Capt. Baker followed Soviet tactical doctrine scrupulously. He gave his unmanned, computer-generated tanks and armored vehicles their instructions with deft points-drags-and-clicks of his Macintosh mouse.
His strategy was to spot or create a weakness in the Yankee defenses, pour as much of his armor through the chink as possible, then roll at blitzkrieg speed to a target deep behind enemy lines: "Objective Kiev."
Capt. Baker coolly sent three groups of digital scouts to certain death.
In the north, Bravo Platoon was the first to spot the approaching enemy scouts. Three Bravo tanks lurched suddenly from ambush and blasted the mechanized transports into smoking digital wreckage. The dying transports took a posthumous vengeance, though, by calling in an artillery bombardment on the Yankee position. Bravo Platoon saw red and yellow impacts spike their hillside landscape, and a vicious crump of high explosives burst from the Perceptronics audio simulators.
A second enemy probe tried the center of the American line. Alpha Platoon called in a hasty artillery strike of their own against the enemy reconnaissance. Unfortunately, the map coordinates were badly garbled in the growing excitement. Lethal "friendly fire" now whumped and blasted around Alpha Platoon's own scouts. One scout was killed by an enemy transport; the other shot dead by friendly tanks as it fled into the trigger-happy muzzles of its own backup units.
By now the radio traffic was going wild. Back at the SIMNET system operator's omniscient "Stealth Station," every howl and yelp was spooling onto a cheap K- Mart boombox for later analysis by trainers.
Under the stress of battle, the American chain of command was disintegrating, and the engagement was becoming a wild scrap.
But one Alpha tank survived. He had found a slope of ground in a sharp declivity, a sniper's paradise. Inside the simulator, the tank commander of Alpha Unit 24 began to lacerate the enemy column, rolling back behind the safety of the virtual ridge, reloading his cannon, then surging up again to swiftly nail another victim with his laser target reticule. It is a terrible thing to snipe with a laser-guided 120-mm cannon. Alpha 24 was methodically tearing the enemy column apart. Within some 30 seconds four enemy vehicles were reduced to burning hulks.
The robotic enemy column seemed stunned by Alpha 24's lethal jack-in-the-box tactic. They milled around in confusion, unable to get a clear shot. Then the American artillery kicked in, bracketing the column in lethal fire. With their position absolutely untenable, the column charged the sniping tank. Alpha 24 killed two more tanks before being outflanked and forced to retreat.
Bravo Platoon was standing firm in the north, but it had been outfoxed. No one was coming their way. Instead, two more enemy columns suddenly appeared in the far south, in Charlie Platoon's turf. Seen through the Threat commander's Macintosh map, the jittering red icons resembled angry ants.
Charlie Platoon as a whole was caught unawares. Despite their wire-guided TOW missiles, Charlie Platoon's Bradley Fighting Vehicles were no match for the Threat heavy armor. Charlie Platoon was swiftly overwhelmed, howling through the radio network for backup that was too slow, and too far away.
Charlie Platoon's survivors called in air-support as they struggled to reach the relative safety of Baseline Amber. In answer, two automatic Apache attack helicopters emerged from the blue nothingness of SIMNET's cyberspace sky. They fired air-to-surface missiles and swiftly roasted a pair of enemy tanks; but the other T-72 tanks potted both the choppers on the wing. The Apaches fell in crumpled digital heaps of flaming polygons.
As the engagement proceeded, dead men began to show up in the CATTC video classroom. Inside the simulators, their vision blocks had gone suddenly blank with the onset of virtual death. Here in CATTC's virtual Valhalla, however, a large Electrohome video display unit showed a comprehensive overhead map of the entire battlefield. Group by group, the dead tank crews filed into the classroom and gazed upon the battlefield from a heavenly perspective.
Slouching in their seats and perching their forage caps on their knees, they began to talk. They weren't talking about pixels, polygons, baud-rates, Ethernet lines, or network architecture. If they'd felt any gosh-wow respect for these high-tech aspects of their experience, those perceptions had clearly vanished early on. They were talking exclusively about fields of fire, and fall-back positions, and radio traffic and indirect artillery strikes. They weren't discussing "virtual reality" or anything akin to it. These soldiers were talking war.
"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 simulators. Everything hummed.
Col. Jack A. Thorpe, USAF, Ph.D., spends a lot of time in the Institute. Col. Thorpe is the "Father of Distributed Simulation" and is America's foremost advocate of virtual reality as a strategic asset.