War is not a game. But it is a video game. Report Le Monde

Five kilometers from the eastern front of Ukraine, in a basement whose location is kept secret, soldiers sit in front of screens. One of them wears gamer glasses. Here, the war is fought remotely, with FPV drones (acronym for first-person view, “immersive”) piloted exactly like in a racing game: a controller, real-time video feedback, and a target to neutralize. 

The thumb movement that controls the trajectory of a drone on a battlefield is the same that, a few months earlier, guided a character in Fortnite (Ukrainian military drones are piloted using modified Xbox controllers). As expert Peter Singer explains, console manufacturers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars designing interfaces whose ergonomics are meant to be mastered in a few hours by millions of players. 

The army recruits precisely from this pool. This transfer is not accidental: it is the result of sixty years of an organic relationship between the video game industry and the military staffs, which political science researchers call the “military-industrial entertainment complex”. 

Since the Cold War, the Rand Corporation, founded in 1948 to provide advice to the Pentagon, has developed computer simulations in which high-ranking officials play the roles of enemy heads of state: nuclear war scenarios, calculations of mutually assured destruction, virtual trials of conflicts that, if they became real, would have no second round. In the 1960s, the Sigma simulations, classified as highly confidential, continued in the Pentagon’s underground facilities to model the evolution of the Vietnam War. Reality proved more complex than algorithms. 

During the 1980s, the logic reversed. The arcade game Battlezone, developed by Atari, was hijacked by the U.S. Army as a training tool. A decade later, video game industry budgets surpassed those of cinema, and the Pentagon realized that private studios now innovate faster than its own laboratories. […] 

The model spreads. In 2006, the French army collaborated with Ubisoft to transform Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter into a communication tool: the studio provided the storyline, the army contributed its experience and equipment, including the connected infantryman Félin (“infantryman with integrated equipment and communications”), which the game already represented with startling accuracy. Fiction precedes reality, or rather, reality reaches the fiction it helped write. 

On July 4, 2002, the U.S. Army had already taken a further step by launching America’s Army, a free shooter developed with 7 million dollars taken from recruitment funds. Result: over 20 million downloads. A study conducted in 2008 revealed that the title had a greater impact on recruits than all other military advertising campaigns combined. 

In the 2010s, soldiers played Call of Duty live on the Twitch platform, answering chat questions between matches. In 2020, an amendment by U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the Democratic Party’s left wing, attempted to ban this recruitment method. The U.S. Congress rejected her proposal. Film studios and military staffs have jointly shaped the imagination of several generations. And they have prepared them, without saying so, for a certain idea of war: clean, precise, victorious. 

In August 2024, Mykhailo Fedorov, then Minister of Digital Transformation (now Minister of Defense), launched the Army of Drones Bonus, a points program awarded to units for each confirmed bombing of Russian targets. Destroying a multiple rocket launcher system earns 50 points; a tank, 40; an enemy soldier, 6. 

Points can be spent on the Brave1 platform, nicknamed the “Amazon of war.” There are over 1,600 products available, from drones to precision optics, with rating systems and customer reviews. According to Ukrainian data, 90-95% of combat units now participate in the program. 

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It is said that the single unit Birds of Magyar has accumulated enough points to command 600 heavy Vampire drones, each capable of carrying up to 15 kilograms of explosives. Pavlo Yelizarov, commander of an elite unit that refused to participate in the program, acknowledges that the game has made drone warfare more effective but has also collected sensitive tactical data in a single document that could fall into the wrong hands. 

The circle closes in 2025 with the launch of the Ukraine Fight Drone Simulator. For the first time, the trend reverses: it is not a commercial game adapted by the army, but a military software born on the front line that is transformed into a game for the general public. Its creators admit: the goal is to recruit, on a global scale, a generation raised with a joystick in hand. 

The rise of FPV drones, states the New York Times, is responsible for 70% of the injuries recorded on the Ukrainian front (22% of victims have head and neck wounds). Hands are systematically targeted because soldiers, like civilians caught on the street, instinctively raise their arms to protect their faces when they hear the buzzing – an archaic reflex useless against a weapon remotely piloted by someone who, in turn, has no body at stake. 

This asymmetry was anticipated by philosopher Paul Virilio (1932-2018) with the term “pure war”. In Vitesse et politique (Galilée, 1977), and later in La Bombe informatique (Galilée, 1998), he describes a conflict in which physical contact would progressively be eliminated by those bombing, until violence becomes a purely technical act, without any friction with the reality of what it produces. 

For Virilio, speed is not only a military advantage: it is a way to bypass moral judgment. When the decision to kill takes less time than the awareness of killing, war itself changes nature. What the philosopher perhaps did not fully anticipate is the role entertainment would play in this desensitization. Sixty years of video games have precisely conditioned the reflexes and emotional threshold of those who pull the trigger. 

Video games have taught the operator to kill without contact. Artificial intelligence eliminates the operator. The Lavender system, developed by the Israeli army and used in the Gaza Strip, automatically generates target lists based on behavioral data (phone, movements, associations). Thousands of names produced by an algorithm and validated in seconds by a human operator, whose role is reduced to a click. 

The interface of killing has become so smooth, so familiar, that the question is not so much whether a soldier is able to kill, but rather to erase the distance between the act and its consequence. Until this distance becomes so great that it disappears from the consciousness of the person acting behind the screen.