The entanglement of war with simulation continues with the discovery that a video of a US battleship shooting down an Iranian fighter jet is very likely a clip from videogame War Thunder, depicting ordnance from the World War 2 era. The clip in question has circulated on social media to the tune of millions of views. It has also been shared around by at least one sitting US Republican statesman, Texas governor Greg Abbott, who reposted it with the caption “Bye bye”. The tweet in question has since been deleted.
The clip’s virality prompted the Agence France-Presse to launch an investigation and debunk the coverage, as passed along by PCGamer. The AFP have yet to identify the origin of the clip, but they have traced it to this Reddit thread and also cite an email sent March 3rd by Konstantin Govorun, publisher Gaijin Entertainment’s head of public relations, who observes: “Yes, this looks like ‘War Thunder’ footage.” The warship depicted in the video resembles the USS Tennessee, a battleship decommissioned in 1947. Social media users note that the so-called Iranian fighter looks like a Nazi German Messerschmitt Me 163B-1a Komet.
There have been no news reports of an Iranian plane getting shot down by a US warship. On 2nd March, the Pentagon denied an Iranian claim to have struck the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln with ballistic missiles.
Videos of milsims are routinely conflated with actual war footage, whether by gullible users or by deliberate spreaders of misinformation. The milsim in question is often ARMA 3, whose developers Bohemia Interactive went so far as to publish a hoax-buster’s guide to identifying ARMA footage after a rash of bogus ‘Israeli-Palestinian conflict videos’ back in October 2023. (In my experience, War Thunder is more often a source of classified military documents, because nerds do love leaking things to win arguments.)
In general, we are entering a truly terrible age for this kind of thing thanks to the prevalence of generative AI deepfakes. The internet is becoming a soup of simulacra feeding on simulacra, helped along by the ‘post-truth’ right’s eternally pubescent readiness to flood the zone with shit. Xitter have recently taken the step of suspending revenue sharing for undisclosed generative AI war videos, after years of stripping away content moderation policies under the kindly stewardship of Elon Musk, the largest wart upon endgame capitalism’s backside.
It doesn’t help that certain governments are happy to make use of photorealistic war games for propaganda. Back in 2013, North Korea’s despotic government included snippets of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 in a film depicting a North Korean strike on a US city. As regards the current US and Israeli war with Iran – which has spilled out to other countries, with no obvious end in sight – the Trump administration recently published battle footage spliced with Call Of Duty animations and HUD elements.
The latter video doesn’t hide the fact that it includes scenes from videogames – worse, it encourages followers to savour the spectacle of Iran being bombed as they would a killstreak montage. Given that the US-Israeli assault has reportedly wiped out 165 schoolchildren, and given that, notwithstanding the colossal viciousness, bigotry and cynicism of Iran’s regime, the strikes are a “pre-emptive”, unprovoked attack in the midst of diplomatic negotiations, I would perhaps dial down the ggez presentation. But that would be asking too much of the glue-swilling trolls in charge of the White House Twitter.
