CLEUELAND. OH
SUNDAY 547.319
DEC 3 1395
Oil, gold traders to teach Marines a few war lessons
NEW YORK - They may not qualify as the few and the proud, but this week 15 oil and gold exchange traders will teach a dozen top Marine Corps generals and colonels how to react with lightning speed in a modern war.
Yes, a war -- the kind that spills real blood, not just red ink.
The Marines are supposed to learn such tricks as avoiding information overload, interpreting and evaluating data, and making split-second decisions --lessons they hope to carry from the financial battlefield to the military one.
The Marines will hit the floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange at the World Trade Center late tomorrow and pretend to trade millions of dollars worth of commodities contracts, which the traders do for real each weekday, usually screaming out their lungs.
Then, Tuesday, the traders -- who constantly weigh risks and probabilities in their jobs - will team up with the officers on Governor's Island in New York to simulate computer-controlled warfare on two 28-inch computer monitors. The simulation will involve lots of small units searching for the enemy and asking for artillery backup and air strikes.
Why traders?
"In the future, war will be a little more chaotic," said 1st Lt. Christopher Lewis, a Marine Corps spokesman, adding that a lot of the decisions will be based on huge amounts of often incomplete digital information.
"The traders on the New York Mercantile Exchange fight the information war on a daily basis at a very fast pace." Lewis said. The traders react to a blizzard of information -- often misleading -- about factors like accidents, weather, economic trends and even war that affect supply and demand for commodities like Middle Eastern oil and various precious metals