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.

The scale of things to come

As the CATT has so many individual simulators, it's capable of hosting formations up to battle group strength, making it the largest battlefield simulator in the world. As such, it's in great demand not only by the British Army, but also for use in training various friendly nations such as Germany and the UAE. In addition, the CATT can be linked to smaller facilities around the world, including Germany and the USA, for even larger operations.

One of the key differences between a military simulator such as CATT and a computer game is scale. In order to be a useful training tool, CATT has to be able to accurately represent towns, villages, rivers and entire cities at a true 1:1 scale. In contrast, game worlds are hugely scaled-down imitations of reality. This is partly because desktop PCs (never mind game consoles) lack the horsepower to simulate sufficiently large worlds, and the fact that most casual gamers would become bored with driving around waiting for something to happen. For example, in Battlefield 2, the larger maps are a mere 1,700 hectares, while the view distance is far less than this; this makes it useless for simulating realistic sniper rifle fire, let alone the power of tanks and artillery. In the largest-scale computer game yet made, Armed Assault, the largest maps are 40,000 hectares, while the view distance is up to 10km.

In contrast, CATT provides three 100,000-hectare virtual battlefields: one is in northern Germany and dates back to the Cold War; another covers a large part of the southern UK; and the third is set in the desert around Fort Irwin in the USA. There are also plans to develop further virtual battlefields to enable the CATT to represent current combat locations such as Afghanistan and Iraq.

It ain't over till it's over

Another principal difference between the CATT and a computer game is what happens when a battle is over. When a round of Counter-Strike: Source or Battlefield 2 ends, most players simply hang around waiting for the next level to load, occasionally typing a message such as 'good game' or 'I'll get you next time, you git'. In contrast, the actual fighting part of a session is a comparatively small part of the time spent in the CATT - what takes up most of the time is the post-action review. This is conducted in four medium-sized auditoriums that allow commanders and OPFOR (Opposing Forces) personnel to evaluate how well the battle was fought, and which areas to focus on in future training sessions. After all, the express purpose of the CATT is to provide training, and this can only be accomplished by analysing errors and teaching trainees how to perform tasks better.

What makes the CATT purr

In addition to exploring the capabilities of CATT, we thought it would be interesting to see what sort of hardware and software you need to create a full-blown military simulator. Since the CATT was first built in 2002, it has undergone a number of significant hardware upgrades reflecting the massive decrease in hardware costs that have been caused by gamers' voracious appetites for faster PCs. Initially, CATT was powered by expensive IBM systems with POWER CPUs and then upgraded to proprietary Quantum3D graphics workstations. More recently, the systems have been replaced by standard off-the-shelf PCs.