Call Of Duty? The Long And Symbiotic Relationship Between The Video Game Industry And The Pentagon

In 1982, SIMNET’s development gathered serious momentum, and by the end of the decade, it had gone online. Along the way, Pentagon officials effectively built the first “massively multiplayer online role-playing game” (MMORPG): The essential knowledge that Thorpe and his colleagues said that SIMNET would promote was related to group-based, rather than individual, training experience. Users might be wired into physically distant terminals, but they were nonetheless a brigade, interfacing in real time inside the same cramped, tense, albeit digital tank cabin. This experience would, according to Thorpe and his division of military-tech evangelists, translate into military success down the road. And so Thorpe’s vision came to pass, in the simulation-driven corridors of the Pentagon. In trying to forecast the future, Thorpe’s planning division had created it.

From our vantage point, four decades into the computing revolution, SIMNET’s animation—cube-like and clunky by even the humblest standards—doesn’t begin to approach what we would consider “realism” in terms of user experience. And it suffered from what computer engineers call “latency,” the delay between an input and its execution on-screen.

Still, SIMNET marked an important design milestone, charting a course for modern video and war gaming: Right out of the gate, it foreshadowed the vanishing boundary between gaming and war. Reality, or an idea of it, could be collapsed into a compact unit and made fully scalable, replicable, and tweakable for individual users. Speaking to Wired in 1997, Duncan Miller, a project manager at Bolt Beranek & Newman in Cambridge, Massachusetts (the DARPA-approved outfit that was responsible for creating Arpanet, the forerunner of the Internet, and that had been contracted to program SIMNET), said that “much of what we think of as ‘out there’ is really internally constructed, coming from models running in our minds.”

This was a rather heady evocation of long-standing debates about how and whether humans apprehend reality, dating back to Plato, but Miller’s theory was entirely in line with the Department of Defense’s efforts to reimagine warfare from the ground up. It’s perhaps also relevant that Miller was a member of the Society of American Magicians; what he was describing was essentially a conjuring trick. For gaming pioneers and their successors, cognition was itself a form of simulation. The only difference, in Miller’s telling, was that what we are all prompted to accept as the world “out there” was now taking crude shape within the Pentagon’s processors.

In February 1991, during the American ground invasion in the Gulf War, Captain H.R. McMaster (better known today for his brief stint as national security adviser in the Trump administration) led the Second Armored Cavalry Regiment against the Iraqi Republican Guard’s Tawakalna Division. The ensuing action—named “73 Easting” for a line on a map used to track the troops’ advance through the desert—saw the Americans emerge victorious in just 22 minutes, even though their forces were outnumbered and they were besieged by a vicious sandstorm.

Indeed, 73 Easting was remarkable not just for its display of military might; the Pentagon brass also touted the operation as a definitive confirmation of Jack Thorpe’s vision. During preparations for the invasion, 80 percent of the leaders of the US ground forces in Iraq had trained on early SIMNET builds. But more important, by mapping out this real-life battle on a virtual grid a few months later, Pentagon war planners unleashed what would become the key innovation of the military-themed gaming industry: a lifelike experience of combat scaled to individual users.

To help them prepare 73 Easting for its SIMNET debut, military planners demanded heaps of data. That’s why, just a month later, McMaster went back in Iraq to retrace his division’s progression across the same desert battlefield. McMaster’s confrontation with the Republican Guard would become a prototype for a new generation of simulated warfare. At the request of the Army’s vice chief of staff, Gen. Gordon Sullivan, McMaster and nearly every other officer involved in the fighting were convened for interviews. Pentagon officials amassed officers’ diaries and personal tape recordings, and dutifully recorded tracks in the sand left by military vehicles. Tanks carried black boxes during combat that were later used to confirm their exact ground positions. Missiles left fragile wire trails revealing their trajectories and explosive descents. War planners reviewed satellite images and radio transmissions documenting the action. At the Institute for Defense Analyses’ Simulation Center in Alexandria, Virginia, technicians worked for nine months reassembling the digital shards of the first Gulf War.

Events as they had actually happened were etched into electronic perpetuity—but the results enabled military war-gamers to alter the fabric of reality, entertaining infinite what-ifs and counterfactuals. At the 1991 Interservice/Industry Training, System and Education Conference (I/ITSEC)—an annual Pentagon-organized military-tech expo that brings together representatives of the armed services, academia, and industry—Thorpe and his colleagues debuted a videotape chronicle of “The Reconstruction of the Battle of 73 Easting.” According to one officer, this pivotal digital archive signaled “group training at the combat level like we’ve never had before…. We can test future ideas, concepts, tactics, doctrine, and vehicles because we now have a benchmark that’s rooted in ground truth.” As with any good video game, the endless replayability of the virtual version of 73 Easting was pivotal to its success.

The following year, DARPA’s whiz kids spliced together hundreds of pieces of computer hardware at the eleventh hour at I/ITSEC. Preparing to unveil a bigger and better SIMNET before an enraptured crowd of military buyers and tech colleagues, the Pentagon’s vanguard corps of computer geeks snaked network connections throughout the convention center’s auditorium early into the morning. Despite a few hiccups—errant connections and the like—the computer-mediated version of 73 Easting captivated the audience by both replicating real-world combat and gaming out alternate scenarios on the fly. One giddy attendee bragged that it was the “first time where industry and government got together and were able to demonstrate the interoperability of various applications on one medium.” In English, this meant that the world was on the verge of beholding the video-gaming universe as we’ve come to know it. Before long, war games would cut across time and space: The Army initially procured 260 SIMNET-capable simulators and distributed them to 11 military sites, from the Mojave to Bavaria. By 2000, Thorpe speculated, there would likely be thousands more.

If the beginning of the Cold War set the simulation boom in motion, then the conflict’s end forced it to evolve. The threat of a massive “peace dividend”—or what the military more ominously called “drawdown”—meant that Pentagon spending could be reined in from Reagan-era highs. A new war-making mandate took shape as a result. Viewing large-scale, expensive land-based wars as a thing of the past, the military establishment embraced a tech-centric “revolution in military affairs” (RMA). From special operations to precision-guided munitions, clean and laser-like efficiency would now be the watchword for Pentagon outlays.

The panicked talk of a drawdown rapidly subsided. Preparation continually displaced action as the rollout of next-generation weapons and ever-larger training exercises droned on. Case in point: In 1995, the Army introduced a new planning mandate, Force XXI, under the rationale that in future US interventions involving two simultaneous major regional conflicts, “modernizing” would have to be achieved “through product improvement.”

From the nonstop broadcasts of bunker-buster explosives in January 1991 to the “shock and awe” opening salvos of the second Iraq invasion a dozen years later, the new tech directives issuing from the Pentagon were designed to overwhelm America’s pitiably outmatched enemies—all via the push of a button.

The inauguration of RMA pushed the military to reorganize in the manner of a data-driven corporation, even as it was underwritten by massive federal subsidies. As the end of the Cold War lifted the veil of secrecy from military research, the lines separating military contractors from their commercial counterparts all but vanished. By 1998, the Army’s budget for modeling and simulation programs had surpassed $2.25 billion. The historians of science Timothy Lenoir and Henry Lowood note that while this was a fraction of total defense spending, it turbocharged private-sector investment in modeling and simulation technologies, primarily because of the military’s new, looser contracting and procurement protocols. In 2000, Michael Macedonia, the chief scientist at what was then known as the Army Simulation, Training and Instrumentation Command (STRICOM), predicted that by “aggressively maneuvering to seize and expand their market share, the entertainment industry’s biggest players are shaping a twenty-first century in which consumer demand for entertainment—not grand science projects or military research—will drive computing innovation.”

More than anything else, the massively popular 1994 first-person-shooter game Doom II prefigured the new normal in the overlapping war-planning and gaming worlds. The first version was built on shareware, meaning that anyone who wanted to could modify its source code. The Marine Corps adapted the game into its own training platform called Marine Doom, morphing Doom II’s space fantasy into a close-quarters urban combat simulator, with the designs of the battle scenes’ “bad guys” cribbed from G.I. Joe action figures.

Marine Doom didn’t entirely catch on as a training tool; it was more of a proof of concept than anything else, used to gin up enthusiasm for the military’s larger simulation development programs. And as one Marine suggested to Wired, the game would serve as an extracurricular component of “professional military education.” In other words, it drove home the benefits of a symbiotic “military-entertainment complex,” in science-fiction author Bruce Sterling’s formulation.

Military theorists were quick to pick up on the implications. Michael Zyda, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, held a workshop in October 1996 to explore the partnership that was taking shape between the Pentagon and the digital entertainment sector, documented in a report titled “Modeling and Simulation: Linking Entertainment and Defense.” Though Zyda lamented that “the flows of technology between the defense and entertainment industries have largely been uncoordinated,” he predicted that would soon change. Representatives from companies like MäK, Spectrum HoloByte, and Silicon Graphics—which were all part of DARPA’s extended universe of public-private collaboration in the increasingly indistinguishable fields of gaming and combat simulation—signed on to Zyda’s plan.

Zyda’s vision of entertainment and military crossovers landed him a $45 million five-year start-up grant from the Army in 1999 to launch the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California. Beyond the ICT, money splashed around liberally in this brave new digital world, providing an ascendant class of techies with ample opportunities to cash in. Companies like Real3D and Viewpoint DataLabs lacked name recognition in Silicon Valley, but they made up for it in market synergy. The former was a Lockheed spin-off, created after the aerospace giant’s merger with Martin Marietta in 1995. Real3D’s goal was to market graphics technology for civilian use, which led to a profitable partnership with the gaming company Sega. Viewpoint DataLabs, meanwhile, hawked “DataSets”—3D computer renderings that provide the underlying structures for digital animations—at military trade fairs and to film studios for use in splashy war and sci-fi films. (Viewpoint contributed the F-18 fighter jets for the 1998 blockbuster Independence Day.) Putting a bow on the whole endeavor, Zyda acknowledged earlier collaborations with executives from Pixar Animation Studios and Walt Disney Imagineering; for their part, these entertainment chieftains later admitted that “funding from defense agencies such as DARPA had a significant effect on the development of fundamental technologies critical to defense and entertainment.”

For members of the Pentagon brass, this arrangement also satisfied a psychological need. Military techno-fantasies lent war planners a new sense of purpose and broke the grip of anxiety that had set them adrift at the Cold War’s end. A simulation race could supersede the arms race: Why search for an existential enemy when you could render one on-screen? STRICOM’s motto declared that “All But War Is Simulation”—but the ubiquity of both simulated war-gaming and Pentagon-sanctioned FPS dramas soon gave the lie to that claim. Jack Thorpe’s designs succumbed in short order to a potent, endlessly renewable push to make real and simulated battle practically interchangeable.

In late 2004, the investigative journalist Gary Webb, writing in the Sacramento News & Review, observed a new phenomenon in online gaming: More than 4 million users were playing an online, PC-based first-person-shooter game produced by the US government. America’s Army had been released two years earlier, for free, on the first Fourth of July after 9/11. “The goal,” according to Zyda, who had a hand in its development, “was to give [players] a synthetic experience of being in the Army.”

The public and media reaction was, according to the Army, “overwhelmingly positive.” A reviewer wrote in Salon that America’s Army might help “create the wartime culture that is so desperately needed now”—a “‘Why We Fight’ for the digital generation.” The Army soon signed a contract with Ubisoft, a French video game publisher, to bring America’s Army to commercial consoles. “We’d like to reach a broader audience,” Col. Casey Wardynski, the military economist who came up with the idea for the game, explained. “Consoles get you there. For every PC gamer, there are four console gamers.” Webb reported that America’s Army was also an aptitude test, collecting data to help the Army figure out what kinds of jobs to give potential recruits. As the Los Angeles Times announced in the wake of the game’s release, “Uncle ‘Sim’ Wants You.” It was a logical, if dystopian, next step.

There’s an oft-repeated line that military FPS games are propaganda, designed to manufacture consent for both specific wars and militarism writ large. Undoubtedly, America’s Army, along with Full Spectrum Warrior—also developed at the ICT as a training and recruitment tool—confirm that this has been true at least some of the time. But these claims also tend to have an air of neo-Luddism or moral panic, glossing over the fact that at a certain point, both entertainment and defense concerns slipped out of the war planners’ brief and further into the black hole that is the market.

Like any speculative technology, simulation has been an extended exercise in the hedging of bets. The 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, together with the United States’ ensuing Global War on Terror, reinvigorated the nation’s sense of military mission and, for the defense establishment, reaffirmed the RMA’s core lessons, namely that future wars would look less and less familiar. Training—with a heavy emphasis on simulation—could in theory make the black-box scenarios assailing the Pentagon more knowable.

But the benefits of the new digital arms race have been unclear at best. On the one hand, in terms of sheer violence, it’s scarcely made warfare leaner and more efficient, as measured by the grim metric of mass death (at least for non-Americans). The Costs of War Project at Brown University estimates that at least 4.5 million people have died directly and indirectly as a result of the post-9/11 wars. On the other hand, the military-industrial complex’s most fervent techno-optimists have made out like bandits. That’s the clear lesson of the newest turn in militarized gaming: Call of Duty is just one successful war game among many, all of which reverently update and repurpose the ideology and iconography of American imperial conquest. Regardless of whether you endorse the version of warfare these games present, you are, on some level, liable to accept it as true: The history can be bunk so long as the players buy into the violence.

At the same time, like the Space Force, the Army now sponsors an esports team out of Fort Knox. In a strange Möbius-strip twist, the Kentucky installation that once hosted SIMNET exercises now livestreams a crop of professional gamers on Twitch. Not to be outdone, the Navy reserves as much as 5 percent of its recruiting budget for similar initiatives, according to The Guardian. And in 2020, fake links on the Army’s esports channel advertised prize giveaways that redirected viewers to recruiting pages. “Esports is just an avenue to start a conversation,” as Maj. Gen. Frank Muth told an esports correspondent, before furnishing an ideal model for such an exchange: “‘What do you do?’ ‘I’m in the Army.’”

Perhaps, as the political scientist James Der Derian has suggested, “Vietnam syndrome” was succeeded by “simulation syndrome.” As the military-entertainment synergies have ossified into a kind of path dependence, gaming engineers and war planners are increasingly overtaxed by the effort to meet the demand for reality-based experiences, continuously pushing the envelope to outpace the oversaturated sensibilities of their user base. Lurking beneath the surface, too, is the fact that if military technologies permeate civilian life, and if civilian technologies serve military purposes, then the militarization of the modern world may run more deeply than we would like to admit. This may not be the brand of revolution that either RMA boosters or the libertarian prophets of controlled digital chaos in the private sector bargained for. But if Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is any indicator, that circuit won’t be broken anytime soon.