In Thomas Hammes’ book The Sling and the Rock, the author articulates the current form of conflict that threatens the US and by extension the military and political influence of the western world.
This method of warfare, dubbed fourth generation war, goes by many other names – insurgency warfare, low-intensity conflict, asymmetrical warfare etc. The essential principle from a strategic perspective of this methodology is that the political will of the enemy is the target of operations. The thrust, at all levels, is to erode the will of the decision makers so that the enemy disengages from the conflict – effectively ending the war in the 4GW practioner’s favour.
This is the only type of warfare, Hammes and many others postulate that is a threat to the United States and its interests worldwide and moreover is the only kind of warfare the US is fighting. Hammes goes on to explain that it is the only type of warfare to show consistent supremacy against US forces.
As a remedy, Hammes articulates a restructuring effort for the armed forces that emphasizes a “leaning down” of the overall staff-level officer corps, increase in the rigor and dynamism of the training, increasing the specialization of officers and providing a 360 review system for officer promotion. One of the solutions Hammes mentions in the book is the development of training simulators using multiplayer virtual worlds.
This is not a new concept but it is one that has yet to be brought into full development. There have been games built for tactical and even operational event simulation but mainly they were designed to recreate circumstances that were too expensive rather than utterly impossible to manifest in reality. Hammes’ idea is to provide a dynamic, hostile simulated environment wherein officers can experiment and fail without grevious consequence – in short execute the true philosophy of wargaming in the new generation of warfare using the new tools available.
When visualizing what this game would look like I took to reviewing the typical “serious games” architecture we have available. After some research I discovered that there are three games on the mass market that have direct counterparts for use in the armed forces, there are several others I’ll describe in brief. The primary three are Full Spectrum Warrior, America’s Army and Defcon: Everybody Dies. Others include simulators for various combat vehicles such as Silent Hunter, a submarine combat simulator, Combat Flight Simulator and some real time strategy games which attempt a realistic interpretation of contemporary battle.
Full Spectrum Warrior is a fast-paced real time tactical game. In it you command two fire teams of US Soldiers in a variety of combat settings. You issue directives by assigning movement commands and disposition orders – you may also take control of any of your soldiers individually for specific target pointing. Full Spectrum Warrior is an adaptation of a product developed for the Army officer training corp, wherein players must make tactical decisions using only line-of-sight information and given intelligence, to simulate fog-of-war .
America’s Army is a first-person shooter developed by the Army as a recruitment tool. In it, players take part in boot camp and eventually combat missions. Expansion packs have included training and operation modules for the special forces and commando units.
Hammes outlines very abstractly what his ideal game would include. He mentions a massively multiplayer world, which implies a persistent environment. He articulates a mixed player base of training players who are officers using the simulator for learning, training operators who are the instructors and professional opponents within the playspace and finally the general public could take part in the game by providing a large, intelligent agent swarm.
Hammes describes the skills important to fighting 4GW which go beyond combat superiority and include rapid infrastructure development emphasizing health facilities, law and order systems and rudimentary civil engineering. Combat superiority is obtained not simply through greater firepower but an increased HUMINT capability, fast OODA loop and low-level decision making capabilities to maximize flexibility and minimize response time.
What would such a game look like? There are few analogs in the gaming world at the moment, though more are perhaps on the horizon. HUMINT must play a role, perhaps players can interact with NPC characters which act as open-source channels for information. This can be used to develop contacts with player agents.
At first, my initial idea was to outfit character groups analogous to real world situations. Soldier-players would be western soldiers with appropriate facilities and weaponry. The Operators would be high-level power brokers within the OPFOR as well as possessing GM-like capabilities to manually control any agent in the playspace. However, this would establish a crutch on western technological superiority rather than teach the kind of problem solving required for the real battlefield – the cards should be stacked overwhelmingly against the soldier-players, success must be tremendously more difficult in the playspace than in real-life conflict.
To that end soldier-players would essentially start out as a team of combatant, power-brokers, a guild. They can recruit members, develop infrastructure and increase a sphere of influence. Of course, other players are members of other teams, each vying for superiority within the finite play space. Teams would need to develop support systems to generate revenue, train soldiers, execute missions, gather intelligence, evade capture etc.
Soldier-players would become, in the playspace, the very enemy they will fight in reality. Some primary aspects to team success will be centered around the hearts and minds tug-of-war between the various factions in a given area. Tactical superiority in combat is insufficient, and largely irrelevant to success within the playspace – as it is in 4GW. NPC agents would represent political decision makers, media outlets, foreign public etc – the AI would of course be modeled around what empirical data the developers can scrounge on real-world events.
The Operators would, in effect, be the western powers. They would control the current regime, if applicable or the US military or equivalent in the playspace. They would have the big toys, superior weaponry, etc. The parameters for their resources would be set as a function of the success of the insurgents and the Operators success as well.
The Operators, in this context are professional game players – they live and breathe the game. The combination of firepower superiority and extensive experience within the simulation would make this team formidable opponents. Especially when coupled with the ability to create missions for the public-players. The Operators would also control the leaders of the various public-player factions, allowing them to form coalitions of the willing against soldier-players.
MMO’s are hideously complicated to develop – easily the most complex and expensive games to develop with budgets into the hundreds of millions and teams in excess of a hundred developers. However, given that the game would essentially be non-profit, open-source development supplemented by a team of organizers and core developers could make it a reality.
There are several MMO architectures available, assuming government agency sponsorship any or all of these could be purchased and adapted by a skilled team of developers. MOD communities abound that could contribute art resources such as models and textures. Existing physics engines could be used. The server architecture, if built around open-source software would cost the hardware and bandwidth.
Making the primary cost-driver gameplay design and development (which is typically part of an equal triumvirate of architecture, content and gameplay when it comes to MMO cost-drivers).
The current limitation of MMOs being latency and how to have spontaneous, non-repetitive, non-default action without crashing your servers is a problem that would need to be surmounted – though several games appear to have figured it out.
More on this to follow, I think.