It’s “Call of Duty for real”

This past month, news came of soldiers training with a system called Tactical Augmented Reality. …

The idea comes from Will Roper, a Rhodes scholar in his late 30s with a PhD in mathematics. Roper runs the Defense Department’s secretive Strategic Capabilities Office; his job is to study where war is headed, and to develop the technological tools that help the United States win there. The military services think about today; DARPA thinks about the distant future; Roper thinks about tomorrow.

His office was founded in 2012, but remained classified until last year. …

“In the age of the Internet of Things, our senses no longer define the boundaries of our perception,” Roper says. Soldiers in the near future will live in a world with almost infinite available information that could help them. Imagine a man or woman in urban conflict. They’d want a map of all nearby friendly soldiers; they’d want heat signatures of anyone behind a nearby wall, or images of them collected by drone swarms. They’d want a map that constantly changes based on what fellow soldiers learn: If they safely break through a wall and move forward, everyone might want to use that path. If they’re greeted by fire, everyone will want to retreat. They’d want, perhaps, a color-coding system that suggests snipers locations, which changes from yellow to red when one is confirmed. They’d want a notification if ammo runs low. Behind all of this, they’d want deep-learning algorithms predicting the enemy’s next move and proposing options for countering it. And, if they were leading a group of soldiers, they’d want strategic advice based on an initial plan for the battle that adjusts as the fight goes on. …

In the near future, at least the one that Roper is concerned about, the challenge is to get soldiers as much information as possible, with as much learning applied to it, in the simplest and clearest way. “If we had to do this in the Pentagon on our own,” Roper continues, “I’d view it as our hardest challenge. But the videogame industry has already cracked the code.”

It is the gaming industry, of course, that has developed the best ways for players to collaborate across countries as though they are sitting in the same room, and that has built interfaces so intuitive to users that new, complex games don’t even need to be trained. …

It’s “Call of Duty for real,” says Roper, which might feel patriotic to some employees and horrifying to others.

Still, the Pentagon does have a $70 billion research and development budget, and Roper’s office seems to be one part of government research that’s growing. According to a recent report, his budget has grown 18-fold since the office was founded five years ago. And so he plans to approach the gaming industry with an idea: You build the Pentagon the systems it wants and give it exclusive access for, say, six months. And then everything can go back into the game. “We don’t own the product, we own the time,” says Roper.