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Scheduleas part of Politics of Presence - the Colloquium
Excerpts from: Tim Lenoir & Henry Lowood, "Theaters of War: The Military-Entertainment Complex." (Illustrations added by HEL)
On the Stanford collection, see Guide to The Battle of 73 Easting, Gulf War: Papers Concerning the Simulation Project.
The U.S. Department of Defense defines a war game as “a simulation, by whatever means, of a military operation involving two or more opposing forces, using rules, data, and procedures designed to depict an actual or assumed real life situation.” (Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) Publication 1, Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., 1987): 393.)
The war college tradition of modern war games began with von Reisswitz’s Kriegsspiel in the early 19th century.
By the 1970s, however, sophisticated war game designs had been created in the commercial sector, beginning with the founding of The Avalon Hill Game Company by Charles S. Roberts in 1958. Roberts’ Tactics (1952), Tactics II (1958) and subsequent Avalon Hill titles established conventions of the modern war game. . . . these games shifted the mechanics of game design from abstract strategy or, alternatively, chance to an emphasis on historical realism defined by systems of rules and data, that is, to simulation.
Source: http://www.alanemrich.com/CSR_pages/CSRawards.htm
In 1976, SPI published Firefight, a game that simulated Soviet and U.S. small unit tactics and the first important title in a series of games that examined the “future history” of potential NATO-Warsaw Pact conflict. . . .The Firefight game system had been conceived and designed for the U.S. Army Infantry School before its release as a commercial game; it probably represented the first collaboration between Dunnigan [Jim Dunnigan, of SPI] and then Lt. Col. Ray Macedonia of the U.S. Army. Macedonia was determined to invigorate military war gaming by injecting the design advances, research standards, and modeling of SPI’s historical simulations into a revived War College system.
Dunnigan and Macedonia forged the military’s first concerted efforts to tap the potential of computer-based war gaming.
By the late 1970s, the Army was pushing for more use of computer technology in war games generally, and it turned outside its ranks for fresh ideas. At the behest of the Army Chief of Staff, Edward C. Meyer, Macedonia took on the task of producing a new architecture for computer-based games. . . . The resulting “McClintic Theater Model” (MTM, programmed by Fred McClintic), another conversion of one of Dunnigan’s older manual designs, was applied to simulation games sponsored by Army Chief of Staff by November 1980 and became the basis for a series of computer-based theater and operational simulations during the 1980s.
The impact of the [Internal Look] simulation on future planning and training exercises was discussed by General H. Norman Schwarzkopf in his memoirs, It Doesn’t Take a Hero (Bantam, 1992). Recalling the uncanny similarities between Internal Look and the real thing, Schwarzkopf wrote: “We played Internal Look in late July 1990, setting up a mock headquarters complete with computers and communication gear at Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida panhandle. As the exercise got under way, the movements of Iraq’s real-world ground and air forces eerily paralleled the imaginary scenario of the game....As the war game began, the message center also passed along routine intelligence bulletins about the real Middle East. Those concerning Iraq were so similar to the game dispatches that the message center ended up having to stamp the fictional reports with a prominent disclaimer: ‘Exercise Only.’ ”
The biggest boost to military war gaming came from the construction of the DARPA-funded SIMNET, the military’s distributed SIMulator NETworking project.
The SIMNET project was approved by DARPA in late 1982 and began early in the spring of 1983 with three essential component contracts. Perceptronics was to develop the training requirements and conceptual designs for the vehicle simulator hardware and system integration; BBN Laboratories Inc, of Boston, which had been the principal ARPANET developer, was to develop the networking and graphics technology; and the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) of La Jolla, California was to conduct studies of field training experiences at instrumented training ranges at the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California.
The usual design goal was to reach the highest possible level of physical fidelity—to design “an airplane on a stick.” The SIMNET design goal was different and was reminiscent of the “design for effect” approach that had been adopted by board wargame designers earlier.
Selective functional fidelity, rather than full physical fidelity, was SIMNET’s design goal, and as a result, many hardware items not regarded as relevant to combat operations were not included or were designated only by drawings or photographs in the simulator.
The terrains for the battle engagements were simulations of actual places, 50 kilometers by 50 kilometers initially, but eventually expandable by an order of magnitude in depth and width. Battles were to be fought in real time, with each simulated element—vehicle, command post, administrative and logistics center, etc. being operated by its assigned crew members.
The visual display depended primarily on the graphics generator resident in each simulator. This computer image generation (CIG) system differed in several important characteristics from earlier CIG systems. First, it was microprocessor-based (vs. large mainframe or multiple minicomputer based), and therefore relatively low in cost (less than $100,000 per simulator visual-display subsystem, vs. more than $1 million per visual channel; typical flight simulators have at least five visual channels). Secondly, it was high in environmental complexity with many moving models and special effects, but low in display complexity with relatively few pixels, small viewing ports, and a relatively slow update rate of 15 frames per second ...
Architecture of a Single M1 (Abrams Tank) Simulator in SIMNET (From J.A. Thorpe, “The New Technology of Large Scale Simulator Networking: Implications for Mastering the Art of Warfighting,” in Proceedings of the 9th Interservice/Industry Training Systems Conference, Nov. 30-Dec. 2, 1987, American Defense Preparedness Association, 1987, p. 495.)
The prototypes and early experiments with SIMNET elements were carried out between 1987-89, and the system was made operational in January 1990. The Army bought the first several hundred units for the Close Combat Tactical Trainer CCTT system ...
The value of the SIMNET as a training system for preparing units for battle became apparent almost immediately during the Gulf War. Hailed as the most significant victory of the war, the Battle of 73 Easting took place on February 26, 1991, just three days into the ground war, between the U.S. 2d Armored Cavalry Regiment and a much larger Iraqi armed force (armed elements of the 50th Brigade of the Iraqi 12th Armored Division). The battle was named for the location at which it occurred: 73 Easting is the north-south grid line on military maps of the Iraqi Desert.
It was immediately appreciated that 73 Easting had potential as a simulation for network training on the military SIMNET.
Simnet screenshot From Bruce Sterling's "War is Virtual Hell," Wired 1.01 (March-Apr. 1993).
Early military simulations incorporated very rote behaviors. They did not capture “soft” characteristics well. An effort to go beyond this was taken by the IDA in their effort to construct a computer-generated “magic carpet” simulation-recreation of the Battle of 73 Easting, based on in-depth debriefings of 150 survivors of a key battle that had taken place during the Gulf War. The goal of the project was to get timeline-based experiences of how individuals felt, thought and reacted to the dynamic unfolding of the events—their fears and emotions as well as actions—and render the events as a fully three-dimensional simulated reality which any future cadet could enter and relive.
Work on data gathering for the simulation began one month after the battle had taken place. The data assembled by the team included battle site surveys and interviews with participants. Documentation included action logs, oral and written interviews, recordings from radio nets, and soldiers’ own tape recordings made during the battle. In addition, overhead photography made before and after the battle was obtained. On the battle site itself, trained observers marked friendly and enemy positions including tank and other vehicle hulks that littered the terrain.
With this data a team at the IDA Simulation Center spent nine months constructing a simulation of the battle.
The Battle of 73 Easting was viewed as confirmation of Jack Thorpe’s original vision for the SIMNET of using networked simulation technology to use history to prepare for the future. It set the standard of a future genre of training simulations.
The “flying carpet” was the most innovative aspect of the SIMNET machine. It allowed zooming to any part of the battlefield as well as forward or backward jumping in time, from any perspective. Commanders could cruise a computer-generated battlefield that showed the deployment and operations of both allied and enemy orders of battle in two-dimensional and three-dimensional views.
"The Battle of 73 Easting" (Screenshot)
________
The history of military simulation has of course led to more recent projects that cross over from military training to videogame entertainment, such as America's Army and Full Spectrum Warrior. However, these simulations were not the first to put narratives about historical events and player exploration of a game-based possibility space in the same package. As Dunnigan pointed out, "The object of any wargame (historical or otherwise) is to enable the player to recreate a specific event and, more importantly, to be able to explore what might have been if the player decides to do things differently." The player's role became one not only of re-experiencing history but also of performing, that is exploring counterfactual moves and even changing history. For Dunnigan and SPI, the advantage of the "simulation game" allowed, "within well-defined limits, a great deal of variety in an otherwise strictly pre-determined historical event." Digital, networked simulations like 73 Easting incorporate massive amounts of documentation, data, and recorded memory to create a sense of historical place, but also of space. They encourage re-creation that animates that space through the agency of players, who surf, fly through and visualize it in ways that generate new and valuable experiences of their own. (HEL, 21 May 2007)
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