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.
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.