Weapons development outpaces training to use said weapons dramatically.
There are many, many, many improvements still needed to prevent collateral damage. The fact that we don’t have more collateral damage based on what the military currently uses is amazing. In high pressure situations where decisions must be made quickly with limited intel, bad things will happen. Yes, training is constantly being improved, but it continues to need improvement. Unreal Engine isn’t a weapon, and I don’t support weapon development for weapon development’s sake, but I fully support any improvements in training for said weapons and intelligence.
Knowing the difference between a hostile environment and a civilian environment is becoming harder and harder the more military ordinance becomes accessible and that is a real shame, but being able to put soldiers on the ground through more training allows them to make smarter decisions and be less likely to treat a civilian environment as a hostile one. Sometimes the only difference is literally how a barrel housing a fire is constructed, whether its set up to cook food or for drugs, such as barrel height and temperature. A lot of current military training sims lack the graphical fidelity to be able to convey this, so this valuable information goes unused in the field, because this information ends up as a footnote of some textbook instead of any required simulation. Tools like Unreal Engine allow for better training in being able to recognize these signs in different environments, in different times of day, and quickly allow easy to understand interactive comparisons with a few simple button clicks.
Using Unreal Engine or any game engine to train how to use handheld weapons is an idea I’m less keen to, but the best training for handheld weapons has always been give that weapon to a soldier, or at least a dummy version of one. Playing an ‘FPS’ for the sake of shooting people isn’t really training, and that training is often done in real life using the MILES or other similar systems. Training for things like artillery fire and bigger weapons also generally happens in the field, which anyone living near a large army base can attest to as you’ll wake up to the shaking to the explosions of various ‘war games’ or seeing the sky illuminated by flares. Yes, some weapon systems make use of digital training, but the overwhelming majority of digital training goes into situation awareness and intelligence, both key elements to reducing collateral damage. If we used today’s weapons but limit military training to its state just a decade ago, there would be significantly increased collateral damage. Adding roadblocks to training will only make combat situations worse, not better.