War Is Virtual Hell Read online

  On a higher level of organization, the same logic of coordination and networking applies across the individual armed forces. Single branches of the American military establishment can no longer play the lone-wolf game. Interservice rivalry (though still very real) is officially out of fashion in the post-Cold War world of rapid deployment. Maximum speed, maximum impact, and minimum American casualties all demand that the services be fully coordinated, that all assets be brought into play in a smooth and utterly crushing synchrony. Navy ships support land offensives, Air Force strikes support mud-slogging Marines. And space-based satellite intelligence, satellite communications, and satellite navigation support everybody.

  That is the core of modern American strategic military doctrine, and that is what Col. Thorpe's new project, the Distributed Simulation Internet, is meant to accomplish for the military in the realm of cyberspace.

  DARPA is an old hand at computer networking. The original ARPANET of 1969 grew up to become today's globe-spanning civilian-based Internet. SIMNET was another DARPA war-child, conceived in 1983 and first online in May 1986. DARPA invented SIMNET just as it invented the Internet, but DARPA spun SIMNET off to the US Army for day-to-day operations.

  DARPA, by its nature, sponsors the cutting edge; the bleeding edge. The Distributed Simulation Internet, projected for the turn of the century, is to be a creature of another order entirely from SIMNET. Ten thousand linked simulators! Entire literal armies online. Global, real-time, broadband, fiber- optic, satellite-assisted, military simulation networking. Complete coordination, using one common network protocol, across all the armed services. Tank crews will see virtual air support flitting by. Jet jockeys will watch Marines defend perimeters on the pixelated landscape far below. Navy destroyers will steam offshore readying virtual cruise missiles... and the omniscient eye of trainers will watch it all.

  And not just connected, not just simulated. Seamless. "Seamless simulation" is probably the weirdest conceptual notion in the arsenal of military virtuality. The seams between reality and virtuality will be repeatedly and deliberately blurred. Ontology be damned - this is war!

  Col. Thorpe emphasizes this concept heavily. And seamless simulation is not a blue-sky notion. It's clearly within reach.

  Most of the means of human perception in modern vehicles of war are already electronically mediated. In Desert Storm, both air pilots and tank crews spent much of their time in combat watching infrared targeting scopes. Much the same goes for Patriot missile crews, Aegis cruisers, AWACS radar personnel, and so on. War has become a phenomenon that America witnesses through screens.

  And it is a simple matter to wire those screens to present any image desired. Real tanks can engage simulator crews on real terrain which is also simultaneously virtual. Fake threats can show up on real radar screens, and real threats on fake screens. While the crews in real machines can no longer tell live from Memorex, the simulators themselves will move closer to the "scratch and sniff" level of realism.

  Granted, simulators still won't fire real shells. "They know how to load shells," Col. Thorpe points out. "That's not what we're trying to teach them." What he's trying to teach them, in a word, is networking. The wired Army, the wired Navy, the wired Air Force and wired Marines. Wired satellites. Wired simulators. All coordinated. All teaching tactical teamwork.

  A wired Armed Forces will be composed entirely of veterans - highly trained veterans of military cyberspace. An army of high-tech masters who may never have fired a real shot in real anger, but have nevertheless rampaged across entire virtual continents, crushing all resistance with fluid teamwork and utterly focused, karate-like strikes. This is the concept of virtual reality as a strategic asset. It's the reasoning behind SIMNET, the "Mother of All Computer Games." It's modern Nintendo training for modern Nintendo war.

  The War We Won

  The walls inside the Institute for Defense Analyses are hung with Kuwaiti topography. In some entirely virtual, yet final and terrible sense, the USmilitary now owns Kuwait. The Pentagon has a virtual Kuwait on a hard disk - SAKI, the Saudi Arabia-Kuwait-Iraq database. It has the country mapped meter by meter, pixel by pixel, in 3-D, with weather optional. You can climb into one of Col. Thorpe's tank simulators and you can drive across that cyberspace doppleganger voodoo Kuwait exchanging gunfire with the polygonal ghosts of Iraqi T-72 tanks.

  There was a war in Kuwait recently. They don't call it "Desert Shield-Desert Storm" at IDA or DARPA. They certainly don't call it the "Persian Gulf War" - that would only irritate the Arab coalition allies who insist on calling that tormented body of water the "Arabian Gulf." No - they like to call this event "the war in Southwest Asia."

  The US military hasn't forgotten Southeast Asia. To hear them talk, you would think that they had discussed very little else for the 16 long years between Saigon and Kuwait City. In Southeast Asia the Pentagon sent Americans into tunnels below the earth to fight peasant guerrillas hand-to-hand with knives and pistols. They sent soldiers sweeping through rice paddies in hopes of attracting gunfire from some Viet Cong group large enough to be spotted from helicopters. As the situation became more hopeless, they sent in more American flesh to be ambushed and pierced with punji sticks. The United States lost a major war in Southeast Asia.

  However, the US recently won a major war in Southwest Asia. With some handy but basically political and cosmetic help from its Coalition allies, the US destroyed the fourth-largest land army on the planet in four days at a cost of only 148 American dead. Geopolitically, this war may have been less significant than Vietnam (with almost everybody in the civilized world versus a clear megalomaniac, victory of some sort was probably not much in doubt.) Strategically and tactically however, Desert Storm was one of the most lopsided and significant military victories since Agincourt. And the American military is quite aware of this.

  "Southwest Asia" may have vanished into the blipverse of cable television for much of the American populace, but the US military has a very long institutional memory. They will not forget Southwest Asia, and all the tasty things that Southwest Asia implies, for a long time to come.

  Col. Thorpe and his colleagues at DARPA, IDA, and the Army Office of Military History have created a special Southwest Asian memento of their very own - with the able help of their standard cyberspace civilian contractors: Bolt Beranek & Newman and Illusion Engineering. The memento is called "The Reconstruction of the Battle of 73 Easting."

  This battle took place at a map line called 73 Easting in the desert of southern Iraq. On 26 February 1991, the Eagle, Ghost, and Iron Troops of the US 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment attacked the Tawakalna Division of the Iraqi Republican Guard. These were untested UStank troops, without any previous combat experience, blundering forward in a sandstorm to confront entrenched Soviet-made heavy tanks manned by elite veterans of an eight-year war. Thanks to the sandstorm, the Americans had no air support either; this was a straight-on tank- versus-tank scrap in the desert, right out of the Rommel and Patton strategic notebook.

  The Americans annihilated the Iraqis in 22 minutes.

  The Battle of 73 Easting has become the single most accurately recorded combat engagement in human history. Army historians and simulation modelers thoroughly interviewed the American participants, and paced the battlefield meter by meter. They came up with a fully interactive, network-capable digital replica of the events at 73 Easting, right down to the last TOW missile and .50-caliber pockmark. Military historians and armchair strategists can now fly over the virtual battlefield in the "stealth vehicle," the so-called "SIMNET flying carpet," viewing the 3-D virtual landscape from any angle during any moment of the battle. They can even change the parameters - give the Iraqis infrared targeting scopes, for instance, which they lacked at the time, and which made them sitting ducks for high-tech American M1s charging out of blowing sand. The whole triumphal blitzkrieg can be pondered over repeatedly (gloated over even), in perfect scratch-free digital fidelity. It's the spirit of Southwest Asia in a digital nutshell.
In terms of American military morale, it's like a '90s CD remix of some '60s oldie, rescued from warping vinyl and remade closer to the heart's desire.

  Col. Thorpe and his colleagues first demo'd "73 Easting" in late 1991 at the Interservice/Industry Training Systems and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) #13, the premier convention for the military training, simulation, and VR industry. The virtual battle was the hit of the show, and it went on to tour the Senate Armed Services Committee, where it much impressed Sam Nunn and John Glenn.

  "The Reconstruction of the Battle of 73 Easting" is an enormously interesting interactive multimedia creation. It is fast and exhilarating and full of weird beauty. But even its sleek, polygonal, bloodless virtuality is a terrifying thing to witness and to comprehend. It is intense and horrific violence at headlong speed, a savage event of grotesque explosive precision and terrible mechanized impacts. The flesh of real young men was there inside those flam- ing tank-shaped polygons, and that flesh was burning.

  That is what one knows - but it's not what one sees. What one really sees in "73 Easting" is something new and very strange: a complete and utter triumph of chilling, analytic, cybernetic rationality over chaotic, real-life, human desperation.

  Battles have always been unspeakable events, unknowable and mystical. Besides the names of the dead, what we get from past historical battles are confused anecdotes, maybe a snapshot or two, impressions pulled from a deadly maelstrom that by its very nature could not be documented accurately. But DARPA's "Battle of 73 Easting" shows that day is past indeed. The omniscient eye of computer surveillance can now dwell on the extremes of battle like a CAT scan detailing a tumor in a human skull. This is virtual reality as a new way of knowledge: a new and terrible kind of transcendent military power.

  A Virtual Military/Industrial Complex?

  What is it that Col. Thorpe and his colleagues really want? Well, of course, they want the unquestioned global military pre-eminence of the American superpower. Of course, they want to fulfill their patriotic duty in the service of the United States and its national interests. They want to win honor and glory in the defense of the American republic. Those are givens. Col. Thorpe and his colleagues already work to those ends every day.

  What they really want is their own industrial base.

  They want the deliberate extension of the American military-industrial complex into the virtual world. They want a wired, digitized, military-post-industrial complex, reformed and recreated to suit their own terms and their own institutional interests.

  They want a pool of contractors and a hefty cadre of trained civilian talent that they can draw from at need. They want professional Simulation Battle Masters. Simulation system operators. Simulation site managers. Logisticians. Software maintenance people. Digital cartographers. CAD-CAM designers. Graphic designers.

  And it wouldn't break their hearts if the American entertainment industry picked up on their interactive simulation network technology, or if some smart civilian started adapting these open-architecture, virtual-reality network protocols that the military just developed. The cable TV industry, say. Or telephone companies running Distributed Simulation on fiber-to-the-curb. Or maybe some far-sighted commercial computer-networking service. It's what the military likes to call the "purple dragon" angle. Distributed Simulation technology doesn't have to stop at tanks and aircraft, you see. Why not simulate something swell and nifty for civilian Joe and Jane Sixpack and the kids? Why not purple dragons?

  We're talking serious bucks here. It's not the most serious money in a superpower's massive military budget, granted - at least not yet, it isn't - but it's very damned serious money by the standards of your average Silicon Valley multimedia start-up. The defense simulation market is about $2.5 billion a year. That's Hollywood-serious and then some. Over the next 10 years the Pentagon plans to drop about $370 billion on electronics R&D. Some of that money will fall to simulation. Maybe a lot of it, if the field really takes off.

  There are some very heavy operators in the simulation market - and they were all at the 14th I/ITSEC in San Antonio, Texas last November.

  The gig was sponsored by the National Security Industrial Association - a group that basically is the military-industrial complex. I/ITSEC was graced by the corporate presence of General Electric, General Dynamics, McDonnell Douglas, Rockwell, Hughes, Martin Marietta, and Bolt Beranek & Newman. And yes, they were also favored by IBM, Lockheed, Motorola, Silicon Graphics, Loral, Grumman, and Evans & Sutherland. And plenty more: a whole cloud of hangers-on, suppliers, dealers, niche marketeers, and brand-new startups.

  All these nice-suited people were in handsome display booths in a very large carpeted hall within hollering distance of the Alamo. The place was alive with screens, top-heavy with humming megabytage. General Dynamics ran their new tank simulator live, right on the display floor. Bolt Beranek & Newman ran a hot new image generator that made mid-1980s SIMNET graphics look like Hanna-Barbera.

  They were running demos at every side, and handing out promotional videos, and glossy display brochures, and every species of carnivorous mega-corporate public relations. They boasted of clinching major sales in foreign markets, and of their glowing write-ups in specialized industry journals such as Military Simulation & Training ($73/year, Britain) and Defense Electronics ($39/year, Englewood, Colo.) and National Defense (American Defense Preparedness Assn., $35/year, Arlington, Va.). Strange magazines, these. Very strange.

  The attendees attended the keynote speeches, and the banquet speeches, and the luncheon speeches. And they attended the presentations, and the paper sessions, and the six tracks of formal programming. And they industriously leafed through their blockbuster, 950-page I/ITSEC #14 Proceedings. This enormous red-and-white volume, officially "approved for public release" by the Department of Defense, was crammed-to-bursting with scholarly articles such as "Computer-Supported Embedded Training Systems for the Strike/Fighter Aircraft of Tomorrow," and "Hypermedia: a Solution for Selected Training and Prototyping Applications."

  And even "Virtual Training Devices: Illusion or Reality?" Not much debate there. Simulators are, of course, both illusion and reality. They're not entirely real, but they function just fine. And they pay like gangbusters.

  These people weren't there for their health. They were there for a simple, basic reason. Call it cyberpork. Cyberpork put the slash in "Interservice/Industry." It put that handy hyphen into "military-industrial." Industry wasn't lonely at I/ITSEC. Their patrons were there in spades. Military brass - heavy brass, shiny brass. TRADOC, the Training and Doctrine Command. STRICOM, the Simulation Training and Instrumentation Command. Air Force Training Command. Naval Training Systems Center. Naval Air Systems Command. People in crisp uniforms and polished shoes, from weapons divisions, and materiel commands, and program offices, and from forts and bases and academies and institutes, all across the US.

  Suppose that you were an ambitious and visionary leader of the post-Cold War '90s military establishment, like, say, Col. Jack Thorpe. Or perhaps Col. Ed Fitzsimmons of the Defense Modeling and Simulation Office, or Lt. Col. James Shiflett from the Information Science and Technology Office, or Col. William Hubbard from Army Battle Labs. What are you supposed to do with all these people at I/ITSEC? On the face of it, your situation doesn't look all that promising. The 40-year Cold War military-industrial gravy train has clearly gone off the rails. There's gonna be - there's bound to be - some "downsizing" and "restructuring" and "conversion" and "transition," and all those other euphemisms for extreme and wrenching economic pain to your own suppliers, and your own people, and your own colleagues. Not to mention the potential threat to your own career.

  Your answer, of course - you being the kind of guy you are - is to seize this magnificent opportunity. Wire everyone up! Global, real-time, broadband, networked vendors and suppliers! They're hurting now. They're worried. They'll go for anything that looks like survival, that looks like a hot new market. Seize the day. No more of this time-wasting, money-squandering,
inter-vendor rivalry with their incompatible standards. One standard now. The Distributed Simulation Internet Standard.

  The Distributed Simulation Internet doesn't even exist yet. It may never exist. That's not a problem. What it does have is its own protocol. The DSI Protocol will link simulation machines from manufacturers across the field and across the planet.

  This virtuality standard emerged from Orlando, Fla., in the early '90s, from the potent nexus of Orlando's Institute for Simulation & Training, Orlando's University of Central Florida, Orlando's US Army STRICOM, Orlando's Naval Training Systems Center, and the Orlando-based, 400-strong Standards for the Interoperability of Defense Simulations working groups. (One mustn't rule out the possible cultural influence of Disneyworld, either.)

  They demo'd the new standard on a network link-up at I/ITSEC #14, live. They went for the opportunity. They had to rip up some of the Ethernet wiring that they'd laid before the show, because it had so many crimp-failures from the tramping legions of wingtip-shod vendor feet. It got hairy for a while there. But they got the demo to run.

  Of course a system crashed. Somebody's system always crashes at any multimedia demo. It's like a force of nature. In the case of the DIS Interoperability Demo, it was the Mac Quadra 900 running the slide show. The sucker iced when its screensaver kicked in, and the sweaty-palmed techies from IDA had to re-boot live. They winged it, and got the slides up. It looked okay. Most people didn't notice.