BY JAMES H. KORRIS

THE U.S. MILITARY IS A LONGTIME LEADER IN TRAINING AND EDUCATIONAL INNOVATION. RECENT SHIFTS IN THE OPERATIONAL ENVIRONMENT HAVE THE U.S. ARMY RETHINKING THEIR LEADERSHIP TRAINING: A SHIFT THAT MAY CHANGE THE WAY WE GROW MANAGERS IN INDUSTRY.

If time were not an issue, empires and enterprises might never fall. All decisionmaking could be rigorously centralized; analysis, evaluation and prognostication could continue without limitation. There would never be a wrong decision because, in all likelihood, there would be no decisions at all. But we do not live in a “turn-based” world.We never have.We build hierarchies and lines of authority in our institutions based on the balance of responsiveness and managerial oversight that we imagine we need to succeed. If we achieve the balance and we work in a business, we prosper and grow. If we work in a military organization, we win the nation’s wars.

But what happens when our competitive environment changes? For the U.S. military, the greatest change in recent memory was the end of the Cold War. Suddenly, we were not fighting a fixed, national super-power. While some imagined that all conflict would end with the close of the Cold War, something quite different occurred.

“Community War,” a term coined by Navy Capt. Larry Seaquist, ethnic cleansing, power-grabs, neighbor-against-neighbor conflict combined with insurgent and transnational behavior has stepped up the number of armed conflicts around the globe by an order of magnitude. Suddenly there are wars everywhere and our experience preparing for conflict with Soviet Russia seems irrelevant.

While the trend had been to rely increasingly on advanced technology to engage the enemy out of contact, over the horizon and, in all likelihood, through the medium of a computer display, these new conflicts often drew us into cities where we might face combatants at very close range. Current stability operations in Iraq, for example, often first involve the question of who actually is a combatant, something commonly determined by knocking on doors and searching homes. This is quite a journey from the hierarchical and deliberate warfare of the Soviet era where the potential scale of conflict demanded strong, centralized control.

By contrast, the new order gave rise to the concept of what Gen. Charles C. Krulak calls the “Strategic Corporal”: low-echelon soldiers whose decisions have impact at the tactical, operational and strategic level. Put simply, decisionmaking is increasingly pushed to the edges of the network. As a rule, these decisions are made under great pressure of time. Small unit leaders taking the right action at the right time will frequently determine the outcome of large operations. Similarly, given the kind of visibility current technology has made possible, the wrong decision will likely show up on CNN.

In many ways, globalized competitive pressures in industry parallel the U.S. military experience. There is, increasingly, the need for strategic, agile thought at all levels of organizations to remain competitive. Long a leader in training and educational methods, the U.S. Army has taken an initiative that may suggest a way ahead for industry.

US MILITARY CHANGES TO NEW ENVIRONMENT

Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. military has done much to adjust its training methods to reflect changes in its environment. One of its most interesting experiments has been at a one-of-a-kind research institute at the University of Southern California.

In 1999, the U.S. Army created the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), a University Affiliated Research Center at USC. The Army sought to leverage a regional capability: the filmed entertainment and computer game industry in Southern California combined with a basic research program in virtual reality enabling technologies.

Computer games–prototype cognitive leadership training aids—but games just the same, have been rolling out of ICT since 2003. They emphasize small combat unit leadership: Squads, Platoons and Companies along with niche capabilities including Combat Patrols, Joint Fires and Close Air Support. This work (and the very existence of the ICT, for that matter) recognizes a generational shift that coincided with a change in the military operational environment. Today, adolescents and young adults play computer games in unprecedented numbers. On average, for U.S. teens, computer games have displaced television viewing in hours per week, Nielsen research has found. “Gamers” are apt to share tips and techniques but, most significantly, time devoted to computer gaming raises gamers’ proficiency in learning new games. In essence, experienced gamers have “learned how to learn” in the game domain. This means, for the applications ICT has developed, less time devoted to learning the game and more time to actual learning.

None of the ICT applications have been, strictly speaking, procedural, i.e. they do not emphasize skills rooted in process. Rather, they involve making decisions with inadequate information under pressure of time. On some level, ICT’s training games are meant to develop “recognition-primed decision” capacity: “how decision makers can recognize a plausible course of action (COA) as the first one to consider,” wrote Dr. Karol G. Ross. In other words, with enough practice, soldiers, commanders (or managers, for that matter) may know the best solution to a problem without developing an analytical approach. There is no need to define, parse, deconstruct and analyze the problem when you know the answer at the outset. This is the essence of “intuition.”

Viewed in this context, games are a very promising enabler. For one thing, a wellconceived and executed game is fun and satisfying to play. This ensures that users devote as much time as possible to it. Moreover, contemporary games, with vivid 3D graphical rendering and directional sound, are can be both engaging and immersive: highly evocative of realworld experience.

GAMING— NOT SIMULATIONS

It is worth noting that these applications are games: not simulations.While both categories of applications share superficial similarities, simulations, on a fundamental level, have a central goal of fidelity. Thus a flight simulator is meant to replicate, as much as possible, flying an aircraft under a range of conditions. Games, on the other hand, have experience as a primary focus. In ICT games there is often the deliberate distortion of time or circumstance to create the most demanding and engaging gameplay for the student. Game balancing is the art of adjusting the challenges and rewards so that complete mastery remains, tantalizingly, “at the outer edge of, but within their ‘regime of competence,’” James Paul Gee wrote in his article, “Learning by Design.” On an important level, so the theory goes, this is what makes games “fun to play.”

ICT’s experience with Every Soldier a Sensor Simulation (ES3), an application meant to develop competence in Combat Patrols (and winner of the 2006 Department of Defense Modeling and Simulation Award for training), is a case in point. The game is played from the first-person perspective of a soldier on patrol in a southwest Asian city in a country that could be Iraq. There are lots of objects to observe, some that are quite dangerous and some that have surprise bonus point values. The limiting factor is time; every action taken runs out the clock to some extent. The player is encouraged to develop his powers of recollection, since taking “photographs,” GPS readings and/or taking notes all have a time “cost.” In addition, players develop basic “info ops” skills in how to approach civilians, when to leave them alone, accept gifts, etc. To date, thousands of soldiers have trained on ES3; beginning in 2007, all new soldiers will use the program.

There were two interesting findings as ES3 began its evaluation at the Army’s Fort Jackson in South Carolina. First, on Thanksgiving, a holiday for the soldiers in Initial Entry Training who were trying out ES3, the Brigade Commander was surprised to find the simulation center filled with soldiers playing the game, with a line of soldiers waiting their turn. Second, the instructors who trained the first soldiers at Fort Jackson reported a surprising result: players not only scored better in obvious activities like IED practice lanes, but were consistently more aware of their surroundings in general. They thus, had become, at least to some extent, by virtue of playing the game, better soldiers. They are on the road to fulfilling the promise of heightened decision-making capability at the edges of the network. The virtual experiences that ES3 and other ICT applications offer suggest a means to develop the kind of intuition that supports recognition- primed decisions. The key is practice; the ultimate benefits are speed and precision. Accuracy in performance makes the operators at the edge of the network worthy of trust. Speed offers the possibility of operating within enemies’ (or competitors’) decision cycles. It is the combination of speed and precision that promises the greatest potential, whether for maintaining the nation’s security or building market share.

The U.S. fighter pilot John Boyd developed concepts of warfare that had impact far beyond the community of pilots who revered him. Put simply, Boyd’s work marked a passage from attrition to maneuver warfare thinking and all of the implications those approaches entail. Boyd used the “OODA loop” (Observe- Orient-Decide-Act) to describe an approach to warfare (or competition) that produces panic, confusion and a general unraveling of the competition to bring defeat. Vivid examples of armies employing the OODA loop approach successfully range from the German Blitzkrieg French invasion in World War II, the U.S. experience in Desert Storm and Israeli Defense Forces’ “swarming tactic” (aka “planned unpredictability”). The most challenging aspect of the OODA construct is the Orient phase, which, according to Boyd, takes into account cultural traditions, genetic heritage, new information, previous experiences and analysis and synthesis. No matter how rapidly a decision can be made, if the orientation process drags on, we may well find ourselves operating outside our opponent’s OODA loop.

Boyd’s construct builds on notions like Fingerspitzengeful (literally “fingertip feel”) and Schwerpunkt (main focus of effort). In a fuller sense, Fingerspitzengeful “applies to a leader’s instinctive and intuitive sense of what is going on or what is needed in a battle,” Robert Boyd Coram wrote in “The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War.” Combine the OODA loop with the intuition value of recognitionprimed decisions and the potential for everyday “Blitzkrieg” becomes more possible, both in war and in commerce. A suite of ICT applications was recently selected as training tools for the Army’s 4th Infantry Brigade Combat Team at Fort Riley. A new brigade and one of the first “modular” units in the Army, the “4th of the 1st” is, in many ways, a bellwether of military transformation. As this is a new brigade, people and equipment have been arriving over a period of months. There is a great deal of ground to cover in terms of training the brigade’s junior officers (basically, its middle managers); essential pieces of the puzzle may not be in place for some time. Virtual training seemed an obvious, albeit partial, solution.When Col. Ricky D. Gibbs turned to Maj. Brent Cummings for suggestions, Cummings drew on his experience at Fort Benning, where he previously had used ICT applications. In addition to bespoke modifications to the applications (e.g. adding terrain maps for Fort Riley where the Brigade is garrisoned) Gibbs wanted something more. He wanted the ability to dynamically change the circumstances and threats for the 30 captains he plans to train with the company-level game, Full Spectrum Command. Originally conceived as a “one player against a computer” game, this “two-player game” seemed an unusual request. On closer examination, it became clear that Gibbs was interested in how these young captains would respond to varying levels of stress and how they would solve a range of problems. It was a military equivalent of risk preference analysis. In essence, while these young officers learned their jobs, Gibbs intended to learn about the officers.

A NEW GENERATION OF LEARNERS

While there is great untapped potential for games in leadership development in both military and industry, we should heed one note of caution. Every generation, it seems, finds and embraces pastimes, technologies –even values—to call its own and thereby distinguish it from those who came before. For the last 60 years, adolescents have been a driving force in popular music and have sought a portable implementation to maintain personal “soundtracks” independent of the adult world around them. But while the teenager of the late 1950s had a shirt-pocket transistor radio, the child of the 1980s had a Walkman and today’s standard issue is the Apple iPod. There is obvious progress here to personalization and control made possible by developments in technology and distribution.

The same thing has happened in games. In the same period of time, board games and low-tech fantasy role-playing games gave way to early arcade games and game consoles which were, in turn, replaced by faster PC’s, better game consoles and portable platforms like Sony’s PlayStation Portable and Nintendo’s DS handhelds. New generations are constantly moving targets. The latest numbers suggest a slight decline in gaming amongst children as the average age of the gaming audience increases, according to the Interaction Digital Software Association. For a younger audience, the focus seems to be shifting to instant messaging and social networking interfaces like www.myspace.com. In a certain sense, the person-to-person connection provided by massively multiplayer online game environments might be giving way, with younger people, to interaction that is personality-based versus fantasy roleplaying. What this will mean, when this group joins the workforce in industry or the military, may be a cooling in the ardor we see now amongst young people for traditional gaming. Their virtual experiences and the way they may be harnessed for learning may be of a completely different nature: not so much a game but a suggestion of real-world experience delivered through computational platforms.

Basic research at centers like ICT may help support this evolving environment. The U.S. Army has made a substantial commitment to ICT work in Virtual Humans including Cognitive Modeling, Natural Language Understanding, Speech Synthesis, along with Photorealistic Realtime Virtual Environments and Avatars. These are extremely challenging research themes that could, when fully realized, provide simulated experiences that are increasingly difficult to distinguish from reality.When that generation comes of age, there will be new experiences –and new ways to train.

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James H. Korris is the creative director for the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California. For more information, visit www.ict.usc.edu.

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