March 4, 2026: PlayStation and other game controllers like Xbox have revolutionized the way military personnel carry out operations, especially those involving drones and RWS/Remote Weapons Stations. Another example appeared when the U.S. Navy polled its sailors to determine what was working, what was not and solicited suggestions for improvements. One response to sailor complaints was the decision to replace the $38,000 handheld controller for the submarine photonics mast periscope with the lighter, cheaper, and easier-to use Xbox game controllers. This was not the first time the military has turned to the Xbox controller. In 2001, the same time the Xbox computer game system was introduced, the Navy developed the electronic photonics masts to replace the traditional optical periscope on submarines. With the photonics masts, you put what the periscope could see on a large flat screen in the control room (or anywhere else in the sub). The photonics mast did not pierce the hull like the old optical periscope, so it was controlled remotely with a relatively large and, according to sailors and officers who used it, clunky custom controller.

While the photonics mast controller was unpopular, the Xbox game controller was quite the opposite. The Xbox game system was wildly popular from the beginning with over two million sold during the first 24 hours it was on sale. Microsoft, the manufacturer, constantly improved the Xbox and its controller. At the same time Xbox appeared, the U.S. Army was developing a highly realistic video game called Full Spectrum Warrior/FSW featuring infantry combat. FSW appeared in 2004 in commercial and more realistic military versions. It was highly popular on Xbox and it was about that time that the army also discovered that most of its new recruits were very familiar with the Xbox controller. It didn’t take long for developers of new army equipment that needed a hand controller to either use a modified Xbox controller or one very similar to it. That saves the army lots of training time and made operators of remotely operated vehicles (ground and air) more effective much sooner.

In 2008 the Xbox controller was used for the ARSS/Autonomous Rotorcraft Sniper System, a remotely controlled sniper rifle using a stabilized mount for a rifle aimed and fired remotely using the Xbox controller. Xbox controllers became the standard for controllers for all manner of remotely controlled weapons and UAVs as well as the small ground vehicles used to deal with roadside bombs and other high-risk tasks.

Over a hundred million Xbox game controllers have been sold since 2001 and the majority of new recruits in the military, male and female are familiar, often very familiar, due to thousands of hours using the Xbox controller before they join. The one loser in all this was the defense equipment manufacturers that were paid big bucks to design and build much less effective controllers. Many of these custom controllers were somewhat similar to Xbox but could not just copy XBox without getting sued by Microsoft. At the same time, Microsoft didn’t mind XBox controllers being bought and used for something besides Xbox games or that some military equipment controllers borrowed heavily from the XBox design. Microsoft also didn’t make an issue of it because a large segment of their Xbox game customers were in the military or service veterans who tended to praise XBox for making life easier and more survivable in a combat zone. You could often use an actual Xbox controller for military equipment by just creating new software drivers. Moreover, at about $30 each with a bulk purchase, you could afford to lose a lot of Xbox controllers in a combat zone as lots of replacements were handy including ones troops brought with them to play Xbox games while off duty. The most recent use of Xbox controllers has been in the Ukraine War, where both sides favor the Xbox controller to control their drones.

There are many other situations where computer gaming equipment plays a major role. At one point American intelligence agencies developed tools to make it easier to extract useful data from video game consoles like Xbox, Wii, PlayStation, and so on. This enabled intelligence to be obtained from the growing number of used consoles available, or those captured during raids of terrorist hangouts.

These consoles were actually specialized personal computers that contained hard drives and allowed users to perform a lot of PC type functions like email, chat and web browsing. The files containing these communications are not displayed as obviously as on PCs and most users don't really care. With this in mind, console manufacturers have made it difficult to get at user data without the proper password. But the counter-terror forces do care and found ways to get at potentially useful data, quickly. They were certain they would find useful information because that has been the case with the many PCs captured from terrorists in the past. The intelligence agencies already had data grabbing tools for PCs and built similar tools for consoles.

The American military is a major user of supercomputers which are some of the fastest computers on the planet. These machines were first developed, as were the first computers, for military applications. These ultra-powerful computers are used for code breaking and to help design weapons, including nukes, and equipment, especially electronic items. The military also needed lots of computing power for data mining. This involves pulling useful information about the enemy from ever larger masses of information.

Because there's never enough money to buy all the super-computers needed, military researchers have come up with ways to do it cheaper. In the late 1990s it was military researchers who figured out how to use GPUs/Graphic Processing Units from high-end PC graphic cards for non-graphic computing. GPUs do something similar to what supercomputers do. This means carrying out lots of math calculations of a fairly simple type, and eventually the manufacturers of GPUs realized that there was a commercial, not just military, demand for GPUs serving as supercomputers.

Twenty five years ago the Tesla supercomputer add-on for PCs appeared on the market. This was basically an Nvidia graphics board tweaked to act like a supercomputer, rather than a device that put 3-D photo-realistic game graphics on your computer screen. Soon there was a version of this system that provided a teraflop of computing power for $10,000.

The Cell Processor on the PlayStation 3/PS 3 was also a GPU, and that GPU alone was used to build several of the fastest supercomputers on the planet. But military researchers were quick to note that some versions of the PS 3 could be tweaked to run Linux, and the software required to produce supercomputer results from the PS 3s Cell processor. Since the PS 3 is sold below cost, so buyers will purchase lots of very profitable games, the U.S. military purchased thousands of PS 3s and used them as inexpensive supercomputers.