Virtual Worlds: The Future of Military Training

We reported earlier in the week that Forterra was opening a National Security Division (NSD).  We spoke with VP Dr. Michael Macedonia, formerly Director of the Disruptive Technology Office and Chief Technology Officer for the U.S. Army Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation, about plans for the division and what the government is looking for in the virtual worlds space.   "We're not trying to build first-person shooters," he said. "Virtual worlds are perfect environments for developing first-person thinkers. You can build worlds of sufficient complexity and immersiveness to challenge people to think."

"Forterra has always had a serious games focus" said Macedonia. "And the military has been using serious games, or simulation, for a long, long time. The technology has moved out of systems that require an enormous amount of hardware and proprietary software, down to PC-based systems. In the military context, MMOGs are a logical progression for training. The same thing goes in the other government sectors, homeland security, law enforcement, and the intelligence community, where there's a premium on being able to train people intelligently and efficiently while providing collaboration across communities of interest."

Chris Badger, Forterra VP of Marketing, said the NSD is only the beginning for Forterra.

"As part of our evolving strategy, we're converting from being a service-oriented company to a product-oriented company, but even within that context, there are different needs and different sectors," he said. This is the first step Forterra is going through to make sure we can deal with these different sectors in different ways. We're going to be doing other divisions like this over time."

All the divisions' target customers have different needs, but Macedonia is "almost reticent to say 'customer' when it comes to the military," he said. "The reality is that we're trying to supply a technology and capability to a very demanding and important mission."

Forterra has already worked with the military to develop medical projects, cultural training, and extending distance learning capabilities.

The Future of Virtual Worlds and the Army

"These are very exciting opportunities," said Macedonia. "The thing that gets me really excited is the 3D Internet that Dave Rolston [Forterra CEO] talked about. It's an old idea that's finally being realized. People in government, and business, and education are finally catching on."

The current state of virtual worlds is often compared to the early days of the Internet, full of early adopters and potential, but drawing skeptics to flock on the outside.  Macedonia thinks it's even more important to look at what happened in 2006. When the majority of homes finally had broadband connections, video sharing over YouTube and iTunes exploded. As he explained in his Computer Magazine column, with a mandated switch away from analog television in 2009, almost all media become digital.

"When everything is digital, we can really have a convergence," he said. "But the problem is, how can we handle all this different media? How can we stitch it together in a way that's coherent? I think that's virtual worlds." 

For government, military, and security applications that information convergence is even more important.  Virtual world platforms, like those built on Forterra's OLIVE software development kit, provide a way to process information that's familiar to users.

"Essentially it ties all this information together that they have and puts it into context in the world and allows people to train, plan, interact, and collaborate in this large, seamless world that's parallel to the real world," said Macedonia. "It almost merges the two worlds."

And Macedonia believes the military and government are not only aware of the possibility, but eager for it.

"I was deeply moved a long time ago by Ender's Game," he said. "And it's a common theme in the military. And it's real now. It's no longer just science fiction. And the whole premise behind Snow Crash is real now. These are very powerful tools, very powerful mechanisms. Businesses as well as government recognize that. And the government, I think, is willing to take a lot more risks than businesses initially—particularly the military. They're looking for that edge. The US military has always valued training and education."

It's important to note that most of the applications Macedonia envisions, or at least discusses, are fairly far away from an Ender's Game scenario. Instead he talks about cultural awareness and training in statesmanship. 

Yesterday a Command Sergeant from Afghanistan showed Macedonia a map of the area his battalion worked in. Then he showed a map of all the cultures, tribes, and sub-tribes that lived in the area, a space about the size of Vermont.

"The first thing that hit me was that this looked like trying to figure out who all the different clans are in World of Warcraft," said Macedonia. "Substitute clans for tribes, and you're there. It's all these different cultures and subcultures. The Command Sergeant, who is in his late 30s, has basically become a member of the State Department. He's negotiating with all these tribal leaders. He said, 'We killed 2000 enemies in the 16 months we were there, but we also spent millions of dollars trying to help them, because they have nothing. 1 in 3 children die in childbirth. The mortality for men is 42. If you live to 70 you're doing great.' You have to be warrior and negotiator, and how do you learn about this? In his case, you spend a lot of time. And the Army spends a lot of time training people. And the technologies we have in OLIVE are the perfect place to train with people to negotiate with different cultures."

An officer from Iraq at the same meeting told Macedonia that "The first thing you learn is that if you want to sit down and talk someone, you better be ready to drink chai--for a long time."

"They don't show that in any manual," said Macedonia. "We can build worlds where you can learn that. You can construct worlds where you build this parallel universe to these cultures."

Virtual worlds also allow for the military's After Action Review. "We can build metrics. We can collect data," said Macedonia. "People go through training, and we can go through the after action review and learn how to improve our performance and processes. Virtual worlds become laboratories for improvement and experimentation and new ideas. That's just one of the ways that the military is using this."

The military has had a long history with virtual training applications, from flight simulators to first-person shooters. (Here's an interview with Macedonia on his previous work.) But Macedonia argues that virtual worlds offer significantly different benefits from single-player applications.

"For one thing, you can build very good training systems that way, part task trainers," said  Macedonia. They're training systems for limited focus, assembly and disassembly for the M16 rifle or installation of a light bulb. We do that very, very well. That's training, though. That's not learning and education."

Now he believes that the bigger challenge is to train soldiers in how to process information and operate as a group.

"The real challenge we're going to have, as was demonstrated yesterday to me, was how we get people to think clearly, quickly, and efficiently," he said. "You may have limited information or too much information. You have to deal with a lot of people, and as a part of a team. There's a Japanese saying that 'one of us is as smart as all of us.' I came from the intelligence community, and the biggest challenge that 9-11 presented was how we can share information with each other and how we can learn to collaborate."

Virtual Worlds Developers Can Make Money by Saving the Government Money

Right now one of the best ways to train in intensive, group-oriented situations for the military is the National Training Center in the Mojave Desert

"The government spends a fortune," said  Macedonia. "They bring all these people together and they fight this big ballet. It's not a part-task trainer, it's a complicated task combining logistics, air support, intelligence, all of that. They all need to mesh together.  The power of virtual worlds is that they let you do that."

Another major problem Macedonia sees in the military is training National Guard members. "If you live in Montana, you might have to travel once a month to Wyoming  because that's where your unit is," he said. "And they almost never get to go to the National Training Center. How do you give them the same level of training?"

With National Guard members becoming a more and more important part of the national security plan, that becomes an ever present question. Likewise, with soldiers spending more and more time overseas, there's less time to train at home.

"I've heard commanders say 'I have all the money and people I need. I just don't have time,'" said Macedonia. "We can overcome time and space. A lot of the costs in training and education are getting people to the place to train."

The Army spent about $16 billion on education last year out of a $90 billion budget. The military as a whole, Macedonia said, had a defense budget of about $480 billion last year, with at least $50 billion going to training. 

 It's not only transportation costs of time and money that come into play, though. Macedonia points out the cost of bullets for marksmanship training, fuel for actual movement training, and actors for cultural training. 

It takes about $1 billion to send a brigade to the National Training Center. At the most, only eight brigades travel there each year. But also traveling to the desert are "400 role players who act as Iraqi civilians and villagers in over 300 different Iraqi buildings," said Macedonia. "They are brought in from LA and other cities to work with the soldiers. What if they could do it from where they're all already at? We can do that."