Video game helps teach armor officer skills.

• Author: Peck, Michael

For the past three years, Maj. Michael Muller has used TacOpsCAV, a militarized version of the commercial TacOps game, to teach everything from standard operating procedures and battle drills to intelligence information tracking decision-making.

Muller is a Marine Corps armor officer who teaches at the Armor Captain's Career Course at Fort Knox. He prefers the user-friendliness of TacOpsCAV, in which he can generate training scenarios on a low-end PC, to the official JANUS ground combat simulation in the base simulation center.

TacOpsCAV is a platoon-level ground combat game where players simultaneously input their orders each turn using a point-and-click interface, and the computer then resolves their orders simultaneously.

Muller uses TacOpsCAV to illustrate lessons to his students. In a small scenario, he might have "five or six guys will play actual commanders, while the others play artillery observers or battalion headquarters, plus a couple to play the bad guys."

One scenario ran for three days. Players spent the first two clays planning their moves. "The neat thing was that we had the planning at the same time as some of the fighting" Muller...