Pentagon to Recruit Hollywood: The Goal Is to Make Military Training Simulators More Realistic
BY: Andrew Pollack
August 19, 1999
LOS ANGELES -
Movies like ''Saving Private Ryan'' and ''Platoon have been acclaimed for portraying the experience of war in a gruesome,
realistic and emotional way. Now the Pentagon is preparing to tap some of that Hollywood talent to make military training
simulators more realistic.
The army announced Wednesday that it is giving $45 million to the University of Southern California over the next five years to
create a research center to develop advanced military simulations. The research center will enlist film studios and video game
designers for the effort, with the promise that any technological advances can also be applied to make more compelling video
games and theme park rides.
''We could never hope to get the expertise of a Steven Spielberg or some of the other film industry people working just on army
projects,'' said Louis Caldera, the secretary of the army. But the new institute, Mr. Caldera said, will be ''a win-win for everyone.''
The idea for the new center, to be called the Institute for Creative Technologies, reflects the fact that although Hollywood and the
Pentagon may differ markedly in culture, they overlap in technology. Moreover, military technology, which once trickled down to
civilian use, now often lags behind what is available in games, rides and movie special effects.
For instance, the army has simulators that allow hundreds of soldiers in different locations to engage in a tank battle on the same
virtual battlefield. Some games played on the Internet, though, allow thousands of personal computer users to interact in the same
virtual world.
''We're doing it on million-dollar simulators, and they're doing it on $400 PCs,' said Michael Macedonia, chief scientist at the army
Simulation, Training and Instrumentation Command in Orlando, Florida
Although the military has already experimented with using some video games as training tools, Mr. Macedonia said tapping
commercial technology could save the Pentagon money and speed its technology development.
Film and game companies that take part in the new research will be expected to contribute financing to it, and it is not clear how
many of them will want to do so, since recruitment has only now begun.
Executives at Walt Disney Co. and Sony Pictures who were mentioned by USC officials as being interested did not return calls,
while Mr. Spielberg was said by his spokesman to be out of the country on vacation.
Another obstacle could be the cultural differences between the buttoned- down, procedure-oriented military and the open-shirted,
informal entertainment community; the army hopes that USC, which already has ties to Hollywood through its film school and to
the military through research programs, will provide a comfortable neutral ground.
Officials involved in the new institute said its primary focus would be not on shooting simulations, though some will be done, but on
more complex exercises that reflect the changing role of the army, which these days is sometimes dispatched on short notice to
places like Kosovo and Bosnia for peacekeeping operations that involve little fighting.
Such operations require soldiers to be trained rapidly in local customs and conditions and, once on the ground, to interact with local
citizens and navigate among different factions. An army training center in Germany already employs actors to play the part of
local people as a way of training soldiers for such duty.
But the army hopes to develop computerized simulators to help soldiers learn local culture, to practice negotiating with the mayor
or with an angry mob, or to move into a hostage situation and immediately tell friend from foe. At present, such simulations are
beyond the state of the art.
''Defense simulations are not very good at modeling humans and modeling human behaviors,'' said Michael Zyda, a professor at
the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. ''We can't do things other than shoot-'em-ups. ''
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