We all love a good war game and it seems like the British Army is no different in this respect.
They recently carried out their biggest ever virtual battle in a large scale simulation which had over 200 real soldiers using computers involved in it. The headquarters for this fake war was at the Army’s own Land Warfare Centre, which is in Warminster in Wiltshire.
The whole thing ran for a couple of hours and the PC using soldiers had to carry out missions in a made up town called Lovelle, somewhere in France. The project is known as Urban Warrior 5 and the work behind it cost around a million pounds, using VBS2 software.
An Army spokesman said that one of the aims of the battle simulation was to help work out what their most pressing resource concerns are when they take over the running of their own budget in April of this year.
How to Win Future Wars
Col Tim Law has the exciting and varied sounding job title of Assistant Director of Concerns and Experimentation with the Army. He said that they need to find out more details about “the speed at which command can respond”. He went on to say that they want to discover what it is that they need to “fight and win” future wars.
The simulation involved changing details on things like the amount of soldiers on the ground or the communication levels, in order to find out what was best suited to the battle scenario in question.
Of course, this wasn’t a game and Dr Nigel Paling, who is a science advisor to the UK Government said that they were “pushing the edges of realism and scale”.
