Страница 4 из 7
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 tu
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 ma
The Americans a
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 Nu
"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 ru
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.