War games 2.0

The driver of the supply truck never saw the rocket-propelled grenade that hit him. But his escort, a heavily armed Humvee, spotted the insurgents almost as soon as they opened fire. The Humvee's gunner aimed his machine gun and fired, wiping out the bad guys with a click of his computer mouse.

It's not Fallujah; it's Cambridge, home of BBN Technologies, the legendary firm that helped develop the Internet and electronic mail. Now BBN is designing realistic combat computer games designed to help save the lives of US troops patrolling the streets of Iraq.

"It's not a source of entertainment," said Bruce Roberts, who heads up BBN's DARWARS project. "It's serious stuff." Roberts's team put together his combat simulator in just seven months; it's already being used to train soldiers destined for Iraq in places like Fort Lewis, in Washington state.

DARWARS takes its name from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon agency that funds unusual technologies that might have military value. Much of BBN's early Internet research was funded by the agency, and BBN has long been a major recipient of the agency's dollars.

The Pentagon agency invested $1.5 million in the game project, which has so far produced DARWARS Ambush!, a combat simulation game for training up to 24 soldiers at a time in military convoy operations. The BBN team that produced Ambush! is also working on a version to teach the skills needed in foot patrols.

The DARWARS idea began with Ralph Chatham, a former sonar researcher who joined the Pentagon agency three days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Chatham had been impressed with the success of advanced military training programs like the Army's National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif. Every major unit in the Army gets this kind of training every three years, said Chatham.

"I wanted to see if I could create a program that allowed us to bottle that and export it," he said.

The best way, he decided, was to capture the experience of veterans inside a computer game that any soldier could play.

His goal "was to train the voice in the back of the head of every soldier to be aware of what might happen, of where an ambush might occur," Chatham said.

In January, Chatham got the funding to go ahead. By March, he'd settled on BBN as the best organization to oversee the effort.

"We zeroed in on convoy ambushes as the right place to start," said BBN's Roberts, because such ambushes had taken a particularly heavy toll of American lives.

For gaming expertise, BBN contacted Total Immersion Software Inc., an Alameda, Calif., company founded by Stephen Blankenship, a former police officer who later became a senior producer for the leading game maker Electronic Arts. He founded Total Immersion to offer his gaming expertise to the US military, calling it "a way for us to sort of contribute to national security in a tiny way."

BBN and Total Immersion modified an off-the-shelf game called Operation Flashpoint, which was created in the Czech Republic in 2001. The game was readily available from software retailers, it could be run on any late-model PC, and it let players create their own combat scenarios.

BBN and Total Immersion dumped the original game's Cold War scenario and created new landscapes and cities with deserts and stone buildings like those found in Iraq. The streets are occupied by Iraqi militiamen with AK-47s and women in long robes and veils. The vehicles in the game are Army trucks and Humvees, and American troops wear desert camouflage.

Like many popular games, Operation Flashpoint can be played by multiple players linked over the Internet. In the same way, DARWARS Ambush! allows soldiers to practice either against computer-generated threats, or against fellow soldiers who play as insurgents.

Roberts's team combed through after-action reports of American troops in Iraq to learn the latest deadly variations on the insurgents' improvised explosive devices, or IEDs.

"A unit was on a convoy," said Roberts, "and discovered for the first time that an insurgent had hung an IED behind a sign on the road. Nobody had ever seen that." That bit of experience is now embedded in DARWARS Ambush!

So is the use of radio-controlled toy cars packed with plastic explosive. Soldiers have also found that Iraqi rebels like to put curbside bombs right at street corners, to catch trucks as they make tight turns. DARWARS Ambush! plants roadside bombs the same way, to teach drivers to stay close to the middle of the road at all times.

Roberts said that new scenarios can be continuously added and soldiers may be trained to modify the software for their particular units, creating modified versions of the game tailored to their specific challenges.

Fort Lewis, Wash., home of the 1st Brigade of the 25th Infantry Division, has so far trained about 100 soldiers using the game. Some of them are presently deployed in Iraq. Lieutenant Colonel Tony Schmitz, chief of the Mission Support Training Facility at Fort Lewis said it's too early to say whether there have been any benefits. But he's impressed with the software's potential.

"We're always looking for new ways to train soldiers," said Schmitz. "The new generation of soldiers who are used to playing videos, the Nintendo generation, would be comfortable with it. Plus, it's cheap."

Chatham, of the Pentagon's agency, said that time will tell whether DARWARS Ambush! can save lives. But he says he's already seen its impact on soldiers who've played the game.

"I know there's a captain now who knows that he's mortal," Chatham said. "I watched him rocking back and forth in the after-action review, knowing he got killed in this simulation."

Chatham hopes that the experience will keep that captain and his soldiers alive on the battlefield.

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.