Archive for May, 2009

AIM FIRE Military Day event draws key engineering leaders to discuss modeling and simulation tools and their impact on the evolving military vehicle development process TROY, Mich., May 15 /PRNewswire/ — The role of modeling and simulation in tomorrow’s defense engineering industry was a focal point for some of the top experts in military... »

the Army’s Intelligence and Cultural Awareness Center at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, commanders knew they had a problem. In the 21st century, the Army was sending younger soldiers into an arena they had little cultural experience in, and at the same time, new social networking sites were poised to broadcast their mistakes to the world.... »

North of Philadelphia, in the suburban area of Bensalem, a recruiting center in the Franklin Mills Mall has achieved a 45 percent increase in Army recruits. The $12 million, 14,500-square-foot Army Experience Center (AEC) has had a significant impact since it opened its doors in August 2008. The two-year pilot project may subsequently have... »

A newly issued U.S. Army field manual has put people on notice: Video games are serious training tools. In its first revision since 9/11, the U.S. Army field manual for Training and Full Spectrum Operations mentions gaming 32 times, describing it as as a key ingredient in replicating “an actual operational environment.” Released in... »

Soldiers have a time-honored way of figuring out what happened after a firefight. They sit down together and hash it out, endlessly going over every moment of the battle as they try to determine who shot first, who hit their target, who missed, etc. Because of the limits of memory and perspective, some of... »

If the career of Steven Woodcock illustrates the ways in which ideas, technologies, and personnel have flowed from military simulation efforts to the entertainment industries, doom II produced by Id Software, and falcon 4.0, one of Spectrum Holobyte’s videogames provide glimpses into how the exchange is being accelerated in the opposite direction at the... »

With the end of the Cold War, a stronger emphasis was placed during the 1990s on running a fiscally efficient military built on the practices of sound business and of making military procurement practices interface seamlessly with commercial industrial manufacturing processes. With pressure to reduce military spending applied by the Federal Acquisitions Streamlining Act... »

SIMNET, the military’s distributed SIMulator NETworking program.  Simulators developed prior to the 1980s were stand-alone systems designed for specific task-training purposes, such as docking a space capsule or landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Such systems were quite expensive, for example, more than $30-$35 million for an advanced pilot simulator system in... »

The Army is shelling out nearly $18 million for a new training simulator game that will allow soldiers to drive virtual vehicles, fire virtual weapons and pilot virtual unmanned aerial vehicles in combat situations. The contract for “Game After Ambush” was awarded late last month to software developers Laser Shot, of Texas, Bohemia Interactive,... »

“There’s been a huge change in the way we prepare for war, and the soldiers we’re training now are the children of the digital age who grew up with GameBoys,” says retired Rear Adm. Fred Lewis, a 33-year U.S. Navy veteran The military simulation and virtual training market has seen dramatic growth in the... »