playing war

daily telegraph, 05.97

Remember The Last Starfighter? That film from back in 1984 where the hero, a video-game obsessed geek who single-mindedly applies himself to his favourite shoot-'em-up, discovers once he beats the high score that the game is in fact a recruiting device for the intergalactic version of the RAF? Teenage escapism right? Wrong. In the real world, video games have now reached such a level of realism that Western military departments have actually started using them as tactical training aids.

Running point on this bizarre development are the American Marines. April's issue of Wired magazine ran as its cover story a piece on the Marine Corps Modeling [sic] and Simulation Management office (McMismo for short) where, with budget restrictions beginning to bite, Sergeants Barnett and Snyder were ordered to look through military-inspired videogames to see if any of them could be used for training purposes. What they came up with was Doom. Doom was perfect for their requirements as its creators, id software, actively encouraged users to strip the game down and rebuild it according to their own requirements. Replacing the demons with Nazis, the rambling castles with brick buildings and the shotguns and chainsaws with M-16s and M-249s, Barrett and Snyder came up with a fast, first person battle sim that was cheap, versatile and effective. And because it was PC-based not only could it be used in general training, but it could be used to keep troops on their toes during long periods at sea, or to familiarise troops with the details of a specific mission - the layout of an embassy being held by terrorists, for example.

But the Americans aren't the only ones getting in on the game. After they outgrew Salisbury plain back in the late 70s, British tank crews could only get effective training if they were flown out to special ranges in Canada where there was enough space to let them run riot. The enormous expense of this prompted the Defence Evaluation Research Agency - the MOD's primary research body, based near Farnborough - to seek another solution. Yup, you guessed it. DERA realised that for a fraction of the cost they could have their crews battle it out in cyberspace, and to do the job they designed a networked system which, because its graphics were generated at the client end (following the model laid down by the games such as Quake, designed from the bottom up to be networked between several players via the Internet) can support hundreds of participants. Crews sit in tank-style podules and play each other over ISDN and fibre networks. International competitions involving teams from both sides of the Atlantic occasionally get staged - although apparently the Americans always refuse to operate the Russian forces.

And ground war is only the half of it. Also at DERA is an air combat simulation facility called JOUST, which has been in operation since 1991. JOUST is "a diverse simulation environment capable of supporting the aeronautical system trade-off studies, simulation tactics development and training technology requirements of fixed wing fighter aircraft for the RAF and RN." In other words, it's a networked flight sim. At the moment, the JOUST system supports up to eight players, but more players can easily be added (JOUST runs on Silicon Graphics Onyx workstations and each station needs two colour monitors, a special HOTAS (Hands On Throttle And Stick) joystick, a bank of other instruments and switches and a throttle).

But although they save money, simulations systems like JOUST, CATT (Combined Arms Tactical Trainer) and CCTT (Close Combat Tactical Trainer) (both currently in production) are still expensive, with costs in the hundreds of thousands of pounds. DERA maintains its own team of coders, all of whom are mainline computer physicists and defence scientists, and specialised hardware construction - if not of the computers themselves, then of the simulation pods - is commissioned out to major defence contractors, who charge premium prices.

But a recent development may be set to change all that. At RAF Coltishall, where the upgrade of the Jaguar fighter is being coordinated, the airforce has actually commissioned a video games company, Warrington's Digital Image Design (www.did.com), to produce a PC-based training simulator.

DID, already responsible for the successful flight game TFX, approached Squadron Leader Pete Birch (jupo@zetnet.co.uk) at Coltishall for advice on a new game they were building based around the Eurofighter. According to Birch, "it quickly became apparent that they were developing a flight simulator, and we made a kind of pact - I said they could say in their advertising that they were developing sims for the RAF if they built me a simulator for £5000." The system Birch needed to simulate was called TIALD (Thermal Imaging and Laser Designation). TIALD is an upgraded version of the laser guidance system used to such effect in the Gulf War (remember those pictures of bombs disappearing down the air conditioning vents of buildings?). TIALD is not easy to operate, and was originally designed for two seater planes. But the Jaguar is a one seater aircraft, and its TIALD system had to be operated by the pilot alone using an adapted HOTAS joystick - according to DID's Don Whiteford, the stick has so many buttons "it looks like a saxophone." Having access to an effective simulator is crucial for pilots wishing to gain mastery over such a complex piece of equipment.

DID delivered the sim - which ran on a PC - within three months, saving the RAF a small fortune. It was an immediate hit, although this didn't make it any easier for them to win an official RAF contract - they were such a small company that the normal procurement channels couldn't cope with them. Now, however, multiple copies of the TIALD sim have been ordered, copies which - because they run on a PC - are enormously versatile. Birch is now pushing for DID to bid for the contract to replace the visual systems in all the Jaguar flight sims with computer graphics. The current - and obsolete - system uses a video camera that runs on wires over a landscape model and runs up electricity bills of over £50,000 a year. While his colleagues prefer a £4 million upgrade, Birch argues that "we could buy a DID PC-based replacement simply out of the money we'd save on electricity over two or three years. And the system would be upgradeable!"