War Is Virtual Hell Read online

  The protocol worked just fine. They had a big digitized section of the terrain from Fort Hunter-Liggett in California, running live on-screen, cunningly combined with an actual long-distance link to an actual wired tank in actual Fort Hunter-Liggett.

  "Seamless simulation," live onstage.

  The demo was far from real virtual war. There was some ritual gunfire here or there, but this wasn't real combat training. This was a fashion show in seam- free camouflage haute-couture.

  Everybody took a formal runway-model turn, up on the big virtual stage. With live narration at the mike: "The bogeys are generated by Bolt Beranek & Newman." General Dynamics Land Systems Division modeled the virtual M1A2 Battle Tank. From their own show-booth, General Electric thoughtfully supplied an Abrams tank and an F-16. Hughes proudly displayed a robot spy-drone. McDonnell Douglas had a surface-to-air missile, and Lockheed demo'd a virtual Patriot battery. Twenty- four companies - twenty-five, if you count the guys who supplied the video projectors. All of them packed snugly in the DARPA virtual corral.

  They had the brass lined-up right at the front, in a row of folding chairs. A rear admiral here, a couple of lieutenant generals there; a full brace of Cold War veterans, braid and chest ribbons and hats. The brass watched the three monster screens with squint-eyed, show-me skepticism.

  And the brass weren't blown-away, either. The network looked pretty good, and it ran without crashing, but they weren't stunned or amazed. The brass didn't leave San Antonio raving that they'd just seen the future and it worked. They clearly didn't know quite what to make of what they had just seen. One got the impression that they figured this virtual-network stuff might turn into something useful someday. Cute gimmick. Clever. Worth a look, I guess. Learn something new every day. Glad we came down here to I/ITSEC. Lemme know when we can use this to invade Normandy.

  The brass were on public exhibit themselves, actually. Whether they knew it or not, they were legitimizers, stalking horses, Trojan Horses. Generals and admirals from a very long-lasting but swiftly vanished era. Compared to their tech-crazed subordinates - the Southwest Asian, baby-boomer, carnivorous cyber- colonels, majors, and captains who are now actually running the digitized New World Order American military - the Cold War guys looked like a line of stuffed ducks.

  Today Kuwait, Tommorow the World

  There was some interesting stuff backstage at I/ITSEC. There was a big rope- handled canvas bag full of the tools of the virtual trade: hex crimpers, nut drivers, metric wrenches, soldering wire, cable strippers. There were big ugly powerful rock'n'roll amps stenciled PROPERTY OF US GOVT INSTITUTE FOR DEFENSE ANALYSES, and big color display monitors shimmed up on cardboard, and there were powerstrips and orange extension cords and some loose Mac floppies. And there was a handscrawled brag on a backstage chalkboard, written by the techies from Orlando: "DIS Interoperability Demonstration. Today's feature: DIS. Tomorrow: the holodeck!"

  The natural question arises: Is this some kind of wacky egghead DARPA media hype, or is this a genuine military technology? Can governments really exercise national military power - kick ass, kill people - merely by using some big amps and some color monitors and some keyboards, and a bunch of other namby-pamby sci-fi "holodeck" stuff?

  The answer is yes.

  Yes, this technology is lethal. Yes, it is a real strategic asset. Military virtual reality is not a toy or a joke. There is a lot of vaporware in "virtual reality," but this technology definitely will help people kill each other. Virtual reality happens to be very fashionable at the moment, with some ritzy pop-cultural overtones, but that is accidental. Whether or not VR becomes a major new medium of commercial entertainment, or some vital new mode of artistic expression, it still will be of enormous use to the military. Thriving civilian VR will probably make military VR expand even faster; giving the virtual battlefield better and glossier set designs.

  There was a demo at I/ITSEC called "Project 2851." This is a new standard for digital terrains, a standard for all American armed forces. It will let them share terrain databases on any number of different machines.

  But there is another aspect to Project 2851. Project 2851 is about the virtual reproduction and archiving of the entire planet. Simulator technology has reached a point today in which satellite photographs can be transformed automatically into 3-D virtual landscapes. These landscapes can be stored in databases, then used as highly accurate training grounds for tanks, aircraft, helicopters, SEALS, Delta Force commandos.

  What does this mean? It means that soon there will be no such thing as "unknown territory" for the United States military. In the future - soon, very soon - the United States military will know the entire planet just like the back of its hand. It will know other countries better than those countries know themselves.

  During the Battle of 73 Easting, an American tank regiment came roaring out of an Iraqi desert that the Iraqis themselves could not navigate. The Iraqis couldn't enter their own desert, because they would have died there. But the Americans had satellite navigation units, so the Americans knew where they were on our planet's surface right down to the yard.

  The Stealth pilots who blew downtown Baghdad into hell-and-gone had already flown those urban landscapes before they ever put their butts in the cockpit seat. They knew every ridge, every skyline, every road - they'd already seen them on console screens.

  During Desert Storm, some Iraqi soldiers actually surrendered to unmanned flying drones. These aircraft are disembodied eyes, disembodied screens, network peripherals basically, with a man behind them somewhere many miles away. And that man has another screen in front of him, and a keyboard at hand, and a wire from that keyboard that can snake through a network and open a Vent of Hell.

  This is what it all means. Say you are in an army attempting to resist the United States. You have big tanks around you, and ferocious artillery, and a gun in your hands. And you are on the march.

  Then high-explosive metal begins to rain upon you from a clear sky. Everything around you that emits heat, everything around you with an engine in it, begins to spontaneously and violently explode. You do not see the eyes that see you. You cannot know where the explosives are coming from: sky-colored Stealths invisible to radar, offshore naval batteries miles away, whip-fast and whip- smart subsonic cruise missiles, or rapid-fire rocket batteries on low-flying attack helicopters just below your horizon. It doesn't matter which of these weapons is destroying your army - you don't know, and you won't be told, either. You will just watch your army explode.

  Eventually, it will dawn on you that the only reason you, yourself, are still alive, still standing there unpierced and unlacerated, is because you are being deliberately spared. That is when you will decide to surrender. And you will surrender. After you give up, you might come within actual physical sight of an American soldier.

  Eventually you will be allowed to go home. To your home town. Where the ligaments of your nation's infrastructure have been severed with terrible precision. You will have no bridges, no telephones, no power plants, no street lights, no traffic lights, no working runways, no computer networks, and no defense ministry, of course. You have aroused the wrath of the United States. You will be taking ferries in the dark for a long time.

  This is not the future that I'm describing. Basically, this is the present - this is what actually happened to the world's fourth largest army, in Southwest Asia. Will the US Government continue to expand the course that led us in that direction? After all, we've won the Cold War and our domestic economy's hurting rather badly. Will the new Clinton Administration follow the DARPA lead? Continue pouring money into the gold-plated rathole of ultra-high-tech military- technological advance?

  You might judge the likelihood of that by Bill Clinton's statements on the campaign trail. "While we will need a smaller military in the post-Cold War world, we must retain our superior technology, high-quality personnel, and strong industrial base." That's what he told National Defense magazine, anyhow.

  Clinton and G
ore may have little reason for fondness for the Army that brought us Vietnam, but they've got plenty in common with their generational contemporaries, the cybercolonels. They are calling for a "civilian DARPA," but you can bet good money that they won't lose their fondness for the military one. Defense Simulation Internet? The White House is now in the hands of rabid fiber- optic enthusiasts.

  The virtual iron is hot. Want to see a real vision of the virtual future? It's a future in which large sections of the American military-industrial complex have migrated entirely into cyberspace. This is the real DARPA Virtual Reality Vision Thing, the plans they allude to with quiet determination just after the big multimedia displays. "Simulate before you build." They want to make that a basic military principle.

  Not just simulated weapons. Entire simulated defense plants. Factories that exist only in digital form, designed and prepared to build weapons that don't even exist yet either, and have never existed, and may become obsolete and be replaced by better ones, before a nail is ever hammered. Nevertheless, these nonexistent weapons will have entire battalions of real people who are expert in their use, people who helped design them and improve them hands-on, in the fields of virtual war.

  "Simulate before you build" is a daring ax-stroke at the very tap-root of the Cold War-era military-industrial complex. It is a potential coup that could deliver the whole multi-billion-dollar shebang - lock, stock, and barrel - into the hands of the virtuality elite. If it shrinks the military by 50 percent or so, so what? Instead of the 1 percent or so of the Pentagon budget that they currently control, the simulation cybercolonels will own everything, the whole untidy, hopelessly bureaucratic, crying-for-improvement mess. No military object will see physical existence until it is proven, under their own institutional aegis, on the battlefields of cyberspace. They'll be able to shove the ungainly Cold War camel through the cold glass eye of the cyberspace needle. And God only knows what kind of sleek, morphing beast will emerge from the other side.

  Does this sound farfetched? Why? If something as delicate and precise as virtual surgery is possible (and it is), then why not virtual military manufacturing? Sure might solve a lot of pollution problems. And military storage problems. All kinds of problems, when you come to think about it.

  Let's have a speculative look at the 21st-century USA. Amber waves of grain and all that. Peaceful place; scarcely resembles a military superpower at all. Hardly any missile silos, hardly any tanks, hardly any concertina wire. Until the Americans need it. Then the whole massive, lethal superpower infrastructure comes unfolding out of 21st-century cyberspace like some impossible fluid origami trick. The Reserve guys from the bowling leagues suddenly reveal themselves to be digitally assisted Top Gun veterans from a hundred weekend cyberspace campaigns. And they go to some godforsaken place that doesn't possess Virtual Reality As A Strategic Asset, and they bracket that army in their rangefinder screens, and then they cut it off, and then they kill it. Blood and burning flesh splashes the far side of the glass. But it can't get through the screen.

  Maybe you can believe that idea and all that it implies - "simulate before you build." Or maybe you might wax a little more cynical. Maybe what we're presented here, under the slick rhetoric of the Paperless Office, is yet another staggering stack of old-fashioned Pentagon paperwork - a brand new way to make megabuck hammers and toilet seats to an entire new set of ridiculous, endless bureaucratic specs. Only this time, after all the studies and form-filling, you end up with absolutely no tangible product at all!

  Maybe it's just a bizarre Silicon Valley power-play. Every other major American industry has got a sucker deep in the military-industrial juice. Maybe it's time for the virtual reality, CAD-CAM, multimedia crowd to hunker down with the older industries and have some long, life-giving sips from the taxpayer's bloodstream. Maybe the whole scheme is just updated hype - for that same old fat-cat, imperialistic, hypertrophied, overfed, gold-plated military bureaucracy... .

  Could be. It could go either way, maybe both ways at once - make your own decision. One thing's for sure though. The US military today is the most potent and lethal gold-plated military bureaucracy of all time.

  You can't fault DARPA for lack of vision. Vision they've definitely got. There's one matter, though, which they don't discuss much. That's the possibility of a virtuality arms race.

  If military virtuality really works, everyone's gonna want it.

  Now imagine two armies, two strategically assisted, cyberspace-trained, post- industrial, panoptic ninja armies, going head-to-head. What on earth would that look like? A "conventional" war, a "non-nuclear" war, but a true War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, analyzed by nanoseconds to the last square micron.

  Who would survive? And what would be left of them?

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