Playable Weapons

Consider The Mechsuit

A good video game usually introduces a new weapon not by stopping to explain everything it does, but by giving the player the weapon, enough information to make the possibilities legible, and then pointing him toward an opportunity to use it, with the rest of the new mechanic learned through experimentation. Taken as a metaphor, the familiar fantasy of a teenager unexpectedly finding himself inside a mechsuit works a similar way, and the useful military fiction is what lies underneath: a sophisticated weapon arriving with an interface that allows a new operator to begin using it effectively before either he or the institution around him has completely worked out what it can do. America should try to make that part of the fantasy real.

Several decades of advancements in military technology have brought the relationship between operator and machine represented by that fiction considerably closer to reality. Computing has steadily moved difficult problems of control and coordination away from the operator’s direct handling and into the machinery underneath him, even as the internal complexity of the resulting weapons has increased enormously. Meanwhile, during almost exactly the same period, and thanks to an overlapping set of technological advancements, video games have taught millions of people to learn and act inside complicated systems which they encounter principally through abstraction.

Playable Weapons Doctrine stems from an acknowledgment that, in light of these technological advancements, speed of learning has become part of the combat value of novel advanced weapons themselves. The practical expression of Playable Weapons Doctrine should be a Game-Native Operability (GNO) standard aimed at measuring operators’ facility with rapidly turning new systems into useful battlefield action, and how quickly, once competent, operators can begin finding new uses for them.

The Machine Disappears Under the Interface

The modern fighter plane and its pilot may be the closest analogue today to Playable Weapons Doctrine, primarily because of the demands of operating such complex machinery and the narrow time window in which a pilot can act at such high speeds. However, by the late Cold War the development of increasingly powerful electronics allowed the development of new combat aircraft like the F-16, which, along with a significant number of its contemporaries, represented a change in the level at which the pilot’s work took place. These planes could fill more roles in the air wing and exemplified the cutting edge for their time of machines becoming hugely more complex internally while being designed to remain manageable by one person.

In its own time, it was seen as remarkable the degree to which the F-16 especially incorporated then-new technology which today is taken for granted. From the start it was designed to have all the pilot’s commands pass through a flight-control system via fly-by-wire without a manual backup, and better sensors and sophisticated digital multifunction displays soon followed. These technical advances accrued throughout the F-16’s long life and continue today, all of which have led to pilots increasingly interacting with the airframe’s capabilities themselves rather than the machinery which gives rise to them.¹ The staggeringly more complicated F-35 of today fills the same role but was conceived as a sophisticated platform from the start, which would achieve fusion of sensors, software, and information through purpose-built integrated digital architecture. Though the volume of information taken in through sensors and data links is far greater, the picture is presented directly through a purpose-built helmet, with the goal of synthesizing a holistic picture and increasing pilot awareness while reducing workload.²

Though the technological transformation is most pronounced in aviation, it has nonetheless extended to many other corners of the U.S. joint force. In fact, as early as 1977, an account written from inside the Aegis automated surface air defense program recognized the problem of operator information burden.³ The account describes the combat system as being deliberately aimed at minimizing the level of necessary human intervention while operating in fully automatic mode, and while in this mode a warship’s capabilities could work at computer speed, not requiring the active intervention of crewmen unless necessary. Today, these advancements in automation and streamlining and simplification of information transfer have been able to remove operators physically from the warship altogether. This was demonstrated in the field during the Navy’s 2026 BALTOPS exercises, when operators maneuvered a small autonomous boat called the Global Autonomous Reconnaissance Craft (GARC) using a small controller purposefully designed to resemble one for an Xbox, through congested waters from British patrol craft to open water, at which point control was transferred to an ashore command hub.⁴ This feat represents a step further beyond Aegis: an operator could guide a vessel through a complicated maneuver without occupying it, and the interface itself stood in as the operator’s only means of contact with the weapon.

This distance of the modern military symbol and referent, weapon and operator, is popularly exemplified today in the first-person-view (FPV) drone operator, protected by obscurity and distance, and represents a further step along the same technological path. The pilot is no longer physically present onboard, with the flight controller mediating between his inputs and the aircraft/motors, as with the F-16, and the abstraction doesn’t end with software merely handling part of the burden of organizing sensing and information management. With the FPV operator, the human has been removed from the aircraft altogether, instead experiencing the machine through a camera image, and experiences none of the craft’s G-forces, meaning practically all of the physical demands of manned flight are stripped away. FPV flight is similar to the gameplay of a video game in a particularly literal sense that doesn’t appear anywhere else on the battlefield to the same extent. Technological developments over the past few decades like cheaper, more capable computing technology, better digital controls, and sensors, therefore, have enabled both modern video games and software-abstracted combat aircraft, as well as finally producing a weapon system whose operator interacts with the physical machine mainly through a video game-like interface.

The Game-Native Operator

Though growing mostly outside the military, video games have mirrored the technological advancement and deepening layers of abstraction seen in real weapon systems, and represent perhaps the largest single field of voluntary training ever created for churning out natives of interfaces for complicated systems.

A core, constant requirement of video games is that the player keep in their head a working model of the hidden rules governing the system, which they build their own understanding of through experimentation, failure, and other environmental feedback. How a gamer plays video games in general has become more or less solved, and it has become the case that serious play in almost any well-balanced game eventually reduces to an exercise in exploring the cost-benefit of any given in-game advantage.

The results of a recent study by the American military furthermore suggest that a gamer’s experience can strengthen military occupational learning. Among some aviators-in-training within the aviation-selection process, a greater degree of experience with action games correlated with better initial performance and faster improvement.⁵ The results of this study lend support to video games as providing experience applicable to learning interactive systems demanding quick response time. In the modern era, where we see significant overlap between gamers and the national pool of potential enlistees, training should be assumed to begin with an individual who already possesses some basic level of habits useful for learning a system, even if they have no specific occupational know-how.

The Weapon Does Not Hold Still

The priorities of weapon system development and doctrine within the American military since World War II have rightly been to prefer spending money and time on more capable platforms rather than falling back on spending lives. What the military has received in exchange for mushrooming costs has been a degree of agility and other network-centric capabilities in such capacity as no other force has been able to match. Yet, the greater expense to buy those technological capabilities has led to the concentration of more combat power and more burden across fewer platforms. Today, however, long efforts to buck that cost trend are bearing fruit in a wide variety of unmanned platforms that are increasingly capable but nonetheless can be produced cheaply enough to be considered attritable.⁶

An operator quickly mastering many weapons within an expanding fleet of systems will be a crucial challenge for near-future operators and doctrine designers to address. What that larger, mixed fleet of dissimilar specialized platforms brings to the table is the number of effective combinations among them which a unit can discover, but if every system has separate, idiosyncratic, unfamiliar controls or training, time-to-learn becomes the bottleneck. In this way, that optionality is closed off, and the notional increase in number of ways to compose a strike package, for example, may not be any real increase if operators cannot master enough of the necessary platforms on a timescale that permits employing them. Conversely, if the force is able to shorten its time-to-learn, a wider variety of weapons can be employed faster and in greater numbers, and even more significantly, it can experiment with the synergy of dissimilar weapons and novel tactics, seizing the initiative while the enemy adapts to individual systems.

By the textbook definition, the conflict in Ukraine is a “conventional” war, and larger than any that’s been fought in decades. It has been a true test for the weapon systems employed by both sides, sparking rapid evolution of weapons and tactics, accelerating development to an extent where unmanned aerial systems (UAS) are disruptively effective against the weapons of just five years ago. The pace of this change is hard to overstate, and NATO clearly regards it as significant, estimating that the Ukrainian battlefield saw a new drone tactic introduced every two to three weeks on average, prompting the alliance to work toward reorganizing more of its procurement around a use-case-based scheme intended for shorter evolutionary cycles.⁷

Adversarial innovation has been responsible for this accelerating trend, and on the Russian side this has been embodied by the continuing development of the Geran family of kamikaze drones. Russia has used the Iranian Shahed, from which the Geran was derived, and altered it repeatedly in response to hardening of Ukrainian defenses against past versions. This cycle has seen expedient improvisations made on the battlefield then standardized on production Gerans, with the end result of a weapon-development or improvement program which would normally take months or years being collapsed into mere weeks.⁸

Likewise, the fact that Ukraine has in 2026 seized on the disruptiveness of midrange strike operations against sensitive Russian assets like infrastructure by directing more resources toward increasing their volume and effectiveness shows the dynamic exists on both sides. This is evinced by the development of the capability in the first place, where Russian forces had a specific offensive advantage over Ukraine, but no defensive advantage to match. The discovery of the effectiveness of these strikes and Ukraine’s swift and intense effort to increase that capacity has clearly paid dividends for its domestic industrial base. This has allowed Ukraine’s domestic industrial base to establish efficient pipelines that, much like their Russian counterparts, can iterate on designs within days based on strike damage assessments and battlefield feedback while delivering more capable UAS that are better tailored for their users and faster to employ as a result.⁹

Beyond weapon design, Ukraine is using technology and reorganizing institutions to leverage the organizational and industrial agility it quickly built to first exploit the asymmetric effectiveness of midrange strikes on vulnerable enemy resources. Its sophisticated smart battlefield management system, DELTA, has a comprehensive recording feature used for drone missions that captures UAS type, course, battle damage assessment and/or failure points, so details can be compared to future mission plans by commanders and personnel. This enables commanders and personnel to compare performance and adapt subsequent operations based on lessons learned by other units.¹⁰ As Ukraine’s success with midrange strikes has shown, this approach allows one drone crew’s effective employment to be compared with others’ performances and incorporated into training and tactics with less friction, ultimately sharpening the whole force’s normal use of the system.

Becoming Clever With the Machine

Ease of use alone is not enough to make a weapon playable. Far from accelerating time-to-learn, systems made superficially simple by concealing so much of their behavior as to leave operators guessing what’s happening beneath the surface become useless as soon as they depart from the conditions the interface was designed around. A good game, on the other hand, hides an enormous volume of calculations, yet remains very deliberate about revealing the essential and necessary information. A playable military system, which faces the same design problem with higher consequences, should do much the same thing: provide curated legibility by hiding complexity which does not matter to employment while highlighting the essential information, making it visible enough that an operator can build an accurate working model of the machine and its state.

Ukrainian experience with automatic terminal guidance on FPV drones demonstrates the distinction. Experienced drone operators have at times chosen manual control for as long as they had a video link, in order to make better corrections on final attack approach. Other times they’ve preferred automatic guidance using pixel lock for the reason that it proved more than sufficient against targets with regular, recognizable outlines like enemy anti-air or jamming equipment.¹¹ Therefore, the value of automatic or manual guidance is situation-, target-, and mission-dependent. To generalize this example, more than just providing an easily selectable automatic option, an effective, time-to-learn optimized interface will still convey sufficient information for the operator to understand each mode’s function, the limits of their advantages, and adapt to changing circumstances.

The division of work between operator and software changes with the target and the condition of the link. An operator will soon likely cease to “fly” an unmanned aircraft in any conventional sense, and instead tell it where to go, what to observe, and how it should work with other machines. The necessary elements of an aerial weapon’s flight, like navigation, obstacle avoidance, or even parts of terminal guidance can increasingly be submerged, freeing up the operator’s attention for the most important tasks, namely target identification, maintaining situational awareness, and coordinating teaming between the weapon and other systems. Such a configuration would aim to offload work from the operator downward into the machine, ultimately enabling the operator to give more attention to the more consequential work, while preserving interface legibility sufficient for the operator to appreciate when the machine’s behavior or the tactical situation requires intervention.

Game-Native Operability

Returning to Playable Weapons Doctrine, there is one real barrier to implementation in the American military. Missing is a demanding standard from the Department of War that specifies a time-to-learn requirement for a trainee operator to reach beyond basic usefulness on a system, where their competence is also tested against conditions that depart from the training script.

As such, DOW should measure GNO through the time required to reach useful mission proficiency, understanding by the operator of system states and limitations which may materially affect weapon employment, and operator ability to make novel use of the platform when the environment, software, mission, or adversary changes. The last item should receive particular attention because the limits of an interface which seems perfectly intuitive while within a controlled environment can become exposed as soon as unexpected variables are introduced, and the entire man-machine interface could suddenly become incomprehensible.

DoDI 5000.95, Human Systems Integration in Defense Acquisition, already requires human considerations to be incorporated into system design, and calls for feasible human-performance metrics tied to user needs, including human-machine interfaces, automation, operational user testing, and training. The instruction also calls for the minimization within system design of characteristics that impose excessive cognitive demands or necessitate extensive training.¹²

This brings us back to the mechsuit. The most important part of that fiction for Playable Weapons Doctrine, beyond surrounding one person with more protection, mobility, perception, and destructive power than his body could otherwise carry, and then pushing it to a fantastical extreme, begins after our notional teenager has managed to make the machine move. With a playable weapon as with any other, while the operator becomes familiar with it, they must learn what it’s capable of, what possibilities its weapons and sensors open up, and how they can use new combinations of those characteristics to produce advantages nobody anticipated when it was built; what will set playable weapons apart is the speed with which operators can begin discovering those things.

The aim of the Playable Weapons Doctrine should be for a platoon, company, or specialist unit to become useful quickly enough with a new system to begin experimenting with the echelon at which that system it belongs, how it should be employed, and with what other systems it can be teamed. Successful use should be shared with other units as well as those responsible for training, software, and equipment, so that changes in deployment on the battlefield are able to inform changes in the system itself.

The Department of War adopting Game-Native Operability as a procurement standard would make more rapid usefulness and time-to-learn something that is deliberately designed, requested, and tested for, rather than something the military hopes will emerge after fielding.

The organizational approach to implementing PWD will inevitably evolve as well. Ukraine has offered one clearly effective approach to institutionalizing emergent tactics and implementing feedback on hardware iterations, but the version that best suits America is unlikely to be a one-to-one clone. Some capabilities may become organic at platoon or company level, while others may be handled by specialized teams attached downward, similar to fire-support teams or JTACs, while still others may make more sense at battalion or above.

Crucial will be for the joint force to remain flexible and open to adaptation. It should use PWD to discover those answers faster by streamlining time between adoption of a platform, operators becoming familiar with its capabilities and then experimenting with it, and organizations evolving based on lessons of what works. Done right, Playable Weapons Doctrine will be a powerful tool for building a force for which absorbing unfamiliar combat power, reorganizing around it, and effectively incorporating battlefield lessons to improve it all come naturally.