Virtual war: The army and technology

Posted at: Thursday 6th September 2007 by James Gorbold

James Gorbold joins the British Army at its high-tech Land Warfare Centre to see just what the military are doing with the most expensive computer games in the world.

Whether or not you play games, there's no denying that games are now the main driving force behind the development of more powerful hardware. In fact, as far back as Origin's groundbreaking - and hardware-breaking - Strike Commander in 1993, hardware manufacturers have used games to encourage us to upgrade.

However, while PC gamers have been driving the market for many years, there's another incredibly active group of hardcore gamers for whom games are literally a matter of life and death. That group is, of course, the military, although the military doesn't like the word 'game', preferring instead to use the term 'simulator'. Military forces worldwide have used simulators to train personnel for thousands of years, from low-tech sand tables (first recorded use: Alexander the Great, circa 320BC), in which sand is moulded to represent terrain features, to today's high-tech computer simulators.

The military likes simulators for several reasons. These range from cost - it's approximately seven times cheaper to train in a simulator than in the field - to safety. It's almost impossible for injuries to occur in a simulator, whereas accidents are all but inevitable when training in the field. In addition, even though the Ministry of Defence (MOD) owns more than 240,000 hectares of land in the UK - approximately one per cent of our island's land mass - very little of it can be used for live fire exercises, whereas troops can discharge as many rounds as they like in a virtual world without endangering civilians or damaging the environment.

The land warfare centre

Although it was the US Department of Defence's use of computer simulators that first caught public attention when the US Marine Corp (USMC) started using a modified version of Doom II in 1995 to train infantrymen, and the subsequent release of its own game, America's Army (www.americasarmy.com), in 2002, the British Army (www.army.mod.uk) now leads the way in military simulation. To find out more, Custom PC travelled to the British Army's Land Warfare Centre (LWC) in Warminster, deep in the heart of Salisbury Plain.

Salisbury Plain is the MOD's largest training area in the UK, covering approximately 38,000 hectares of land. However, even Salisbury Plain pales in comparison with the size of the LWC's virtual battlefields, which comprise a total of 300,000 hectares. The purpose of the LWC is to provide training for every soldier in the British Army every two years - a task that simply isn't practical if the all the training were to be carried out in the field. Currently, the LWC employs over 1,600 staff, ranging from military instructors to civilian technical support engineers, who service the bases' various simulators.

Down in the dirt