Flashback to 2001 - USA Today - Game creators join war against terrorism

I have found another highly explosive document (from the Center for Nonproliferation Studies) where they were discussing all the possible avenues for their command-and-control, net-centric warfare systems - this was all back in 2001. They pooled together all the available experts from every strata of society - from defense contractors such as RAND Corporation to videogame designers - and it's just astonishing what names pop up in this document. Basically, DARPA and the military-industrial complex were sucking up to Will Wright (from Sim City and The Sims fame), Lorne Lanning (the maker of the Oddworld Games), and we can go on and on.

LITERATURE REVIEW OF EXISTING TERRORIST BEHAVIOR MODELING
Final Report to the Defense Threat Reduction Agency - 14th August, 2002

PREPARED BY
WMD Terrorism Project,
Chemical and Biological Nonproliferation Program
Center for Nonproliferation Studies
Monterey Institute of International Studies, CA

http://cns.miis.edu/reports/pdfs/terror_lit.pdf

But let's just talk about a few articles in particular that pop up in this document. This is a few months after September 11th 2001. This was published by USA Today - the link is now down but someone was forward-thinking enough to make a PDF copy of it.

http://gamepipe.usc.edu/~zyda/Press/USAToday5Dec2001.pdf

Quote

Game creators join war against terrorism

Some of the training games MOVES creates look similar to Electronic Arts' popular 'SimCity' game. (My note: Big surprise, as it's by some of the same game makers)

Wanted: Fun-loving, patriotic person willing to create and play video games all day while helping America fight terrorism. Sound like the perfect job? Well, it exists at the Naval Postgraduate School's Modeling, Virtual Environments and Simulation (MOVES) Institute in sunny Monterey, Calif. Twentyfive former commercial video game designers are working with Navy students at the institute to create video game-like simulations to train troops to fight terrorism.

My note: I will be covering the Naval Postgraduate School's project, MOVES, in more elaborate detail in a later post perhaps today or tomorrow.

The terrorist simulations, which are still about three years away from release, would use artificial intelligence to predict how terrorists might wreak havoc on civilians or U.S. troops.

Although Osama bin Laden might be history by the time the terrorist training games are complete, MOVES officials said they are still needed because terrorism will persist.

"If you think the war is going to be over next year, you are mistaken," said MOVES Institute director Michael Zyda, who turned 47 on Sept. 11. "This may take a generation."

Game designers as teachers
Many MOVES instructors used to work at Sony, Electronic Arts and other top video game makers. MOVES Institute also partners with other big players such as Lucas Film, the studio behind the Star Wars films, Dolby Interactive and Epic Games.

Some of the training games MOVES creates look similar to Electronic Arts' popular SimCity, which lets computer users create their own virtual city complete with luxury condos, parks, tax-paying citizens and crime. Others are simply just red and blue dots playing across a computer screen grid (My note: Red and blue dots - as in 'red and blue teams' - just as the Navy has always liked to wargame.).

The military has used computer simulation for flight and combat training for decades. But the new war against Osama bin Laden and worldwide terrorism is making many of these combat models obsolete, Zyda said. The military now has to plan attacks against small, fanatical terrorist cells — not large armies — and the battlefield has moved to formerly safe places like airports. "If you look at the focus of the U.S. military, it has been the Cold War with the Russians coming in," Zyda said. "Now, the military has been making some moves toward being more agile."

Artificial intelligence key
How do you make a computer game more agile and able to predict the mind of a terrorist? By giving the virtual characters more artificial intelligence, Zyda said (My note: Note how they're continually using this buzzword 'agile'? That's not a coincidence by the way). For instance, MOVES is working on simulations that let designers create game characters with unique personalities and skills and play them off other characters. Such a program would be ideal for simulating how an individual terrorist or terrorist cell might react in an urban setting or when attacking U.S. forces.

Some defense experts criticized the U.S. Military for relying too much on technology before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Ground-based intelligence could have yielded more clues the attack was imminent, critics said.

But Jack Spencer, defense analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., said simulations such as MOVES computer games are invaluable as long as they are combined with reality-based anti-terrorism training (My note: This is rich. So, these kind of predictive/forecast systems are 'invaluable' only when they are combined with real anti-terror drills and real 'red team' scenarios - which at any opportune moment can go 'live' because the computer (or rather, the system-of-systems) just determined that it would be politically expedient to make this a 'live exercise' and blame it on Al-Qaeda?? Un-f**king-believable - I always had an inkling this is how it worked, but this guy basically insinuates it right here)

I want to emphasize the following here - the more I look into this, the more it becomes obvious that videogames (and the science and industry behind it) are the backbone that enables false-flag operations, effects-based operations, enterprise architecture and social network analysis. DARPA, the Navy Postgraduate School all LOVE videogames - precisely because they breathe new life into 'Operations Research' and specifically the 'Simulation' department. They want to be able to create course of action scenarios, infer behavior and complex sociological factors, and then be able to 'visualize' and interact with all that within the context of a 'videogame' - which is really a business domain. Videogames are the 'medium' that in effect turns something which was previously just a bunch of notes in an academic paper into a real 'model' - into a real recreation of the simulated 'terror attack'/the real 'counterinsurgency' plan - and so on.

Now, here's where this becomes even more troubling - by machine learning and heuristic neural networks, the machine will be able to do all this on-the-fly and constantly plot and strategize against its main enemy - the 'asymmetric threat' - which is US. This is Skynet we're talking about here - what were Skynet's enemies? The entire world which was not the computer. This is John Nash's selfish and paranoid game theory elevated to a nightmarish level.

If you nexus this in with my previous forum post,

Protecting critical infrastructure in urban areas from YOU, the terrorist
http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=160767.0

, you can see that they can 'map' the videogame/the simulation on top of real geospatial data. What this is, is a tool to 'wage war' against entire societies and entire populations - by stealth - because the plan exists inside a COA-event planning generating program (such as CAESAR III or Pythia), which is then fed into a custom-built, DARPA-funded videogame which creates a visual representation of the data, and the neural network constantly analyzes all this and devises even more suitable COAs and looks at the outcome of the 'game' and the blue-red teams that are playing inside that game - all according to the 'simulation', of course