about the obscene levels we've reached today. I'm talking about the chasm between the 0.001% and the rest of the fucking planet that will ultimately suffer due to not treating the disease that creates ruthless Greed.
A billionaire doesn't maintain a desire to become a trillionaire because of "survival mechanisms", so let's just drop that bullshit argument. There is nothing b
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"A billionaire doesn't maintain a desire to become a trillionaire because of "survival mechanisms","
Actually, they do, at least such traits (often called greed or avarice) were strongly selected in Europeans. http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.ed... [ucdavis.edu]
What happened over about 20 generations (at least) was that the upper economic strata reproduced at a much higher rate than the lowest strata. This level of selection gave us tame foxes after the same number of generations.
So it is not surprising that people with the
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Bill Gates is evil because Windows was successful? He is that top 0.001%. Why is his wealth evil and how is he harming poor people when people willingly bought a product he offered?
When insecurity of the worlds most popular OS is directly responsible for the loss of global information, it becomes difficult to define "success".
That said, Bill Gates is doing good things with his wealth. He doesn't appear to be sustaining a goal of becoming the next trillionaire, indifferent of the masses. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation tends to be evidence of that.
Not all billionaires are part of the problem. Society still champions building wealth to an obscene level, which is impacting the w
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"When insecurity of the worlds most popular OS is directly responsible for the loss of global information, it becomes difficult to define "success"."
Give us a break, that argument died long ago. There's no evidence Windows is any less secure than most Linux distros nowadays, most serious exploits in recent years have existed in open source products like OpenSSL, MySQL, Java, PHP, and so on. You're stuck in the 90s with a grudge to bare if you still believe that. You can hardly call Microsoft unsuccessful or
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Sure but that's not just humans, that's just the very nature of existence. The whole universe and certainly life itself is built around conflicting forces to some degree or another.
You're basically arguing that reality is harsh, you're right. Our biggest achievement will be resisting the very nature of existence if we manage it.
Not all species are as infected with our desire to kill others of our own species. There are some examples of interspecies warfare, but with humans, it is a core competency.
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The Future of War should be an absence of it. Greed will never allow that to happen.
Human nature won't allow it. We are a tribal species, and our psychology practically requires an "other". To get rid of war means fundamentally changing the way people are wired.
But I agree with you that adding robots into the battlefield is not progress, but for different reasons I think. When you take away the human cost of war, you take away the political cost as well. The public doesn't really care if you are blowing billions of dollars in munitions and equipment to fight a war(in fact that might
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This is true, but here's a hypothetical: 'the other' doesn't necessarily have to be other humans. I mean, the age-old sci-fi theme is humans uniting as a species against an external threat once we realize we're not that different compared to aliens, but the external uniting force does not have to be aliens either.
In this century we'll be facing multiple, complex issues and catastrophes caused by the environment rapidly changing. Arm
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This is true, but here's a hypothetical: 'the other' doesn't necessarily have to be other humans. I mean, the age-old sci-fi theme is humans uniting as a species against an external threat once we realize we're not that different compared to aliens, but the external uniting force does not have to be aliens either.
I'm in disagreement. Humans have a core competency of aggression, and this aggression is mainly toward other humans. The sci-fi trope is merely wishful thinking.
And if the "enemy" is climate, we won't unite to fight it. We'll kill other humans in a fight over dwindling resources and useable land. It will be a lot more like Mad Max than The 4th of July.
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Evolution in action.
And almost every animal ever on the planet has gone extinct. I suspect we shall do the same, only for our crewed up sense, we'll be crying tears of joy when it happens.
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If you want to stop modern war, you must make it so costly politically that no country would ever think to start one.
That only works in the democratic countries, where the people can overthrow the rulers if the rulers go against the wishes of the people.
In other words, this won't work for the majority of countries, only for a tiny handful who don't go to war anyway,
Re: :-) (Score:2)
Wait, I'm being told they aren't a democracy but a Republic. Carry on...
Democratic republic (Score:2)
Despite the apparent misconception, "Republic" and "Democracy" are not mutually exclusive. You can, in fact, have a democratic republic.
(although most of the states with the phrase "democratic republic" in their official name put those words in to hide the fact that they were actually neither).
Some links: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/05/13/is-the-united-states-of-america-a-republic-or-a-democracy/ [washingtonpost.com]
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/republic [merriam-webster.com]
maybe my :-) I was too subtle (Score:2)
Is it opposite today? (Score:2)
It's almost as if I knew all that, and was pointing out that being a democracy doesn't seem to have stopped the US from being in a constant state of war. Plenty of other democracies were quite willing to tag along also.
It is usually hard to tell real ignorance from faked ignorance on slashdot, but, when in doubt, I just assume that people actually are ignorant; it's usually a good bet. It hardly matters: half of the readers will read your post assuming that you mean what you say, and not the opposite of what you say, so it's worth correcting for that fraction of readers.
https://medium.com/@lessig/the-united-states-is-not-a-democracy-it-is-a-republic-54e8036c781c
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Nothing the peasants do or say will have any effect on that, elect Trump or Sanders or Batman...
"I'm Batman, and I approve this message."
Yep, I'd vote for that. Only question is, should it be Christian Bale's or Will Arnett's voice in the voiceover.
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If you want to stop modern war, you must make it so costly politically that no country would ever think to start one.
That only works in the democratic countries, where the people can overthrow the rulers if the rulers go against the wishes of the people.
Because theocracies, monarchies, and dictatorships have NEVER had any regime change......
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There is no democratic country in the world where people can "overthrow" the current government.
They can vote for other assholes next election ... perhaps.
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But I agree with you that adding robots into the battlefield is not progress, but for different reasons I think. When you take away the human cost of war, you take away the political cost as well.
Bingo! I have long said that the concept of robot warfare isn't going to work in the end because we aren't killing people. Humas have a deep seated need to kill other humans.
Right now, it is asymmetrical. We un the US are using robots that kill some other groups of people who aren't anywhere near the technology to create their own. So the deathlust is satisfied.
But as technologically advanced nations create their own warrior robots, my best guess is that robot versus robot warfare is going to be borin
Killing is a means, not an end [Re:Nothing ever... (Score:2)
But I agree with you that adding robots into the battlefield is not progress, but for different reasons I think. When you take away the human cost of war, you take away the political cost as well.
Bingo! I have long said that the concept of robot warfare isn't going to work in the end because we aren't killing people. Humas have a deep seated need to kill other humans.
I'll disagree with you on that one. The purpose of war is for one group to force their will on another (and the converse, to prevent another group from forcing their will on them.) That might be: to take their stuff, to take their land, to control their politics, or whatever. Killing people just happens to be a very good way to do that: if you kill all the other people who can fight back, you can impose your will without opposition.
But killing people isn't the objective, it is merely a tool to accomplish
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I'll disagree with you on that one. The purpose of war is for one group to force their will on another (and the converse, to prevent another group from forcing their will on them.) That might be: to take their stuff, to take their land, to control their politics, or whatever. Killing people just happens to be a very good way to do that: if you kill all the other people who can fight back, you can impose your will without opposition.
But killing people isn't the objective, it is merely a tool to accomplish the objective. If you could accomplish the objective with a better tool-- well, then the people with the better tool would impose their will on the people without the better tool.
And yet, even aside from wars, the prisons are full of people who kill other people.
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The Future of War should be an absence of it. Greed will never allow that to happen.
Unless you manage humanity 2.0, greed (and wars) are necessary part of operational cycle. Without greed we will stagnate. Just look at hunter-gatherer tribes that have no concept of property - they are still hunter-gatherers.
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In what dream world do you live that you think hunter gatheres have no concept of property?
This is my hunting ground.
This is my river.
This is my oasis.
This is my wife.
This are my kids.
And this: is my spear and my axe to keep what is mine.
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The Future of War should be an absence of it. Greed will never allow that to happen.
We pretend replacing humans with bots on a 21st century battlefield is "progress". It's not. We've won a battle, but we're still waging war for profits sake.
Greed is only one part. More deep seated is that humans simply love to kill other humans. We love to define "the other" and then kill it.
This drive does not respond to rational thinking, it laughs at logic, and it has become linked to our survival instinct. The irony is that it might cause us to gleefully destroy ourselves. Our lizard brain is still in control while our modern brain allows us to create the weapons that will do it.
The only actual scenario I can see where we won't make ourselves extinct
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> The Future of War should be an absence of it.
Indeed. We already have a cliche for it:
Fighting for Peace is like Fucking for Virginity
> Greed will never allow that to happen.
That's a rather cynical / pessimistic attitude. That's incorrect for two reasons:
1. While we have been brought up the delusion of There is never enough -- our definition of abundance has already changed for some people:
Having what you need, when you need it
And while the problem is the majority of people still confuse "need" wit
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We all know that zero point enrgy is 'a reality'.
However exploiting it to 'gain power', seems impossible. But perhaps you have an idea?
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That's only because other people have provided you with far more than basic necessities. If you actually had to work for a living, or worse yet - had to compete with others for limited resources, you'd redevelop the concept of "owning a house" pretty fucking quickly. Your opi
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Are you sure?
https://ourworldindata.org/sli... [ourworldindata.org]
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Are you sure?
https://ourworldindata.org/sli... [ourworldindata.org]
If the world is truly in decline, then how do we explain the unending rise of the Military Industrial Complex?
How do we explain the Incarcerated States of America?
How do we explain the continued militarization of our civilian police forces?
My original statement stands, because ruthless Greed created this shit. Warmongering is a proven for-profit business, which is why ruthless Greed continues to sustain it. The sick part about that is putting a price tag on human lives to define profit.
Also, it's a bit d
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Access to higher education and modern healthcare services including contraception and abortion has proven to be an excellent way to limit the uncontrolled breeding of humans.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of religious assholes who abhor all of the above and are intent on forcing everyone else to live according to their beliefs.
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Last time I checked the USA is pretty much "keeping its guard up". They're probably the leading cause of death in quite a few areas of the planet.
USA is number one. (Score:3)
Last time I checked the USA is pretty much "keeping its guard up". They're probably the leading cause of death in quite a few areas of the planet.
Yep, as it turns out, America has a larger defense budget than the next eight nations combined. "Keeping its guard up" is, in fact, what we spend the largest part of our taxes on. (Along with paying for the debt we accrued from building and equipping that army in the past.)
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/02/how-us-defense-spending-stacks-up-against-the-rest-of-the-world.html
They're probably the leading cause of death in quite a few areas of the planet.
No, not even close. Heart disease and stroke are still number one and two. http://www.who.int/mediacentre... [who.int]
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They're probably the leading cause of death in quite a few areas of the planet.
No, not even close. Heart disease and stroke are still number one and two.
Worldwide, yes. But not in a few areas. Somehow, I doubt that too many people die of strokes in Afghanistan. Strikes, yes, but not strokes.
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Our resources aren't infinite.
Humanity grows exponentially.
It's worth pointing out that the second assumption is an assumption, not a law of nature.
Demographers have long proven that three things lead to lower population growth: 1. A wealthier population, 2. A more educated population, and 3. Access to birth control (not forced birth control! It turns out that merely giving people access to the means to limit number of children is enough to have an effect on reducing average family size.)
So, if you want humanity to not increase exponentially until it reaches a (ine
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We've won a battle, but we're still waging war for profits sake.
Was WW1 or WW2 for profit? The Korean War?
How many top defense contractors thriving today can trace their grassroots funding from these wars?
I'd say damn near all of them.
How many conflicts today continue to be weakly justified by the business that is the Military Industrial Complex?
I'd say damn near all of them.
meh (Score:5, Insightful)
Arrested Development (Score:2)
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I honestly wonder how many would actually stop playing when they realize this. And how many would redouble their effort because now it's MORE fun.
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This was actively debated idea at the time of Arrestd Development, because there were reports of military drones being operated by soldiers physically located in US military bases.
Another Time-Capsule Slashdot Story? (Score:4, Interesting)
Thousands of Videogame-Playing Soldiers Could Shape the Future of War
There was a LOT of discussion about the "Nintendo Warriors" and the precision ordnance guided by soldiers with years of training in their parents' basements. Operation Desert Strike, and then later Desert Storm.
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This time, the idea is to gather data and use it to select and evaluate new technology for the battlefield, and ways to apply it to best effect.
From the Do-You-Want-Skynet?-Because-That's-How-You-Get-Skynet Dep't.
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Hey, 1990 called and wants their headline back.
Battle simulations and collecting data from them go much further back. There's a reason young knights were expected to master chess, hold "games" of jousting and fencing, and participate in a number of sports. Before that were wrestling matches, javelin throws, and on and on. They were training for strategy, testing equipment, and building strength. People learned not just from participation but by watching.
There's a reason why military recruiters ask if recruits participated in team sports, Boy Scouts,
Enders Game (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Enders Game (Score:4, Interesting)
Drone operators demonstrate the problems with this approach quite well.
While it undoubtedly protects the lives of the operators, it seems like it makes things worse for innocent people on the ground. This is true of all remote killing technologies such as missiles and bombs, and even guns to an extent. The closer you are to the actual killing the less likely you are to accidentally kill innocent people it seems.
There is also the problem of operators going from a warzone to civilian life and back again every day. Turns out it's a stressful transition to make, when many assumed it would make life easier for them. Seems that it is actually harder to dehumanize the enemy when operating from a position of complete safety.
Innocent people are exploiting this by ramping up psychological pressure on the operators, for example by placing large photographs of children on the roofs of their homes so that they are visible from the air. The hope is that it will make them hesitate before dropping bombs.
In other words while being in an air conditioned office somewhere is physically much safer than being on a battlefield, it has simply changed the focus from inflicting bodily damage to inflicting mental damage and encouraged civilians to join in.
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On the other hand, being close to the killing seems to make it more likely that soldiers kill innocent people intentionally. I mean no drone raped anyone nor has a drone operator gone on a killing spree killing a whole village.
Hmmm.... (Score:5, Informative)
...apparently, there's a boy named Ender who is really good at this sort of thing....
Evolution of Warfare (Score:1)
Oh good (Score:2)
Boot Camp will now include an entire day devoted to learning how to teabag corpses.
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I'd guess they start with only recruiting people who are already pros at the basics.
list of other games on the system (Score:2)
falken's maze
black jack
gin rummy
hearts
bridge
checkers
chess
poker
fighter combat
guerrilla engagement
desert warfare
air-to-ground actions
theaterwide tactical warfare
theaterwide biotoxic and chemical warfare
global thermonuclear war
NIntendo Generation (Score:2)
They also should recruit former soldiers who play video games, who have been in combat and have a sense how things work.
You'd get people who'd would try crazy stuff like.....
spoke of how an early effort of his to attach a gun to an unmanned ground vehicle was declined because if the gun were fired, it would flip the vehicle over.
It's a simulation, let them try it. The soldier already know chances are good it will flip but maybe not if the weapon is restricted to specific degrees over the front or rear of t
What a depressing thought (Score:3)
People = War (Score:2)
6 months from now (Score:5, Funny)
The data is logged, sorted, and then analyzed, using insights from sports and commercial video games. Overmatch's team hopes this data will inform the Army's decisions about which technologies to purchase and how to develop tactics using them, all with the aim of building a more forward-thinking, prepared force...
We have analyzed the data from over 2.4M games and the results are clear - we need:
1) wall hacks
2) aim bots
And
3)185k cases of RedBull
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3)185k cases of RedBull
You kid on the RedBull. On one of my overseas deployments, the base I was attached to got upset because our guard force was drinking $20k worth of RedBull a month. We weren't even getting shot at. I could only imagine how much it was while I was in Iraq.
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Remember kids (Score:2)
There is no respawn
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I heard one guy managed to pull it off, but even for him it took 3 days and they said he was a god.
Done again? (Score:2)
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History masquerading as prediction. (Score:2)
Not a realistic simulation (Score:2)
The problem is that this form of combat doesn't accurately simulate physical and mental fatigue, nor does it carry the same potential cost as a real firefight (death, injury, psychological trauma). The result? Soldiers will behave in a completely different manner than they would in reality.
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Not learned the lesson from WW1? (Score:4, Insightful)
Overmatch's team hopes this data will inform the Army's decisions about which technologies to purchase and how to develop tactics using them
As German military strategist Helmuth von Moltke noted “No battle plan, survives contact with the enemy.” [ Wiki ]
And this sort of "strategy" seems to make the basic error: that the enemy is playing by the same rules, or has had the same training that these soldiers - on either side - are employing.
I fear this will go badly and catastrophically wrong. Probably the first time it's tried.
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Indeed. Take muslim jihadists for example. Basically a bunch of bearded savages with medieval mentality and values, and limited resources, against the migth of modern western warfare and its state of the art weaponry, satellite intelligence, drones, etc. This should have been not a massacre, but an extermination. They should have been dispatched in days.
And yet, years later, they endure. The only reason they are loosing ground, albeit very slowly, is because they are overwhelmingly outnumbered and outgunned
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What makes you think our elites want to win against the jihadis? Where'd you get that idea?
They're useful. They provide constant war, which means a constant churn of military action, which is highly profitable. They create chaos, which our elites love because it means they get to change things. They love messing with things. Ever know one of those people who likes to take things apart just to mess with them? But they're not really good at putting them back together and tend to move on to the next pr
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Who says we're going to fight jihadis for the rest of history?
Which is the whole point.
Coming up with fixed strategies and then discovering they don't work was exactly what von Moltke was criticising. It didn't work in WW1, It definitely didn't work in Vietnam - despite overwhelming technology, firepower, money, bombs and munitions. The russians failed in Afghanistan for similar reasons. The "plan" in Iraq seemed to be to destroy everything (that part succeeded) then to work out what to do with the rubble (that part failed hopelessly).
The only thing the army - and
Re: Not learned the lesson from WW1? (Score:1)
~/ "Video games train the kids for war" /~ (Score:2)
author (Score:2)
It leaves out the important parts (Score:2)
Fear and pain. And the combination, being afraid to die after catching a bullet.
Real life combat is not a milsim. One is business, the other is fun. And you notice the difference VERY quickly. No matter how "professional" you want to pull it off. People are WAY braver and WAY more collected when their ass isn't on the line.
People who get shot scream. That's maybe the worst thing missing here, and you cannot simulate this. Yes, you can make the character model scream, but who gives a fuck about some generic
Less collateral damage? More accountability? (Score:2)
Instead of planting landmines, plant sensors? LOTS of 'em? Maybe the true advantage of embedding computer simulation in real world battle wouldn't be improving military control and tactics as much as maximizing sensor data and finally *lifting* the fog of war.
Let's call the policy of planting billions of sensors everywhere 'BoSE'. In embattled settings, police and peacemaker orgs would willingly adopt BoSE as the ideal way to minimize the element of surprise, both during battle, as well as when preparing
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Use drones to drop them. Have them report GPS coordinates a few seconds after pressure/weight trigger. They only need to last 3-4 days (situational awareness rather than full time monitoring), they could be the size of a nickel. Maybe have higher power radio transmitters dropped as well that the individual sensors communicate with and proxy info to the command center (makes battery issues much easier to deal with, also resolves distance issues).
Color them to match the locale (so dull yellow for the endle
That old new thing, all over again (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
If you want to get good at fighting, you must practice fighting. Even if it means "lasertag with tanks" that cost $1000 per mile and planes that cost $5000 per hour to operate.
Playing games leads to good game strategy but not good fighting.
(-I'm not generally an advocate of war, it would be real nice if humans could stop killing each other--at least in massive amounts... but I think we're still quite some tim
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The difference here, and why it is something new, despite your out of hand dismissal, is how they are collecting data from the players and how they are hoping to use it. This isn't to train soldiers, but to understand
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Bradley Trainer: Atari’s Top Secret Military Project
https://www.google.com/amp/s/arcadeblogger.com/2016/10/28/bradley-trainer-ataris-top-secret-military-project/amp/ [google.com]
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What should we do about it?
Saying that anyone playing a MilSim would gladly go out and shoot everyone in sight is bullshit. There is a huge difference between treating a virtual "wounded soldier" and a person that got really hit by enemy fire.
One of them make you puke the first time you do it. I leave it to your imagination which one it might be.