Over practically 40 years in uniform, I noticed struggle shift from the massed battles we braced for within the Chilly Conflict, to pinpoint strikes on terrorists, and now to a battlefield dominated by autonomous machines, torrents of information, digital deception, long-range missiles, and unblinking surveillance. As rivals sharpen their edge and discipline a technology raised on digital instruments, the U.S. navy ought to seize each benefit to remain forward in coaching — particularly one few anticipate: gaming.
The fashionable battlefield requires split-second decision-making, seamless coordination amongst distributed groups, the power to see with out being seen, and instruments able to shortly processing huge quantities of knowledge, all beneath excessive strain. As I’ve discovered over the past yr, as an advisor to August Interactive, a gaming studio, these are precisely the abilities that well-designed navy gaming applications can develop and refine.
In contrast to conventional navy wargaming — which usually entails structured, turn-based workouts on maps or fashions to discover marketing campaign plans and strategic ideas — the gaming mentioned right here attracts closely on digital interactive platforms, together with modified industrial titles and purpose-built navy simulations. These environments — starting from real-time technique video games to tactical shooters, flight simulators, and cyber-themed video games — emphasize fast steady decision-making, high-pressure coordination, and immersive ability improvement. Whereas each approaches purpose to sharpen judgment and put together leaders for advanced eventualities, this type of navy gaming leverages the velocity, interactivity, and scale of recent gaming expertise to domesticate competencies which can be tough to copy in conventional wargaming codecs. And they’re additionally extra participating and enjoyable, which is an effective factor.
The U.S. navy ought to formally embrace and spend money on superior digital gaming as a core coaching software, leveraging its skill to construct essential cognitive, coordination, and technical abilities for contemporary warfare. Doing so will keep America’s coaching edge in opposition to rivals who’re already integrating gaming into their navy preparation.
Past Leisure: Gaming as Tactical Coaching
Navy gaming isn’t nearly troopers enjoying industrial video video games throughout their free time. It’s about using superior simulation applied sciences to create life like coaching environments which can be too advanced or too costly to breed bodily. The Military’s Artificial Coaching Setting and CAE’s Naval Fight Methods Simulator for tactical coaching already exhibit this idea, however the U.S. navy ought to proceed to set the worldwide normal for coaching excellence by aiming even increased, and navy gaming is the following wanted evolution.
Take into account the cognitive calls for of recent warfare. Items should defend themselves from detection and assault whereas additionally creating alternatives to launch deadly results. They need to function in areas dominated by layered threats, together with digital jamming, drones, sensors, and missiles. They need to achieve a call benefit by buying, processing, analyzing, and appearing on massive quantities of information sooner than their adversary. They need to generate localized fight energy to beat the mass and momentum benefit of their enemies after which, simply as shortly, disperse to cut back vulnerability. These eventualities could be practiced repeatedly and at better scale in digital environments, permitting leaders and troopers to refine abilities, techniques, and decision-making frameworks earlier than lives are on the road, making certain America retains its unmatched coaching benefit.
Getting Particular
Video video games can develop a number of abilities related to trendy navy functions, significantly in contexts involving refined adversaries like China and Russia. The U.S. navy has used modified industrial video games for coaching, and some branches actively recruit avid gamers for sure roles requiring these ability units. Some examples of video games that can be utilized to show essential abilities embody:
Strategic and Tactical Pondering
Actual-time technique video games (StarCraft II, Command & Conquer, the Complete Conflict sequence, Age of Empires, Civilization VI, Hearts of Iron IV, Europa Universalis) develop multi-level strategic considering, useful resource administration, and the power to adapt techniques shortly. These abilities translate to operational planning and battlefield decision-making.
Situational Consciousness and Multitasking
First-person shooters and tactical shooters (Warhammer, World of Warcraft, Rainbow Six Siege, the Arma sequence, Valorant, Apex Legends, Name of Obligation, Overwatch, Insurgency: Sandstorm) improve spatial consciousness, menace detection, the power to course of a number of info streams concurrently, and firm to squad degree techniques in addition to tactical communication and actions, all essential for contemporary battlefield environments with advanced sensor networks.
Precision and Positive Motor Management
Whereas there’s comprehensible debate about video games that characteristic first-person shooters, what gamers really worth and develop from these video games goes past surface-level fight simulation. The actual abilities embody excessive precision beneath strain, split-second hand-eye coordination, micro-movements for accuracy, and the power to keep up regular efficiency throughout intense conditions. Video games like Valorant and Rainbow Six Siege demand millimeter-precise aiming and timing. These high quality motor abilities and precision capabilities are precious for working refined navy tools, from superior weapon techniques to delicate technical devices.
Workforce Coordination and Communication
Multiplayer tactical video games (Rainbow Six Siege, Counter-Strike: World Offensive, Squad, Insurgency, Valorant, Overwatch, League of Legends, Dota 2) develop clear communication protocols, management beneath strain, and coordinated staff actions. These straight apply to small unit techniques and joint operations.
Digital Warfare and Cyber Abilities
Video games involving hacking mechanics or digital warfare parts (the Watch Canine sequence, Cyberpunk 2077, the Deus Ex sequence, Hacknet, Uplink, Gray Hack, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon sequence) can introduce ideas related to info warfare — more and more essential given China and Russia’s emphasis on cyber and digital warfare capabilities.
Drone and Distant Operations
Flight simulators and video games involving unmanned techniques (DCS World, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Conflict Thunder, the Falcon BMS mod, IL-2 Sturmovik, Elite Harmful, Star Citizen) can develop hand-eye coordination and spatial reasoning for working drones, that are central to trendy navy operations.
Stress Administration and Determination-Making
Aggressive gaming environments (StarCraft II, Counter-Strike, League of Legends, Rocket League, preventing video games like Avenue Fighter or Tekken) practice fast decision-making beneath strain and sustaining efficiency throughout high-stress conditions.
Sample Recognition
Technique video games and puzzle video games (Chess.com, Tetris, the Portal sequence, The Witness, StarCraft II, the Civilization sequence, Europa Universalis IV) improve sample recognition skills, helpful for intelligence evaluation and menace evaluation.
Attracting the Subsequent Era
Navy gaming additionally addresses a essential recruitment problem. In the present day’s potential recruits are digital natives who grew up with refined interactive leisure. They anticipate expertise to be intuitive, participating, and responsive. By incorporating gaming parts into coaching and operations, the Protection Division ought to exhibit to recruits that the U.S. navy continues to steer in innovation, creativeness, and significant considering — values that guarantee it stays the world’s most superior preventing drive. The Military’s latest success with esports groups and gaming-focused recruitment campaigns exhibits that this strategy is efficient. When younger People see the navy participating with the applied sciences they use and perceive, they’re extra prone to view navy service as a possible profession possibility.
Constructing Crucial Abilities
Essentially the most compelling case for navy gaming lies not in its expertise, however within the distinctive competencies it develops — abilities that conventional coaching strategies, regardless of their continued significance, wrestle to copy at scale and beneath life like circumstances.
Distributed Teamwork Throughout Distances
Fashionable navy operations more and more require seamless coordination between models separated by continents, not miles. I’ve witnessed firsthand how difficult it may be to keep up unit cohesion when your groups are scattered throughout a number of time zones, speaking by means of encrypted channels, and executing advanced missions with out ever assembly face-to-face. Gaming environments naturally train this type of distant collaboration, forcing contributors to speak clearly, share essential info effectively, and execute intricate plans with teammates they might by no means see.
Fast Adaptation
The simplest navy gaming eventualities don’t observe predictable scripts. Fairly, they continuously introduce new variables, surprising issues, and evolving threats. This mirrors the truth of recent warfare, the place enemies adapt their techniques every day and expertise shifts the battlefield sooner than doctrine can maintain tempo. By means of repeated publicity to dynamic eventualities, troopers develop the psychological agility to pivot shortly when their preliminary plans meet surprising resistance.
Methods Pondering
In the present day’s conflicts aren’t received or misplaced by particular person heroics, however by understanding how technological, logistical, and human techniques interconnect and affect one another. A single determination on the tactical degree can cascade by means of intelligence networks, provide chains, and diplomatic channels. Effectively-designed gaming eventualities assist troopers visualize these connections and perceive how their actions ripple by means of advanced operational environments — a perspective that’s tough to develop by means of conventional discipline workouts alone.
Stress Inoculation for Excessive-pressure Efficiency
Whereas no simulation can completely replicate the stress of precise fight, aggressive gaming environments can generate real strain that impacts decision-making and efficiency. The hot button is creating eventualities the place failure has significant penalties throughout the coaching context, instructing troopers to keep up their effectiveness when adrenaline is excessive and time is brief. This isn’t about changing fight expertise. Fairly, it’s about constructing the foundational resilience that helps troopers carry out when it issues most.
Studying from Adversaries
China and Russia aren’t dabbling. They’re normalizing digital, game-like coaching at scale.
In February 2023, PLA Each day (please word I can’t responsibly hyperlink to those Chinese language on-line sources as a result of they will not be protected web sites to go to in regular browsers) explicitly urged models to “improve present video video games and wargaming techniques” and use clever simulation for human-machine confrontation coaching, highlighting virtual-real interplay and closed‑loop suggestions — precisely the mechanics that trendy digital video games ship.
One other PLA Each day characteristic in April 2023 described a digital actuality tactical assault capturing simulator and a “metaverse + sport” coaching atmosphere for small‑unit communication, motion, and determination‑making. Chinese language navy models report fielding VR and simulation labs at scale. Stories element digital actuality parachute coaching for jumpers (2022), multi‑expertise simulation platforms to speed up ability technology (2022), and in April 2025 a Folks’s Liberation Military brigade constructed at the least 10 simulation rooms utilizing digital actuality to shorten coaching cycles throughout artillery, air protection, and reconnaissance specialties. The U.S. Protection Division has famous the Chinese language navy’s emphasis on extra rigorous, life like coaching, together with simulated strikes — an indication of routine reliance on artificial, sport‑like environments to rehearse in opposition to U.S.‑related targets.
Russia is transferring alongside an analogous path, with official navy faculties codifying PC‑based mostly simulator coaching for drone and anti-drone operators. The builders of one other Russian online game, Squad 22: ZOV, declare it is strongly recommended by the Russian navy for coaching.
The lesson is easy: America’s rivals are mixing industrial‑model sport tech, digital actuality, and function‑constructed simulators into on a regular basis drive preparation, from small‑unit shooters and man-machine “blue drive” confrontations to standardized PC‑simulator time for drone operators.
The Path Ahead
For individuals who need the US to maintain its coaching edge, it’s time to deal with this not as a curiosity, however as core tradecraft — and useful resource it accordingly. To maintain America’s function because the world chief in navy coaching and be sure that management extends into the following technology of warfare, listed below are three issues U.S. protection leaders can do:
First, the Pentagon ought to dedicate funding and assist for navy gaming analysis and improvement. This entails forming partnerships with main expertise firms and universities to develop coaching techniques that make the most of the newest advances in synthetic intelligence, digital actuality, and cloud computing.
Second, the Protection Division ought to develop standardized metrics to judge the effectiveness of gaming. Simply because the division and providers assess conventional coaching strategies, they want rigorous analysis instruments to make sure gaming applications meet their supposed objectives.
Third, it’s time for a cultural shift. Senior civilian and uniformed leaders ought to overtly and repeatedly endorse gaming as a sound coaching software, not a distraction from “actual” navy abilities. This entails educating leaders about gaming’s potential and clearly speaking its function in bigger coaching efforts.
The Backside Line
I visited the gaming middle at West Level final spring. I used to be impressed with the setup and technological capabilities, however I used to be much more impressed by the insights shared with me by combat-experienced officers and non-commissioned officers overseeing this system. The constructive influence on cadet management improvement was exceptional: improved communication abilities, faster decision-making, and sooner adaptability to vary. Notably, many intercollegiate athletes there are concerned in navy gaming.
Gaming isn’t about changing conventional navy coaching. It’s about enhancing it. Bodily health, marksmanship, tactical execution, and self-discipline stay basic to navy effectiveness and lethality. However in an period when warfare more and more entails human-machine teaming, info warfare, and sophisticated multi-domain operations, the U.S. navy wants coaching instruments that put together troopers for these realities.
Each navy innovation is met with resistance from those that desire conventional strategies. Nevertheless, historical past demonstrates that nation’s main in coaching innovation persistently dominate future battlefields. The U.S. navy has at all times been that chief — and by embracing gaming, America can guarantee it stays on the forefront of navy readiness and operational excellence.
Gen. (ret) Joseph L. Votel is the previous commanding common of U.S. Particular Operations Command and U.S. Central Command. He’s a senior advisor to August Interactive, a video games and immersive experiences studio. Not one of the video games talked about on this article have been produced by August Interactive.
Picture: Senior Airman Kristine M. Gruwell by way of Little Rock Air Power Base
