The Military Metaverse: Part 1

“And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!” 

“Have you used it much?” I enquired. 

“It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”

– Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno Concluded

In 1889 Lewis Carroll imagined the culmination of the surveyor’s art – a map so big it completely covered the territory it was supposed to represent. At the time Carroll was writing, various European institutions were competing with one another to produce maps with greater and greater detail and his reference to a 1:1 map was meant to poke fun at this cartographic brinksmanship. But a century later, engineers at Google went even further – kicking off an ambitious plan to record, store and publish a digital map of the entire globe. 

In their efforts to chart the planet Google was motivated by commercial interests but, historically speaking, map-making has been driven by the demands of Empire and the same holds true today. While Google has been scanning and photographing every last city and town, street-by-street, a similar, much more secretive, project has been underway to turn the planet into a virtual battlefield for the benefit of the U.S. military and its NATO allies. This parallel world, known as the Synthetic Training Environment (STE), represents the latest milestone in the evolution of wargaming from tabletop topographic maps to modern VR simulations. 

Before looking at the STE it’s worth considering the history of wargaming as a discipline because the design of these games tells us a great deal about how military institutions view conflict. The rules of these games and the decisions on what features these organisations choose to include and exclude tell us what military strategists consider important. A close look at wargaming over the years also reveals a very blurry line between the idea of wargames as training and the idea of wargames as entertainment.  

The very broadest definition of the term ‘wargame’ would encompass all sorts of activities designed to convey martial skills. Although tabletop wargaming for military training purposes appears to be a relatively recent phenomenon, wargaming, as a pastime, appears to be as old as civilisation itself. Archaeological evidence for strategy games turns up in ancient Egyptian tombs and burial sites in China, Central Asia and India. The ancient Indian strategy game chaturanga which dates back at least two millenia appears to have been the common ancestor to modern games like chess, xiangqi and shogi (the Chinese and Japanese variants respectively). With its various playing pieces representing the four branches of ancient Indian warfare – infantry, cavalry, chariots and elephants – Chaturanga had a clear military focus. 

To the extent that these chess-like board games depict war at all, they tend to do so in a very abstract way. Even relatively complex map-based games like Risk conveniently set aside issues like logistics and supply, the treatment of casualties, the guarding of prisoners and the challenges posed by terrain and weather so that players can focus on what might be considered purely ‘tactical’ considerations – where to place units for the greatest advantage. By design these board games also tend to ignore what 19th century military philosopher Karl von Clausewitz referred to as ‘friction’ – the cumulative effect of setbacks and obstacles that armies run into when they face off against one another in the real world. 

Perhaps most conspicuously, board games offer players full visibility of what their opponents are doing – providing what theorists refer to as games of ‘perfect information’. Clausewitz, on the other hand, was keen to emphasise the ‘fog of war’ – the chaos and confusion on real world battlefields that make certainty impossible. In the midst of a 19th century battle, miscommunication, rumours and delayed reports not only prevented military commanders from knowing what their opponents were doing but they also made it difficult for them to determine where their own troops had ended up.

Starting in the early 19th century, members of the Prussian aristocracy began to codify the modern practise of wargaming – allowing military commanders to rehearse and reenact specific battles. Baron George Leopold von Reisswitz first advocated for the use of table-top wargames to help train Prussian military officers in the 1810s but it was his son (another George von Reisswitz) who formalised the system that would be used in Prussia’s military academies and, subsequently, in training schools and lounge rooms throughout the world.

The early versions of Baron von Reisswitz’s kriegsspiel (lit ‘wargame’) involved sculpting miniature battlefields in wet sand – onto which wooden blocks were placed to represent various military units. Prussian (i.e., friendly) forces were painted blue while enemy forces were painted red – a convention that is still used in professional wargames to this day. Von Reisswitz’s son simplified the setup while expanding the mechanics of the game. Rather than forcing participants to create battlefields out of sand, later versions of Kriegsspiel were designed to be played on top of accurate, large-scale (1:8,000) topographical maps.

In the 1820s the younger von Reisswitz introduced a number of other innovations to the kriegsspiel to help simulate Clausewitz’s concept of friction. Rather than simply removing defeated tokens from the field like in chess, units in Kriegsspiel could suffer partial losses and still remain in play. Damage was determined by dice rolls and a referee kept track of each unit’s remaining ‘hitpoints’. In order to simulate Clausewitz’s ‘fog of war’ the referee was also charged with keeping track of the position and movements of both armies. Only when the two sides encountered one another on the map would their positions be revealed to one another. After overcoming his initial scepticism, the Prussian Army’s Chief of Staff – Karl Freiherr von Müffling – became a vocal proponent of von Reisswitz’s kriegsspiel, declaring that:

“It’s not a game at all, it’s training for war; I shall recommend it most emphatically to the whole army”

The reliance on experienced officers to adjudicate simulated battles allowed for very complex scenarios but the challenges faced by these referees grew as the games became more elaborate. After von Reisswitz published the full rules of his kriegsspiel in 1824 referees were expected to keep track of troop movement speeds, weapon damage statistics, range calculations and all sorts of other variables via an ever-expanding list of lookup tables¹. In circumstances that will be familiar to modern Dungeons & Dragons role-players the world over, the complaint from military authorities in the late 19th century was not that the kriegsspiel scenarios were unrealistic but that they simply couldn’t find enough experienced referees to meet demand. 

Throughout the 19th century, officers in the Prussian military continued to rely on von Reisswitz’s system. What started as a tool for simulating relatively small tactical engagements between a few hundred troops, cavalry and artillery was gradually expanded to encompass entire armies and sprawling military campaigns². Nevertheless there were sceptics within the military establishment that considered the scenarios too limited or rule-bound to impart any real lessons of warfare. In his history of wargaming Playing at the World, historian Jon Peterson notes the difficulty in establishing the efficacy of these games.

“What role, if any, the practice of kriegsspiel played in the Prussian victories of the 1860s and 1870s is difficult to assess. Moltke, the chief of the General Staff and the architect of the Prussian strategy in both conflicts, was certainly an avid wargamer, but who can say if kriegsspiel improved his military genius or merely delighted it.”

Whatever the merits of kriegsspiel the successes of the Prussian army – despite deficiencies in manpower and resources – prompted many foreign rivals to take an interest in their wargames. In the 1870s von Reisswitz’s handbook was translated into English and French – setting off a wargaming fad within various armed forces that spilled over into the civilian world. Peterson’s history traces the evolution of wargaming through a whole host of tabletop strategy games resembling Risk³. 

One of the more high profile promotors of tabletop wargaming was renowned science fiction author and pacifist H. G. Wells⁴. In 1913 Wells published a bestselling book on recreational wargaming with the title ‘Little Wars: a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys’ games and books‘. Much like his contemporary Elizabeth Magie (who’s Landlords Game would go on to become Monopoly) Wells believed that games could serve to educate the public about dangerous social phenomenon and perhaps even discourage them from enacting the real thing. When it came to war Wells insisted that there was ‘no inconsistency in deploring the practice while perfecting the method’ and that his game should be considered:

“…a homeopathic remedy for the imaginative strategist. Here is the pre-meditation, the thrill, the strain of accumulating victory or disaster and no smashed nor sanguinary bodies, no shattered fine buildings nor devastated country sides, no petty cruelties, none of that awful universal boredom and embitterment, that tiresome delay or stoppage or embarrassment of every gracious, bold, sweet, and charming thing, that we who are old enough to remember a real modern war know to be the reality of belligerence.”

A year later the German army invaded Belgium and ignited one of the most destructive wars in human history. In both that conflict, and the one that followed, wargaming had a substantial impact on the strategies employed by the major powers. Notably the German Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen based his plan for the 1914 invasion of France, in part, on the outcome of gamed simulations.

In World War II German military commanders again made extensive use of wargaming in their plans for the invasions of Poland, France and Russia. When the tables turned in 1944 the German army continued to rely on wargames to plan their defence of ‘Fortress Europe’. By coincidence the Allied invasion of Normandy interrupted a trip by several German officers to the French city of Rennes to plan for just such an attack.

During the battle of the Pacific in World War II both sides made heavy use of Naval simulations and wargaming exercises. U.S. Admiral Chester Nimitz later claimed that: 

“…the war with Japan had been reenacted in the game room here by so many people and in so many different ways that nothing that happened during the war was a surprise – absolutely nothing except the Kamikaze attacks towards the end of the war. We had not visualised those”.

The Imperial Japanese Navy likewise wargamed their attacks on Pearl Harbour and Darwin and subsequent campaigns in the Pacific. One particularly infamous planning session became part of wargaming folklore. In early 1942 the Imperial Japanese Navy began preparing to attack the tiny U.S. airbase on Midway atoll some 2,400 kilometers West of Hawaii. The attack would be carried out by a massive battleship and aircraft carrier armada codenamed ‘Nagumo Force’. 

In the lead up to the attack the IJN carried out several wargaming exercises designed to reveal flaws in the attack plan but, according to former IJN officer Mitsuo Fuchida, the wargames were undermined by the ‘highhanded conduct’ of the presiding officer – Rear Admiral Matome Ugaki – who refused to concede the possibility that enemy carriers might appear on the flank of Nagumo Force. In his memoirs Fuchida related several instances in which Ugaki appeared to place his finger on the scale in favour of the Japanese taskforce.

“In the tabletop maneuvers, for example, a situation developed in which the Nagumo Force underwent a bombing attack by enemy land-based aircraft while its own planes were off attacking Midway. In accordance with the rules, Lieutenant Commander Okumiya, Carrier Division 4 staff officer who was acting as an umpire, cast dice to determine the bombing results and ruled that there had been nine enemy hits on the Japanese carriers. Both Akagi and Kaga were listed as sunk. Admiral Ugaki, however, arbitrarily reduced the number of enemy hits to only three, which resulted in Kaga’s still being ruled sunk but Akagi only slightly damaged. To Okumiya’s surprise, even this revised ruling was subsequently cancelled, and Kaga reappeared as a participant in the next part of the games covering the New Caledonia and Fiji Islands invasions. The verdicts of the umpires regarding the results of air fighting were similarly juggled, always in favor of the Japanese forces.”

When the real operation was launched in early June, 1942 the outcome exceeded the IJN’s worst-case scenario. As the Japanese Armada approached Midway a U.S. Navy Carrier group appeared on the flank of Nagumo Force – attacking just as the Japanese aircraft were refuelling and rearming for a second attack on the island. In his famous essay Losing the War writer Lee Sandlin compared the resulting destruction to an industrial accident.

“One bomb fell on the flight deck of the Akagi, the flagship of the fleet, and exploded amidships near the elevator. The concussion wave of the blast roared through the open shaft to the hangar deck below, where it detonated a stack of torpedoes. The explosion that followed was so powerful it ruptured the flight deck; a fireball flashed like a volcano through the blast crater and swallowed up the midsection of the ship. Sailors were killed instantly by the fierce heat, by hydrostatic shock from the concussion wave, by flying shards of steel; they were hurled overboard unconscious and drowned. The sailors in the engine room were killed by flames drawn through the ventilating system. Two hundred died in all. Then came more explosions rumbling up from below decks as the fuel reserves ignited. That was when the captain, still frozen in shock and disbelief, collected his wits sufficiently to recognize that the ship had to be abandoned.”

In the space of ten minutes the Japanese carriers, Akagi, Kaga and Soryu were destroyed. Another carrier, the Hiryū, followed soon after. The IJN’s disastrous attempt to take Midway represented the turning point for America’s war in the Pacific. That one brief clash claimed the lives of more than 3000 Japanese sailors and sent four aircraft carriers, a heavy cruiser and almost 250 aircraft to the bottom of the ocean. The IJN would spend the next three years attempting, unsuccessfully, to replace the men and machinery that they had lost at Midway.

Simulation and Training

But how did the U.S. Navy of 1942 manage to pull off this victory? While North America benefited from immense natural resources and industrial capacity the U.S. military remained relatively small and inexperienced during the interwar period. But as political turmoil overtook Europe and Asia the United States began mobilising for war at a staggering rate – starting with only 140,000 personnel in 1935 the U.S. military ended the second world war with some eight million of their citizens in uniform. This army was well-paid and well-equipped but the soldiers themselves lacked the practical experience of their axis opponents who had tested their weapons and their tactics in North Africa, Spain and China during the 1930s. 

During the run up to WWII it was becoming increasingly clear that aircraft would play a major role in any future conflict. At Guernica in 1937 the Luftwaffe had demonstrated the destructive capacity of aerial bombardment but it was the Battle of Britain in 1940 which firmly established the notion that ‘air superiority’, more than any other factor, determined the success of military operations on the ground or on the waves. For the U.S. the real shock came on December 7, 1941 when aircraft launched from Japanese carriers laid waste to the U.S. base of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The attack dramatically confirmed that aircraft carriers could deliver devastation over long distances with very little warning. 

But while U.S. planners understood the importance of ‘air power’ their pilots lacked any practical experience employing it. To make up for the shortfall in expertise, the U.S. Army Air Corps invested heavily in training aids and instructional material. The first true flight simulators – so-called Link Trainers – had been purchased before the war by the Air Corps after a series of accidents in poor weather claimed the lives of several air-mail pilots. In order to meet the requirements of the Air Corps, inventor Edwin A. Link used his knowledge of pumps, valves and bellows – gained from working for his father’s organ manufacturing business – to create replica cockpits that pitched and tilted in response to the built-in controls. 

In what would become a recurring theme in the history of simulation the first versions of Link’s device – resembling the coin-operated children’s rides found in shopping centres today – were sold to amusement parks and penny arcades. But as the U.S. mobilised for war, and aircraft production ramped up, the Air Corps purchased dozens of the more sophisticated ‘Link Trainers’ to convey basic flying skills and teach trainees to rely on their instruments in poor visibility. 

Then, as now, pilot training was divided into hours spent on the ground learning theory and the crucial hours spent in the air practising formation flying, navigation and aerobatics. Despite the limitations of these early simulators the hours a trainee spent in the Link Trainer still counted towards their time in the air. 

The Royal Australian Air Force received 170 of these devices as part of the Lend-Lease arrangements with the U.S. government. In an act of institutional superstition every Link Trainer issued to the RAAF was designated with the prefix ‘13’ in the hopes that any karmic misfortune would be confined to the only aircraft that never left the ground.

While some inventors were working on ways to simulate flying others were working on ways to simulate shooting planes out of the sky. Once again the U.S. military enjoyed a substantial technological advantage over its allies and adversaries. Developed in 1942, the Waller Flexible Gunnery Trainer incorporated cutting edge Hollywood theatre technology to train USAAC gunners, under realistic conditions, to track and estimate the range and speed of enemy aircraft. The device used five separate film projectors to fill an enormous half-dome screen with footage recorded from the tail or turret gun position of a WWII bomber. Surround-sound speakers reproduced the drone of engines and the sound of gunfire while motors within the handles of the dummy machine gun simulated the recoil of the real .50 calibre weapons. Trainees received feedback in the form of a high-pitched tone played through headphones whenever they fired at the correct point of aim.

James Reddig, one of the Eastman Kodak engineers employed to work on the secretive trainer was asked by a colleague to give a rough description of the device. 

“Oh, that’s easy. You take the end off the Triborough Bridge, put four men on it with their feet dangling in the air, a console like a church organ, and behind that photocells, amplifiers, levers, scanners, and a lot of other things that I cannot understand. Then, take the Perisphere from the World’s Fair, cut it into four pieces, push the end of the Triborough Bridge into one of the pieces and you have a Waller Gunnery Trainer. It’s just as simple as that.”

The Waller Trainer was a technical triumph but an exceptionally expensive and labour-intensive device to maintain. Vitarama Corporation justified the hefty price tag by touting the Waller’s ‘remarkable and unparalleled reliability’ – claiming in 1946 that it had trained more than 1,000,000 men and saved thousands of lives. For the soldiers who trained with the Waller the appeal was more visceral. Commentators at the time compared it to an elaborate carnival shooting-gallery. One Air Force Major observed that the “effect is great fun. You seem to be sitting in space in the tail turret of a bomber and the attacking planes appear three dimensional and scare the hell out of you.” 

Following WWII a new generation of bombers operating at higher speeds and altitudes made the sort of aerial gunnery skills imparted by the Waller trainer obsolete but the demand for sophisticated flight simulators only increased as aircraft became more complex. Later versions of the Link Trainer in the 1950s incorporated real-time feedback via video feed. Cameras connected to the flight controls recorded the aircraft’s movement over miniature terrain maps decorated with the same scenery used to construct model railroads. Later iterations incorporated crude digital representations of the aircraft’s surroundings. By the 1970s the U.S. Federal Aviation Authority had enough confidence in the quality of these systems to equate time in the simulator with time in a real aircraft – allowing civilian pilots to qualify for certain types of aircraft without ever having flown them.

ARPANet and Networked Simulations

Throughout the long ‘Cold War’ enormous amounts of money and resources were dedicated to planning and preparing for what many believed would be an inevitable, decisive confrontation between the United States and Soviet empires. 

At the same time, in the U.S., concern over the ability to anticipate and retaliate to a potential Soviet nuclear attack spurred research into communications networks that would survive even if entire cities were suddenly wiped out by radioactive fire. In 1964 researchers at the RAND Corporation sketched out a way of portioning and queuing up large chunks of data within a network so that it could be transferred and reassembled at the desired destination – a concept that became known as ‘packet switching’. Using this principle, and some newly developed communications protocols, researchers at the U.S. Defence Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) went on to develop ARPAnet – a research network between U.S. universities, research and military facilities that would eventually form the basis of the modern internet.

Many of the earliest computer games were indirectly funded by the DoD. SpaceWar! was developed in 1962 and ran on the Programmed Data Processor-1 – a ‘microcomputer’ the size of three conjoined refrigerators costing somewhere in the realm of a million (inflation adjusted) dollars. In terms of its game mechanics SpaceWar! is a clear ancestor to the later Asteroid arcade game but instead of breaking up space rocks SpaceWar! pitted two triangular spaceships against one another. Each player fired slow-moving missiles while jetting around a central star which served as a gravity well – allowing each craft to pick up and shed momentum. While the early games pioneered at places like MIT were not created directly for military purposes they derived much of their impetus from a surge in ‘defence’ funding spurred by the success of the Soviet space program and the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957.

MIT remained at the forefront of computer game and simulation design throughout the 60s and 70s, producing the world’s first first-person shooter (FPS) known as Maze Wars which provided a very basic vector-based 3D environment that multiple players could navigate and use to hunt one another down. At the university’s Lincoln Laboratory researcher Ivan Sutherland devised the first head-mounted display – a precursor to the current generation of VR headsets. The display was cumbersome and power-intensive so it had to be suspended overhead from the ceiling – earning it the nickname The Sword of Damocles. Sutherland understood the immediate potential of such devices but also imagined a much more dramatic convergence between the digital simulations and the real world. In a paper written in 1965 he wrote that:

“The ultimate display would, of course, be a room within which the computer can control the existence of matter. A chair displayed in such a room would be good enough to sit in. Handcuffs displayed in such a room would be confining, and a bullet displayed in such a room would be fatal. With appropriate programming such a display could literally be the Wonderland into which Alice walked.”

The first digital turn-based and real-time strategy games began to be developed in the early 1970s – mimicking the sort of tabletop wargaming exercises employed to train officers at military colleges. At the same time, researchers were also working on much more visceral 3D simulations. In 1975 researchers at Northwestern University developed the first digital tank simulator known as Panzer which ran on the PLATO system and combined simple vector landscapes with raster animations to create explosions and other effects. As the technology matured the U.S. military brought together several tech companies to develop SIMNET – a network-based wargaming simulator which allowed military personnel scattered across the country to sit in mock tanks and aircraft and rehearse complex operations via dial-up modem.

In the aftermath of the first Gulf War the U.S. military went to great lengths to improve the quality of SIMNET by attempting to recreate one of the most thoroughly one-sided tank battles of the 20th century. Named after the location where it took place, the Battle of 73 Easting lasted less than two hours and occurred in the midst of a dust storm at the outset of Operation Desert Storm. Several days earlier the retreating Iraqi army had set alight Kuwait’s oil fields and the storm carried a fine haze of unburned crude oil over the battlefield. In the words of one U.S. veteran trying to see through the oil-drenched dust was ’like looking into a closet with sunglasses’. 

Visibility may have been poor but U.S. tanks at the time were equipped with thermal sights that could detect the heat of a human body from hundreds of metres away and easily isolate the engines and exhaust of distant vehicles. This advantage was compounded by the use of onboard targeting computers which enabled gunners to correct for the arc of projectiles as well as the range and movement of their targets. It could also factor in other variables like air temperature, wind speed and barometric pressure. Furthermore the munitions used by U.S. tanks – wire-guided missiles and armour-penetrating slugs of depleted uranium – outranged Iraqi weapons by more than 1.5 kilometres. 

Predictably, the result was a slaughter. During the brief assault on 73 Easting hundreds of Iraqi soldiers were killed and dozens of Iraqi armoured vehicles were destroyed for the loss of a single U.S. vehicle (probably from friendly fire). Despite the wash the U.S. Defence Department clearly felt that there was something to be learned from this one-sided exchange. In his essay All But War is Simulation researcher Tim Lenoir described the forensic details collected by DARPA researchers in the aftermath of the battle. 

“A few soldiers supplied diaries to reconstruct their actions. Some were even able to consult personal tape recordings taken during the chaos. Tracks in the sand gave the simulators precise traces of movement. A black box in each tank, programmed to track three satellites, confirmed its exact position on the ground to eight digits. Every missile shot left a thin wire trail which lay undisturbed in the sand. Headquarters had a tape recording of radio-voice communications from the field. Sequenced overhead photos from satellite cameras gave the big view. A digital map of the terrain was captured by lasers and radar.”

Over the next nine months DARPA researchers fed all this data into SIMNET while veterans of the battle tested and fine-tuned the details. To outside observers the instructional value of replaying such a mechanised massacre might seem low but, to U.S. military planners, the Battle of 73 Easting represented the ideal form of warfare – an immediate rout of the enemy where the only risk was running out of ammunition. 

For many U.S. strategists the salient lesson of the war in Vietnam was a belief that the American public had very little tolerance for military losses. SIMNET, therefore, allowed the military to rehearse the sort of engagements that adhered to the nascent doctrine of ‘force protection’ which placed a premium on the lives of American personnel and depended on overwhelming superiority of firepower. In the years following the First Gulf War a new generation of remotely operated weapons supported by sensor and simulation technology was developed in an attempt to achieve this somewhat wishful mode of warfare.

Wargaming with Off-The-Shelf Technology

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union the U.S. military shifted their procurement strategy away from purpose-built military technology towards commercially available equipment and components that could be adapted for military use. The new directives also obliged the military to adopt the same sort of management processes that had been the mainstay of corporate decision making. Thus the various branches of the military were encouraged to make use of ‘off the shelf’ civilian technologies.

Training and simulation was one area where potential savings could be made. Although dwarfed by the costs associated with staging mass military exercises in the great outdoors, the cost of training individuals in purpose-built simulators can also be substantial. An ‘aeroplane on a stick’ is an expensive proposition – especially if you want to perfectly replicate actual flight controls or build realistic virtual environments. Accordingly, most high-end simulators end up costing at least twice as much as the vehicle they simulate.

Denied their traditional blank cheques from the Pentagon, defence contractors turned elsewhere for sources of revenue and R&D inspiration. In his book War Play writer Corey Mead summarised the new military procurement paradigm.

“…even in this time of seeming crisis, the contractors ended up coming out ahead, as it quickly became apparent that another industry was hungry for their wares: the entertainment industry. The relationship born of this outcome was symbiotic: defense contractors would spin their technologies off into the commercial game industry, and the commercial game industry would spin its technologies right back.”

In 1993 Id Software released the groundbreaking first-person shooter Doom. As well as incorporating a range of new graphics technologies it also featured a fast peer-to-peer networking system for multiplayer gaming and an easy-to-use file format that allowed anyone to make their own levels and modify aspects of the game⁵. At least one branch of the U.S. military saw Doom as a potential combat simulator early on. 

When Doom II was released in 1994 members of the Marine Corps’ Modeling and Simulation Management Office created their own modification of the game that replaced demons and energy weapons with sprites based on GI Joe action figures and weapons modelled on the Marine Corps standard-issue small arms. Ostensibly Marine Doom allowed soldiers to practise general squad-based tactics but it’s hard to imagine picking up any practical skills from playing Doom. Military officials, however, did suggest a more plausible use case – using the level-editor to recreate real world locations so that soldiers could rehearse specific missions. Still institutionally traumatised by the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979 and the botched rescue operation that followed, the Marines suggested that they could recreate the floor plan of a U.S. embassy in Marine Doom so that soldiers could familiarise themselves its the layout before mounting a rescue mission⁶.

Setting aside Doom’s somewhat dubious training value, this quick and dirty approach to simulation proved to be incredibly cost effective. Lenoir notes that the creation of SIMNET involved several hundred employees, took more than ten years to perfect and came with a price tag of about $140 million USD. By contrast Marine Doom was built by eight people in the space of six months for a little less than $25,000. 

These savings turned out to be largely academic as the era of belt-tightened training budgets and procurement contracts didn’t last long. In the late 1990s the U.S. Army received $45-million dollars to establish the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California so that the army could tap into the high-tech expertise of game studios. 

During this period developers from MicroProse and Aces Game Studio competed to create increasingly sophisticated flight-simulators for the commercial market. MicroProse’s Gunship 2000 – which simulated helicopter combat – included a built-in level editor which allowed players to create their own scenarios by placing friendly and enemy units onto a digital map of the battlefield. The civil-aviation oriented Flight Simulator series also broke new ground by allowing players to practise takeoffs and landings from specific airports modelled after their real-world counterparts. Throughout the 1990s the graphics of these commercial simulators improved by orders of magnitude with each iteration. Flight Simulator 5.1, released in 1995, featured 3D clouds, fog, weather effects and terrain rendered with low-resolution satellite images while later versions included photo-realistic cockpits and instrument displays. 

In an eerie coincidence this technological arms race between military and commercial simulations indirectly set the scene for the U.S government’s disastrous Global War on Terror. The Al-Qaeda hijackers who carried out the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001 had collectively spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours training in commercial flight simulators running modified versions of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2000. Some had flunked out of their courses for failing to demonstrate the requisite skills but none of their instructors seemed to notice that their students weren’t interested in practising takeoffs or landings.

In Part 2 of the Military Metaverse we’ll look at how the Global War on Terror drove an even greater convergence between computer game studios and military institutions – paving the way for the Synthetic Training Environment.

1. The Kriegsspiel rule book included tables to simulate morale and exhaustion, inclement weather, the time taken to construct or destroy bridges and fortifications as well as the handicap presented by the capture of prisoners or the disruption of supply lines.

2. An 1848 game held in Berlin designed to simulate a war with Austria represented the first strategic war game. 

3. These strategy board games and their daunting rule-sets ultimately provided a template for Gary Gygax’s seminal fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons.

4. In a postscript to a later edition of Little Wars H.G. Wells commented on the failings of official British wargames:

“I have had quite a considerable correspondence with military people who have been interested by [Little Wars], and who have shown a very friendly spirit towards it—in spite of the pacific outbreak in its concluding section. They tell me—what I already a little suspected—that Kriegspiel, as it is played by the British Army, is a very dull and unsatisfactory exercise, lacking in realism, in stir and the unexpected, obsessed by the umpire at every turn, and of very doubtful value in waking up the imagination, which should be its chief function.”

5. Game content – graphics, sound effects, level geometry – was stored in unencrypted ‘WAD’ files; standing for ‘Where’s All the Data?’, enabling amateur game designers to customise and create their own WAD files to run modified versions of Doom.

6. Fifteen years later the CIA created a 1:1 scale replica of Osama Bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound at their training facility in North Carolina so that U.S. Navy SEALS could rehearse their assassination mission.

7. In addition to this tongue-in-cheek reference to barnstorming Manhattan there’s also a throwaway line in the game’s intro video in which two players are flying over a low-poly version of New York and marvelling at the possibilities. ’John’ one of them says ‘you just about crashed into the Empire State Building!’ to which John cheekily replies ‘hey, that would be cool’.

References
Garry Brewer, Martin Shubik (1979) – The War Game: A Critique of Military Problem Solving
Francis J. McHugh (1966) – Fundamentals of War Gaming
H.G. Wells (1913) – Little Wars
Andrew Wilson, John Curry (1969) – The Bomb and the Computer: The History of Professional Wargaming 1780- 1968
Jon Peterson (2012) – Playing at the World
Corey Mead (2013) – War Play : video games and the future of armed conflict
Rob Riddel (1997) – Doom Goes to War
Popular Science (September 1943) – Movies Train Air Gunners
Military History In a Minute – (2024) – Waller Aerial Gunnery Trainer
Ron Larham (2011) – Naval Wargames and Related Stuff
Ivan Sutherland (1965) – Augmented Reality: The Ultimate Display
Jim Millar.net (Accessed 2023) – SIMNET Case Study
Mike Zyda (2020) – Tape #025 1991 Recreation of the Battle of 73 Easting
John Rhea (1989) – Planet Simnet
British Pathé (1956) – Interview with Peter Cushing
Josey Ballinger (2001) – Authorities question criteria for access to flight simulators