PlayStation and other game controllers, like Xbox, have revolutionized how military personnel carry out operations, especially those involving drones and RWS/Remote Weapons Stations. Another example came when the U.S. Navy polled its sailors to determine what worked, what didn't, and to solicit suggestions for improvement. In response to sailor complaints, the Navy decided 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 wasn't the first time the military turned to the Xbox controller. In 2001, when the Xbox console launched, the Navy developed electronic photonics masts to replace submarines' traditional optical periscopes. 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 sailors and officers controlled it remotely with a relatively large, clunky custom controller.

While the photonics mast controller was unpopular, the Xbox game controller was quite the opposite. The Xbox system was wildly popular from the start, with over two million sold in its first 24 hours. Microsoft, the manufacturer, constantly improved the Xbox and its controller. At the same time, 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 around that time 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 makes 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 with a stabilized mount, 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.

Since 2001, over a hundred million Xbox game controllers have been sold, and most new recruits, male and female, are familiar, often very familiar, with them because they spent thousands of hours using Xbox controllers before they joined. The only losers were the defense equipment manufacturers that were paid big bucks to design and build far less effective controllers. Many of these custom controllers resembled Xbox controllers, but they couldn't 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 Xbox customers were military personnel or veterans who often praised Xbox for making life easier and more survivable in a combat zone. You could often use an Xbox controller with military equipment by creating new software drivers. Moreover, at about $30 each with a bulk purchase, you could afford to lose many Xbox controllers in a combat zone, since replacements were readily available, including those 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.

Computer gaming equipment plays a major role in many other situations. At one point, American intelligence agencies developed tools to make it easier to extract useful data from video game consoles like Xbox, Wii, and PlayStation. 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 specialized personal computers with hard drives that let users do many PC-type functions, like email, chat, and web browsing. The files containing these communications aren't displayed as obviously as on PCs, and most users don't care. Console manufacturers have made it difficult to get user data without the proper password. But counter-terror forces do care and find ways to access 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. Like the first computers, these machines were developed for military applications. These ultra-powerful computers are used for code-breaking and for designing 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 data.

Because there's never enough money to buy all the supercomputers needed, military researchers have found cheaper ways to do it. In the late 1990s, military researchers figured out how to use GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) from high-end PC graphics cards for non-graphics computing. GPUs do something like supercomputers. This means doing lots of simple math calculations, and eventually GPU manufacturers realized there was commercial, not just military, demand for GPUs 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, a version of this system 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 quickly noted that some PS 3 models could be tweaked to run Linux, and that the software was needed to get supercomputer results from the PS 3's Cell processor. Because the PS 3 sold at a loss, buyers purchased many highly profitable games; the U.S. military bought thousands of PS 3s and used them as inexpensive supercomputers.