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 Gore 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.