Future soldier
Wargaming is I 28
n 2015, I toured the International Defence Industry Fair on a particularly humid May in Istanbul. Aside from the usual displays of arms and armour – a thronging crowd pushed to get a look inside the prototype of the Altay main battle tank – the Training and Simulation exhibition was causing a hubbub too. There, I joined some soldiers in a friendly pistol shooting contest set up on a virtual gun range, complete with weapons that simulated the recoil of real firearms. While they may have had the live firing experience, I grew up playing Time Crisis with a light gun on the
serious business
For centuries, military training has been straightforward enough: drills, exercises, fi ring ranges. But, like so many other areas of military life touched by new technology, that’s changing fast. That’s clear enough in the British Army, with DE&S developing a range of virtual platforms, allowing them to
practice everything from shooting to tactics via the comfort of a computer. Yet if these serious cousins to video games are remarkably fl exible – allowing units to switch up the weather or the environment at the click of a mouse – what can they offer that traditional training can’t? And to what extent is the future of training destined to be done in ones and zeroes? Tallha Abdulrazaq investigates.
PlayStation. And though we certainly all had fun, the fact I was able to do so well against trained soldiers told me that this definitely wasn’t realistic enough – and warfighting was very much a soberingly realistic endeavour.
But, aside from these less-than-realistic virtual ranges, there are a wide variety of simulation experiences that run the gamut of tactical to strategic level training. These include fictional villages recreated like a movie set, to highly advanced and physically expansive facilities that simulate a broad range of scenarios – all without
Defence & Security Systems International /
www.defence-and-security.com
Rob Kane/UK MoD
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