"Get them, sir," a deceased tanker muttered vengefully as he watched Alpha
24's heroic stand in the fake Mojave Hills. Another tanker, from the Alpha
scout unit, griped bitterly about his death by friendly fire:
"fratricide." Dying at the hands of his own platoon had been especially
cruel. It was clear that the real-life lesson of unit coordination had
sunk in well - at least for this poor guy.
"It's only SIMNET," another tanker told him at last. "You're not bleeding."
They weren't bleeding. That was undeniable. On the contrary, they'd just
been killed in combat, yet also had the amazing luxury to learn by this
experience. The CATTC trainers called off the battle in time for lunch;
the result was now a foregone conclusion. As Capt. Baker explained to his
virtual enemies and real-life students, "There'll be hot borscht and vodka
at Objective Kiev tonight." The dead soldiers, and the few pleased
survivors, had shakes, fries and burgers from the local Burger King.
When they returned from their lunch, Maj. Rogers replayed the battle for
them, hitting the high points with detailed graphics from the big machine
called Radcliff. Any event can be scrutinized, from any angle of vision,
at any moment in time that the trainers desired.
Virtual Reality as a Strategic Asset
SIMNET today is a clunky and rapidly aging mid-1980s technology; its
giant, $100,000 image generators are so large that they bear red adhesive
labels: "WARNING: RISK OF PERSONAL INJURY FROM RACK TIPPING FORWARD."
SIMNET still thrives in everyday use at Fort Knox, Fort Rucker, Fort
Denning and a number of other sites, sometimes linked together through
long-distance lines, more often not. But better stuff is coming: faster,
cheaper, more sophisticated, and far better-connected.
The people at the Institute for Defense Analyses know all this. The
Institute is a large, brown, campus-like building set in a pleasant wooded
lot outside the Beltway of Washington, D.C. Its tall brick walls are
festooned with white security telecameras. White shuttle-vans with the IDA
logo - an infinity-sign in a triangle with the IDA acronym - pull up
periodically, disgorging small scholarly groups of tweed-jacketed
military-academic spooks.
I visited the Institute last fall. Groups of Air Force bluesuiters ambled
periodically into the "Stealth Room." "Stealth technology" cloaks
observers in digital invisibility, so that they can travel to any point
inside a simulated battle. A huge triptych of full-color computer screens
showed the simulated activity of a certain weapons system I was forbidden
to identify publicly. The tarpaulin-shrouded chambers within the Institute
were draped with wrist-thick clusters of black cabling leading to Sun
workstations, networked Macintoshes, and a variety of prototype
