How This Video Game Controller Became the US Military’s Weapon of Choice

In a future conflict, American troops will direct the newest war machines not with sprawling control panels or sci-fi-inspired touchscreens, but controls familiar to anyone who grew up with an Xbox or PlayStation in their home.

Over the past several years, the US Defense Department has been gradually integrating what appear to be variants of the Freedom of Movement Control Unit (FMCU) handsets as the primary control units for a variety of advanced weapons systems, according to publicly available imagery published to the department’s Defense Visual Information Distribution System media hub.

Those systems include the new Navy Marine Corps Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System (NMESIS) launcher, a Joint Light Tactical Vehicle–based anti-ship missile system designed to fire the new Naval Strike Missile that’s essential to the Marine Corps’ plans for a notional future war with China in the Indo-Pacific; the Army’s new Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense (M-SHORAD) system that, bristling with FIM-92 Stinger and AGM-114 Hellfire missiles and a 30-mm chain gun mounted on a Stryker infantry fighting vehicle, is seen as a critical anti-air capability in a potential clash with Russia in Eastern Europe; the Air Force’s MRAP-based Recovery of Air Bases Denied by Ordnance (RADBO) truck that uses a laser to clear away improvised explosive devices and other unexploded munitions; and the Humvee-mounted High Energy Laser-Expeditionary (HELEX) laser weapon system currently undergoing testing by the Marine Corps.

The FMCU has also been employed on a variety of experimental unmanned vehicles, and according to a 2023 Navy contract, the system will be integral to the operation of the AN/SAY-3A Electro-Optic Sensor System (or “I-Stalker”) that’s designed to help the service’s future Constellation-class guided-missile frigates track and engage incoming threats.

Produced since 2008 by Measurement Systems Inc. (MSI), a subsidiary of British defense contractor Ultra that specializes in human-machine interfaces, the FMCU offers a similar form factor to the standard Xbox or PlayStation controller but with a ruggedized design intended to safeguard its sensitive electronics against whatever hostile environs American service members may find themselves in. A longtime developer of joysticks used on various US naval systems and aircraft, MSI has served as a subcontractor to major defense “primes” like General Atomics, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and BAE Systems to provide the handheld control units for “various aircraft and vehicle programs,” according to information compiled by federal contracting software GovTribe.

“With the foresight to recognize the form factor that would be most accessible to today’s warfighters, [Ultra] has continued to make the FMCU one of the most highly configurable and powerful controllers available today,” according to Ultra. (The company did not respond to multiple requests for comment from WIRED.)

The endlessly customizable FMCU isn’t totally new technology: According to Ultra, the system has been in use since at least 2010 to operate the now-sundowned Navy’s MQ-8 Fire Scout unmanned autonomous helicopter and the Ground Based Operational Surveillance System (GBOSS) that the Army and Marine Corps have both employed throughout the global war on terror. But the recent proliferation of the handset across sophisticated new weapon platforms reflects a growing trend in the US military towards controls that aren’t just uniquely tactile or ergonomic in their operation, but inherently familiar to the next generation of potential warfighters before they ever even sign up to serve.

“For RADBO, the operators are generally a much younger audience,” an Air Force spokesman tells WIRED. “Therefore, utilizing a PlayStation or Xbox type of controller such as the FMCU seems to be a natural transition for the gaming generation.”

An Xbox game controller used to maneuver the photonic mast aboard the USS Colorado submarine in 2018.Photograph: Courtesy of U.S. Navy/Mass Communication Specialist First Class Steven Hoskins

Indeed, that the US military is adopting specially built video-game-style controllers may appear unsurprising: The various service branches have long experimented with commercial off-the-shelf console handsets for operating novel systems. The Army and Marine Corps have for more than a decade used Xbox controllers to operate small unmanned vehicles, from ground units employed for explosive ordnance disposal to airborne drones, as well as larger assets like the M1075 Palletized Loading System logistics vehicle. Meanwhile, the “photonics mast” that has replaced the traditional periscope on the Navy’s new Virginia-class submarines uses the same inexpensive Xbox handset, as does the service’s Multifunctional Automated Repair System robot that’s employed on surface warships to address everything from in-theater battle damage repair to shipyard maintenance.

This trend is also prevalent among defense industry players angling for fresh Pentagon contracts: Look no further than the LOCUST Laser Weapon System developed by BlueHalo for use as the Army’s Palletized-High Energy Laser (P-HEL) system, which explicitly uses an Xbox controller to help soldiers target incoming drones and burn them out of the sky—not unlike the service’s previous ventures into laser weapons.

“By 2006, games like Halo were dominant in the military,” Tom Phelps, then a product director at iRobot, told Business Insider in 2013 of the company’s adoption of a standard Xbox controller for its PackBot IED disposal robot. “So we worked with the military to socialize and standardize the concept … It was considered a very strong success, younger soldiers with a lot of gaming experience were able to adapt quickly.”

Commercial video game handsets have also proven popular beyond the ranks of the US military, from the British Army’s remote-controlled Polaris MRZR all-terrain vehicle to Israel Aerospace Industries’ Carmel battle tank, the latter of which had its controls developed with feedback from teenage gamers who reportedly eschewed the traditional fighter jet-style joystick in favor of a standard video game handset. More recently, Ukrainian troops have used PlayStation controllers and Steam Decks to direct armed unmanned drones and machine gun turrets against invading Russian forces. And these controllers have unusual non-military applications as well: Most infamously, the OceanGate submarine that suffered a catastrophic implosion during a dive to the wreck of the Titanic in June 2023 was operated with a version of a Logitech F710 controller, as CBS News reported at the time.

“They are far more willing to experiment, they are much less afraid of technology … It comes to them naturally,” Israeli Defense Forces colonel Udi Tzur told The Washington Post in 2020 of optimizing the Carmel tank’s controls for younger operators. “It’s not exactly like playing Fortnite, but something like that, and amazingly they bring their skills to operational effectiveness in no time. I’ll tell you the truth, I didn’t think it could be reached so quickly.”

There are clear advantages to using cheap video-game-style controllers to operate advanced military weapons systems. The first is a matter of, well, control: Not only are video game handsets more ergonomic, but the configuration of buttons and joysticks offers tactile feedback not generally available from, say, one of the US military’s now-ubiquitous touchscreens. The Navy in particular learned this the hard way following the 2017 collision between the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS John S. McCain and an oil tanker off the coast of Singapore, an incident that prompted the service to swap out its bridge touchscreens for mechanical throttles across its guided-missile destroyer fleet after a National Transportation Safety Board report on the accident noted that sailors preferred the latter because “they provide[d] both immediate and tactile feedback to the operator.” Sure, a US service member may not operate an Xbox controller with a “rumble” feature, but the configuration of video-game-style controllers like the FMCU does offer significant tactile (and tactical) advantages over dynamic touchscreens, a conclusion several studies appear to reinforce.

But the real advantage of video-game-style controllers for the Pentagon is, as military officials and defense contractors have noted, their familiarity to the average US service member. As of 2024, more than 190.6 million Americans of all ages, or roughly 61 percent of the country, played video games, according to an annual report from the Entertainment Software Association trade group, while data from the Pew Research Center published in May indicates that 85 percent of American teenagers say they play video games, with 41 percent reporting that they play daily.

In terms of specific video games systems, the ESA report indicates that consoles and their distinctive controllers reign supreme among Gen Z and Gen Alpha—both demographic groups that stand to eventually end up fighting in America’s next big war. The Pentagon is, in the words of military technologist Peter W. Singer, “free-riding” off a video game industry that has spent decades training Americans on a familiar set of controls and ergonomics that, at least since the PlayStation introduced elongated grips in the 1990s, have been standard among most game systems for years (with apologies to the Wii remote that the Army eyed for bomb-disposal robots nearly two decades ago).

“The gaming companies spent millions of dollars developing an optimal, intuitive, easy-to-learn user interface, and then they went and spent years training up the user base for the US military on how to use that interface,” Singer said in a March 2023 interview. “These designs aren’t happenstance, and the same pool they’re pulling from for their customer base, the military is pulling from … and the training is basically already done.”

At the moment, it’s unclear how exactly many US military systems use the FMCU. When reached for comment, the Pentagon confirmed the use of the system on the NMESIS, M-SHORAD, and RADBO weapons platforms and referred WIRED to the individual service branches for additional details. The Marine Corps confirmed the handset’s use with the GBOSS, while the Air Force again confirmed the same for the RADBO. The Navy stated that the service does not currently use the FMCU with any existing systems; the Army did not respond to requests for comment.

How far the FMCU and its commercial off-the-shelf variants will spread throughout the ranks of the US military remains to be seen. But controls that effectively translate human inputs into machine movement tend to persist for decades after their introduction: After all, the joystick (or “control column,” in military parlance) has been a fixture of military aviation since its inception. Here’s just hoping that the Pentagon hasn’t moved on to the Power Glove by the time the next big war rolls around.