Collateral Damage

[Rabb]

There used to be cows... :)

 

You are familiar with Bill et John?

 

 

Original LOMAC machinima.

[iborg]

From the point of morality it's questionable, but it is much worse to pretend that civilians do not exist in a warzone... what most wargames do.

The idea of a neutral faction with non combatants sounds good.

 

I imagine a Mission where you hold fire because non combatants are danger close to the splash area of your weapon... something like that.

 

 

 

Reminds me of the tank game "Balkans on fire" in the early 2000s. Was a bit of a polemia because there were indeed civilians and civilian vehicles and, well you could machine gun them, set a bus on fire and have flaming people and children run out before keeling over on the road.

At least it simulated the atrocities of a civil war well

[Aginor]

Neutral faction and controllable civilian units should be included IMO.

How the sim reacts to shooting them should be up to the mission designer. That fratricide thing killing your logbook is.... bad.

I like realism, so having complex ROE situations is important.

 

So +1 I guess.

[Yoda967]

There used to be cows... :)

 

 

Nailed it.

[shagrat]

Neutral faction and controllable civilian units should be included IMO.

How the sim reacts to shooting them should be up to the mission designer. That fratricide thing killing your logbook is.... bad.

I like realism, so having complex ROE situations is important.

 

So +1 I guess.

^this.

 

To model modern asymmetric warfare ROEs and collateral damage assessment is required to have a realistic representation.

[Yoda967]

To model modern asymmetric warfare ROEs and collateral damage assessment is required to have a realistic representation.

 

 

 

Yes, and that should factor into the way the mission is designed, and you don't need "neutral units" to simulate either of these things.

 

 

The core of all ROE is that, regardless of other restrictions, the unit retains the inherent right of self-defence. If a so-called "neutral unit" opens fire on us, we have the right to schwack him. If he's not shooting at you and you can't clearly identify him as a bad guy, you don't shoot him. If both red and blue forces are using BTR-80s, you can't go around shooting BTR-80s unless you can see that they're marked for the other side or they're firing at you.

 

 

Formal collateral damage analysis isn't done in the cockpit, it's done by certified CDE analysts working in the Air Operations Center, before the mission for a pre-planned strike, or in real time in support of a FAC/JTAC. ("Real time" doesn't mean "quickly". An F/A-18 pilot once told me that he never once dropped a bomb in several months of flying CAS over Afghanistan. He got a 9-line nearly every sortie, but would drive around in circles waiting for approval until it was time to head back to the boat. That would make for a pretty boring campaign, wouldn't it?)

 

 

Higher-level approval is what's missing from the current JTAC implementations, even if it's only:

"Warrior 1, this is Higher. Target AA1001 approved."

"Higher, Warrior 1, roger - BREAK - Colt 11, target AA1001, cleared in hot."

"Colt 11, AA1001, cleared hot. Inbound."

 

 

One way to realistically present those considerations would be to prep the mission with a graphical presentation showing areas where players arean't allowed to drop a bomb. Within the mission, trigger zones would cover those areas, and a set of triggers would set a flag to fail the mission and issue a debrief warning: "Turn in your wings, numbnuts. You bombed a baby milk factory."

[shagrat]

Yes, and that should factor into the way the mission is designed, and you don't need "neutral units" to simulate either of these things.

 

 

The core of all ROE is that, regardless of other restrictions, the unit retains the inherent right of self-defence. If a so-called "neutral unit" opens fire on us, we have the right to schwack him. If he's not shooting at you and you can't clearly identify him as a bad guy, you don't shoot him. If both red and blue forces are using BTR-80s, you can't go around shooting BTR-80s unless you can see that they're marked for the other side or they're firing at you.

 

 

Formal collateral damage analysis isn't done in the cockpit, it's done by certified CDE analysts working in the Air Operations Center, before the mission for a pre-planned strike, or in real time in support of a FAC/JTAC. ("Real time" doesn't mean "quickly". An F/A-18 pilot once told me that he never once dropped a bomb in several months of flying CAS over Afghanistan. He got a 9-line nearly every sortie, but would drive around in circles waiting for approval until it was time to head back to the boat. That would make for a pretty boring campaign, wouldn't it?)

 

 

Higher-level approval is what's missing from the current JTAC implementations, even if it's only:

"Warrior 1, this is Higher. Target AA1001 approved."

"Higher, Warrior 1, roger - BREAK - Colt 11, target AA1001, cleared in hot."

"Colt 11, AA1001, cleared hot. Inbound."

 

 

One way to realistically present those considerations would be to prep the mission with a graphical presentation showing areas where players arean't allowed to drop a bomb. Within the mission, trigger zones would cover those areas, and a set of triggers would set a flag to fail the mission and issue a debrief warning: "Turn in your wings, numbnuts. You bombed a baby milk factory."

On the contrary. As a mission designer you need a neutral faction to discriminate between enemy and civilians. AI will attack any opposite faction by default..

 

But fortunately this is already on the roadmap. In the Openbeta Missioneditor.lua is already a test option to reactivate the neutral faction again.

 

We need this for thorough mission design. Technically not tactically.

Edited July 3, 2018 by shagrat

[ouPhrontis]

I suppose you could have some measure of all the above, in that you could release weapons on-top of, or near civilians to strike a legitimate target, but would be questioned/analysed in debrief, it would be logged, measured. That's something that is perhaps possible within the mission-editor, though I don't know it well enough to say it is possible.

 

-edit-

 

I think someone pretty much stated that before me, apologies.

Edited July 3, 2018 by ouPhrontis

[Yoda967]

I suppose the discussion is academic, since a neutral faction is already on the roadmap.

 

 

Having been a scenario designer for real world war gaming, the question I constantly ask myself is, "Will the player see this?" If the answer is no, it doesn't go into my scenario. If the answer is yes, then I ask, "How do I present this in a way that seems realistic to the player?"

 

 

Someone higher up in the thread raised the question of morality within the context of the DCS engine, and that got me thinking. I did some research and found a document called "Legal and Ethical Lessons of NATO's Kosovo Campaign", which is a 600+ page transcript of a days-long legal symposium at the Naval War College in Newport Rhode Island sixteen years ago. One of the questions asked was by a military pilot, who wondered if decision makers considered the difficulty of conducting a humanitarian mission from 15,000 feet (her altitude, not mine). She expressed the opinion that it's impossible to tell who the civilians are from 2 1/2 miles up.

 

 

The panelist's response was, in a nut shell, "It was hard, but they did it. They flew lower. They used binoculars. And in any case, most of the civilian casualties occurred when civilians were mixed in with military personnel in violation of International Law." (I'm paraphrasing there.)

 

 

In the latter example, the player will have no way of knowing that's what he or she is facing until after the fact...just as in the real world. So what purpose does it serve? (That's not a rhetorical question. I'm seriously asking.)

[shagrat]

I suppose the discussion is academic, since a neutral faction is already on the roadmap.

 

 

Having been a scenario designer for real world war gaming, the question I constantly ask myself is, "Will the player see this?" If the answer is no, it doesn't go into my scenario. If the answer is yes, then I ask, "How do I present this in a way that seems realistic to the player?"

 

 

Someone higher up in the thread raised the question of morality within the context of the DCS engine, and that got me thinking. I did some research and found a document called "Legal and Ethical Lessons of NATO's Kosovo Campaign", which is a 600+ page transcript of a days-long legal symposium at the Naval War College in Newport Rhode Island sixteen years ago. One of the questions asked was by a military pilot, who wondered if decision makers considered the difficulty of conducting a humanitarian mission from 15,000 feet (her altitude, not mine). She expressed the opinion that it's impossible to tell who the civilians are from 2 1/2 miles up.

 

 

The panelist's response was, in a nut shell, "It was hard, but they did it. They flew lower. They used binoculars. And in any case, most of the civilian casualties occurred when civilians were mixed in with military personnel in violation of International Law." (I'm paraphrasing there.)

 

 

In the latter example, the player will have no way of knowing that's what he or she is facing until after the fact...just as in the real world. So what purpose does it serve? (That's not a rhetorical question. I'm seriously asking.)

Use the TGP, follow JTAC orders and consider attack directions is what you need to do as a pilot.

The idea is to get a feedback, when you carelessly throw a couple Mk-83 on an enemy vehicle or group of infantry near a house or inside a village...

A typical example: I am working on a dynamic mission that generates random attacks on FOBs, a District Center some Outposts. There are groups of 3-8 Insurgents and a couple vehicles coming from randomized directions.

Now to simulate ROE I had to put georgian infantry as "non-combatants" and put them into the villages and fields near the FOBs etc. It is pretty hard to determine between an armed insurgent and an armed georgian soldier with a TGP. A civilian with NO AK-47 is much easier to distinguish on a TGP. (BTW I managed to line up a perfect strafing run on an insurgent hiding between two houses, without hitting any of the two "non-combatants" and own troops).

With a GBU-38 you may be very precise, but when you "hit" civilians and get a message that tells you, that you caused a collateral and e.g. reduces mission score or will block rearming on Multiplayer for a 15 min penalty (just examples) can be an incentive to properly observe the ROEs and if in doubt, double check target and weapons choice. Which is a big challenge for the pilots in asymmetric conflicts.

 

For the mission designer it is currently very difficult to "simulate" any kind of non-combatants. No models that are unarmed, no neutral faction that isn't attacked by default so you need to workaround with "invisible". Next you cannot check for coalition "neutral" but need to check hits on individual units, determine an unitname prefix or country or the like to identify the "civilian" faction, with complex scripting (MOOSE makes this easier, but still it requires a basic knowledge of LUA and scripts).

So with a couple unarmed civilian models, a neutral faction and some conditions/script you can set up a convincing ROE in a mission and somewhat enforce a pilot to plan his attack and consider weapons effect.

[BitMaster]

Good idea, it adds the problems of RL warfare.

[Zimmerdylan]

I was on a Facebook page the other day and saw that ED had implemented cows into the Normandy map meanwhile, the map still flickers, has shadow issues, and is still plagued with issues that get complained about all of the time. This whole civilian casualty thing goes right along those lines. All I can say is, "What a complete waste of resources". Cows? People in civilian clothes? As if ED doesn't already suffer from FPS and memory problems.

All of the time people are on these threads complaining that they cannot find vehicles, other planes, targets of all sizes and shapes. It's brought up all of the time and has been from day one. Now we have cows? Something that we really aren't looking for to begin with and will not see anyway? And now people are asking for civilians? Blood? Seriously folks. Go play Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 where they show exploding heads if you want to see that kind of stuff.

To my mind, ED is costing my rig resources already by adding things that I'm never going to see to begin with. No A10 or F18 pilot is ever going to see a cow (much less a civilian) unless he's getting ready to crash into it. The only time you'd be seeing them is in the WWII planes strafing at ground level. And even then, I'm to busy setting up my target to care about a cow, and people are almost impossible to see even that close in DCS. And if you are just shooting cows....go buy a hunting game because you just spent a hell of a lot of money to use DCS for all the wrong reasons.

I rarely fly DCS these days because ED seems to be focusing too much on dazzling us with silly toys rather than working on problems that they have not been able to solve now for years. I don't want people that I'm never going to see on the ground, or cows that I could care less about. It's all just fluff that takes precious memory that ED cannot seem to fix to begin with. Modules that have been broken for years. Promises that never get kept. Projects that will never get out of Beta. Assets packs where the few assets that are there do not work. I'm not trying to undermine ED but this is years of stuff. Not a few months here and there......Years. And now, cows?

It seems to me that ED is focusing on the silly stuff and not on what needs to be taken care of.

I am not complaining, I'm spilling the facts as I have seen them on these forums and in game. I purchased this software and am happy to abide by it's terms. So.....Since I'm becoming less and less enchanted with the terms. I'll fly less and less, and also purchase less and less. In my mind, ED has lost sight of what they originally got into this game for.

As far as collateral damage, it can be included in the debriefing like it usually is in the real world. No pilot really ever sees or knows what damage outside of his intended target is until after the mission. This has been stated time and time and time again in soooo many documentaries dating back to WWI. There is no need to go blowing civilian memory hogs just to see the gore and their lovely clothing all over the battlefield. There are plenty of GAMES where you can see that.

Edited July 3, 2018 by Zimmerdylan

[BitMaster]

have you read the entire post ?

 

 

Wags clearly states those are TWO DIFFERENT dev teams.

 

 

When you wait for the engine mechanics to finish the V8-Motor, you might as well do a nice paintjob for the hood, one does not hinder the other and you cannot make a painter to a satanic engine mechanic just because you need one more to speed things up.

 

 

That's the best Wags could do imho...or sent that dev team to Sochi beach while there is no other work for them...either or

Edited July 3, 2018 by BitMaster

[Yoda967]

Use the TGP, follow JTAC orders and consider attack directions is what you need to do as a pilot.

The idea is to get a feedback, when you carelessly throw a couple Mk-83 on an enemy vehicle or group of infantry near a house or inside a village...

A typical example: I am working on a dynamic mission that generates random attacks on FOBs, a District Center some Outposts. There are groups of 3-8 Insurgents and a couple vehicles coming from randomized directions.

Now to simulate ROE I had to put georgian infantry as "non-combatants" and put them into the villages and fields near the FOBs etc. It is pretty hard to determine between an armed insurgent and an armed georgian soldier with a TGP. A civilian with NO AK-47 is much easier to distinguish on a TGP. (BTW I managed to line up a perfect strafing run on an insurgent hiding between two houses, without hitting any of the two "non-combatants" and own troops).

With a GBU-38 you may be very precise, but when you "hit" civilians and get a message that tells you, that you caused a collateral and e.g. reduces mission score or will block rearming on Multiplayer for a 15 min penalty (just examples) can be an incentive to properly observe the ROEs and if in doubt, double check target and weapons choice. Which is a big challenge for the pilots in asymmetric conflicts.

 

For the mission designer it is currently very difficult to "simulate" any kind of non-combatants. No models that are unarmed, no neutral faction that isn't attacked by default so you need to workaround with "invisible". Next you cannot check for coalition "neutral" but need to check hits on individual units, determine an unitname prefix or country or the like to identify the "civilian" faction, with complex scripting (MOOSE makes this easier, but still it requires a basic knowledge of LUA and scripts).

So with a couple unarmed civilian models, a neutral faction and some conditions/script you can set up a convincing ROE in a mission and somewhat enforce a pilot to plan his attack and consider weapons effect.

 

I'll concede that with a helicopter, you might be able to make that determination from the cockpit. But not in a jet.

 

As you say, in a jet, you're following the directions of a JTAC, and in the real world, even the JFAC doesn't have approval authority for collateral damage assessment. That comes from higher. (See my sample three-way radio dialogue in one of my previous posts.)

 

From a player perspective, if I'm flying an FA-18C and the ROE asks me to ID individual human figures before I press the pickle, I'll pass. That miz file will go straight into the digital oubliette. If, on the other hand, I'm briefed on the collateral concerns that I can reasonably see on a bombing run, and I'll get penalized for putting a bomb too close to one, I'd consider that a realistic presentation of a battlefield problem and a suitable challenge.

[Zimmerdylan]

have you read the entire post ?

 

 

Wags clearly states those are TWO DIFFERENT dev teams.

 

 

When you wait for the engine mechanics to finish the V8-Motor, you might as well do a nice paintjob for the hood, one does not hinder the other and you cannot make a painter to a satanic engine mechanic just because you need one more to speed things up.

 

 

That's the best Wags could do imho...or sent that dev team to Sochi beach while there is no other work for them...either or

 

It's all about priorities. It's clear where they lie at this point.

So you are saying that the engine doesn't run so I'll paint the hood. If the engine doesn't run, what good is the hood? Looks real pretty just sitting in the garage doing no good for anyone.

I personally would sell a car if the engine ran like crap for years, no matter how many bells and whistles it had.

Two sided coin my friend.

[shagrat]

It's all about priorities. It's clear where they lie at this point.

So you are saying that the engine doesn't run so I'll paint the hood. If the engine doesn't run, what good is the hood? Looks real pretty just sitting in the garage doing no good for anyone.

I personally would sell a car if the engine ran like crap for years, no matter how many bells and whistles it had.

Two sided coin my friend.

This argument is getting really old, and doesn't get better by repeating false perceptions.

Priority is a guideline to prioritize AVAILABLE resources with the REQUIRED skills.

If you have modellers free to do something... Let them work on it if it is on the list. Frees up resources later.

 

I am happy not everybody is running larger businesses here. ;)

[Cik]

seems to me that if you have resources to model civilian stuff, you should just model any of the huge holes we have in the roster of red/bluefor imo

 

 

the code side of having n+n sides though, that would be nice. ideally we could have red/blue/neutral/terrorist/whoever, and multiple subdivisions of all of those, so a bunch of different militias could be shooting each other while red and blue operate in the same airspace and there are three neutral factions with various forces involved, like real life. but just putting a bunch of unarmed guys in the ME? nice to have but nothing critical imo

[shagrat]

seems to me that if you have resources to model civilian stuff, you should just model any of the huge holes we have in the roster of red/bluefor imo

 

 

the code side of having n+n sides though, that would be nice. ideally we could have red/blue/neutral/terrorist/whoever, and multiple subdivisions of all of those, so a bunch of different militias could be shooting each other while red and blue operate in the same airspace and there are three neutral factions with various forces involved, like real life. but just putting a bunch of unarmed guys in the ME? nice to have but nothing critical imo

In the contrary, neutral faction is in the works (see Openbeta missioneditor.lua) and even a simple unarmed civilian model what suffice to model ROEs with a bit of scripting.

I currently use Georgian Soldiers on invisible and Moose scripts to simulate civilians.

The most difficult part is the pilot watching the target through the TGP and need to verify it is armed with an M-4 carbine or an AK-47... An unarmed civilian model would be gold, the neutral faction implemented icing in the cake. :)

[john9001]

I built a simple mission to practice bombing, i put some trucks alongside a road so I could find them easily. There is a lot of civilian trucks, buses and vans moving on this road, I did not put them there, they just showed up and they all had blue roofs. So I thought we already civilians in the simulation.

[shagrat]

I built a simple mission to practice bombing, i put some trucks alongside a road so I could find them easily. There is a lot of civilian trucks, buses and vans moving on this road, I did not put them there, they just showed up and they all had blue roofs. So I thought we already civilians in the simulation.

That is the auto-generated civilian traffic.

It is not consistent and can't be addressed in scripts... Unfortunately.

[Zimmerdylan]

This argument is getting really old, and doesn't get better by repeating false perceptions.

Priority is a guideline to prioritize AVAILABLE resources with the REQUIRED skills.

If you have modellers free to do something... Let them work on it if it is on the list. Frees up resources later.

 

I am happy not everybody is running larger businesses here. ;)

 

I have and do run a business, for 30 years now. My business is one of the hardest to be successful at than any other on the planet yet I have done it very successfully for all of this time. I did not get where I am by fluffing my customers. If there are issues that need addressed, I pull my resources and address them because the success of any given project for a client demands it in order to maintain the high level of professional service that I do. My reputation precedes me in my industry. Do my clients know and understand the nuts and bolts of what I do for them? Most of the time absolutely not. What they do understand is that when something isn't working, they need it fixed. They don't care how, or what I have to do to get it done. They Don't want fluff. They want the issues fixed with no excuses. I give them just that or I offer them another viable alternative. So this whole argument getting old attitude is nothing to the oldness of the years long issues that seem to hinder DCS. That is old. Really old. Years old. My business absolutely would not have survived a year if did not understand how it all worked. I'm going on year 33.

 

On a final note: My personal work is at least on the same level as ED's. I am in media and entertainment. You and almost everyone who has ever been on these forums has experienced my personal work at one time or another. That's pretty much on par with the size and scope of DCS.

Edited July 6, 2018 by Zimmerdylan

[shagrat]

I have and do run a business, for 30 years now. My business is one of the hardest to be successful at than any other on the planet yet I have done it very successfully for all of this time. I did not get where I am by fluffing my customers. If there are issues that need addressed, I pull my resources and address them because the success of any given project for a client demands it in order to maintain the high level of professional service that I do. My reputation precedes me in my industry. Do my clients know and understand the nuts and bolts of what I do for them? Most of the time absolutely not. What they do understand is that when something isn't working, they need it fixed. They don't care how, or what I have to do to get it done. They Don't want fluff. They want the issues fixed with no excuses. I give them just that or I offer them another viable alternative. So this whole argument getting old attitude is nothing to the oldness of the years long issues that seem to hinder DCS. That is old. Really old. Years old. My business absolutely would not have survived a year if did not understand how it all worked. I'm going on year 33.

 

On a final note: My personal work is at least on the same level as ED's. I am in media and entertainment. You and almost everyone who has ever been on these forums has experienced my personal work at one time or another. That's pretty much on par with the size and scope of DCS.

When you plan work for your employees, do you plan free ressources as "blocked", because they need to wait for other specialists to finish their jobs, or do you try to find useful work for them, to speed up upcoming tasks, as long as the skillset matches?

 

And nobody is "bluffing" anybody...

[Svend_Dellepude]

Neutral faction is a good idea. I thought about that many times. Would give something to ROE.

[DarkFire]

I don't particularly have a strong opinion on whether or not I'd want to see civilian units & consequent restrictions in DCS, but it's worth noting that other games of a similar nature such as ARMA deal with civilians reasonably well, given certain scenario type restrictions. Difference being I guess that a bullet from a soldier's rifle does very much less collateral damage than a FAB-1500 would.

 

Might be interesting to be able to have civilian traffic as destroyable units. Terrorists escaping in a car? Better use an AGM-65 or Vikhr instead of rockets. And so on.

[shagrat]

I don't particularly have a strong opinion on whether or not I'd want to see civilian units & consequent restrictions in DCS, but it's worth noting that other games of a similar nature such as ARMA deal with civilians reasonably well, given certain scenario type restrictions. Difference being I guess that a bullet from a soldier's rifle does very much less collateral damage than a FAB-1500 would.

 

Might be interesting to be able to have civilian traffic as destroyable units. Terrorists escaping in a car? Better use an AGM-65 or Vikhr instead of rockets. And so on.

The important part is to get the option through civilian models (at least an unarmed "civilian" on foot) a couple cars, pickups, lorries from the auto generated traffic would be nice, as well.

With that option mission designers can(!) implement Rules Of Engagement (ROE) and build missions that require thoughtful use of weapons...