Trigger Happy

Shoot first, ask questions later

Steven Poole on games’ sad role in the military-industrial complex

Back in 1998 the US Navy cruiser USS Yorktown suffered a complete engine failure off the coast of Virginia. It was “dead in the water” for two hours and 45 minutes. Eventually it had to be towed back to harbour. Embarrassing, but not – as it would have been in a combat zone – multiply fatal. The Yorktown had been a testbed for the Navy’s Smart Ship project, which aimed to use networked computers aboard vessels to reduce the number of people needed to crew them. This ‘smart’ ship was so smart because it was running, er, Windows NT. One sailor accidentally entered a zero into an input field and the system attempted to divide by zero, causing a buffer overrun and somehow corrupting the entire database. Bye bye, propulsion. Even so, despite wide consensus among IT pros that UNIX-based systems would be more robust, a version of Windows 2000 that became colloquially known as “Windows for Warships” was installed over the next decade on both US and UK fleets. Feel any safer yet?

My point here is not to rag on Microsoft particularly, but this history is relevant when we consider the recent rebellion among MS employees over the prospect of selling Kinect-derived AR headsets to the US Army. The Hololens was built in the hope that it would be used by architects, trainee surgeons or Mars rover operators. So when Microsoft announced that it had won a $480m contract with the Army to provide 100,000 Hololens sets for training and battlefield use in the IVAS (Integrated Visual Augmentation System) project, the idealistic engineers were understandably troubled. The kit, the Army announced, would “increase lethality by enhancing the ability to detect, decide and engage before the enemy”. But that was not what its inventors thought they were making.

So the Hololens workers wrote an open letter to Brad Smith and Satya Nadella, demanding that Microsoft cancel the contract. “We refuse to create technology for warfare and oppression”, they said; “we do

not want to become war profiteers”. They’d been conned: “We did not sign up to develop weapons,” they wrote, “and we demand a say in how our work is used.” This contract, they argued, was something new. “While the company has previously licensed tech to the US Military, it has never crossed the line into weapons development. With this contract, it does. The application of Hololens within the IVAS system is designed to help people kill.”

Well, yes, but providing an operating system to run warships is also helping people kill: that is what warships are for. This is not to dismiss the Microsoft employees’ concerns, but only to point out that there is no simple way out of what General Eisenhower warned was the “military-industrial complex”. MS workers have previously complained about the possibility that their AI products might be used by US immigration forces, or that their company might bid on a military cloudservices contract. Elsewhere in the wider world of capitalism, you might design a new kind of waterproof fabric, only to discover that the military has used it for uniforms, to help people kill in comfort. Advances in trauma medicine are used on the battlefield, to help people survive and kill another day. And we all use the fruits of “defence”, ie warmaking, technology every day, from the Internet itself on downwards.

What is particularly piquant in the employees’ open letter is their distasteful reference to electronic entertainment. When used by the military, they argue, Hololens will work “by turning warfare into a simulated ‘videogame’, further distancing soldiers from the grim stakes of war and the reality of bloodshed.” It would be an argument for another time to ask why distancing soldiers in this way is not a good thing – for their own mental health and operational efficiency. For now it’s fair to say that the prospect of “distancing” is a horse that bolted long ago, with the invention of aerial bombing, if not firearms themselves.

The game industry itself has a long history of collaboration with the military, from a souped-up version of the 1980s arcade game Battlezone that was used for tank training onwards. Many US soldiers on deployment play FPS games in their downtime: aren’t those very games also, in a way, helping them to kill, by enabling them to blow off steam and relax? The Hololens rebels have put their finger on a real problem, but they are hugely underestimating the scale of it. And nothing will change until we acknowledge that we are all implicated.

There is no simple way out of what General Eisenhower warned was the “militaryindustrial complex”