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.
The Colonel wore a civilian pinstriped suit, an understated maroon tie, and polished black wingtips. Col. (or Doctor) Thorpe is a cognitive psychologist specializing in training techniques; he is tall and lean and bespectacled, with a straight nose, dark hair, and hollow temples, and he possesses the vigorous air of a man with a vision and clear ideas of how to get there. He is somewhere near his early forties.
Col. Thorpe's highly unusual expertise makes his position in the military hierarchy somewhat anomalous. He is a career Air Force officer who nevertheless pioneered virtual reality networks for the US Army. He is also the special assistant for simulations at DARPA. He clearly has a lot of pull at the Institute for Defense Analyses, his institutional home away from home, where DARPA sponsors the IDA Advanced Distributed Simulation Laboratory.
Col. Thorpe also has a number of friends among the computer-networking experts at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, and more colleagues yet at the Defense Mapping Agency, and yet more in the Topographic Engineering Center, and plenty of eager listeners from all over the defense-contracting industry.
And yet Col. Thorpe's primary role in today's USmilitary is as "Leader of Thrust Six" for the Director of Defense Research and Engineering.
Dr. Victor Reis, Col. Thorpe's immediate superior, is Director of Defense Research and Engineering. Dr. Reis has a seven-point plan for distributing $3 billion worth of defense research in fiscal year 1993. The plan involves fairly standard post-Cold War matters such as global surveillance, air superiority, precision strikes, and advanced land combat. But the sixth point in the Reis plan is "Synthetic Environments."
Col. Thorpe is the premier Defense Department evangelist for synthetic environments. His interest in these matters goes back to the late '70s, when he was in the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. In those days, full-scale Air Force jet simulators cost $40 million each. The simulators - odd devices that perch on hydraulic stilts and pitch and toss their wannabe-ace occupants like broncos - clearly worked well in flight-training, but they were clumsy and they cost far too much, and worst of all, they were not connected.
Col. Thorpe is a connectivity visionary first and foremost.
His reasoning is simple but profound. An army is not an armed mob of heroic individualists. An army is a connected, coordinated, disciplined killing force, working systematically in close cooperation to a desired end. In any stand-up fight, an army will destroy a mob, even an armed and heroic mob, with very little trouble.
There are two basic problems with isolated simulators. They don't connect to other soldiers, and they don't connect to an enemy. They might train individual pilots how to fly very well, but they can't train squadrons how to fight. They can teach the skill of handling an aircraft, but they can't teach combat with your own comrades at hand, against an intelligent enemy who can see you and react to what you do. Similarly, a single tank simulator might train a single crew to some brilliant pitch of mechanical efficiency, but it can't build platoons, companies, battalions, or regiments of armor that can work together, confront enemies, and conquer the battlefield. Armies win wars, not lone heroes. In real wars, Rambos die quick.
On a higher level of organization, the same logic of coordination and networking applies across the individual armed forces. Single branches of the American military establishment can no longer play the lone-wolf game. Interservice rivalry (though still very real) is officially out of fashion in the post-Cold War world of rapid deployment. Maximum speed, maximum impact, and minimum American casualties all demand that the services be fully coordinated, that all assets be brought into play in a smooth and utterly crushing synchrony. Navy ships support land offensives, Air Force strikes support mud-slogging Marines. And space-based satellite intelligence, satellite communications, and satellite navigation support everybody.
That is the core of modern American strategic military doctrine, and that is what Col. Thorpe's new project, the Distributed Simulation Internet, is meant to accomplish for the military in the realm of cyberspace.
DARPA is an old hand at computer networking. The original ARPANET of 1969 grew up to become today's globe-spanning civilian-based Internet. SIMNET was another DARPA war-child, conceived in 1983 and first online in May 1986. DARPA invented SIMNET just as it invented the Internet, but DARPA spun SIMNET off to the US Army for day-to-day operations.
DARPA, by its nature, sponsors the cutting edge; the bleeding edge. The Distributed Simulation Internet, projected for the turn of the century, is to be a creature of another order entirely from SIMNET. Ten thousand linked simulators! Entire literal armies online. Global, real-time, broadband, fiber- optic, satellite-assisted, military simulation networking. Complete coordination, using one common network protocol, across all the armed services. Tank crews will see virtual air support flitting by. Jet jockeys will watch Marines defend perimeters on the pixelated landscape far below. Navy destroyers will steam offshore readying virtual cruise missiles... and the omniscient eye of trainers will watch it all.
And not just connected, not just simulated. Seamless. "Seamless simulation" is probably the weirdest conceptual notion in the arsenal of military virtuality. The seams between reality and virtuality will be repeatedly and deliberately blurred. Ontology be damned - this is war!
Col. Thorpe emphasizes this concept heavily. And seamless simulation is not a blue-sky notion. It's clearly within reach.
Most of the means of human perception in modern vehicles of war are already electronically mediated. In Desert Storm, both air pilots and tank crews spent much of their time in combat watching infrared targeting scopes. Much the same goes for Patriot missile crews, Aegis cruisers, AWACS radar personnel, and so on. War has become a phenomenon that America witnesses through screens.
And it is a simple matter to wire those screens to present any image desired. Real tanks can engage simulator crews on real terrain which is also simultaneously virtual. Fake threats can show up on real radar screens, and real threats on fake screens. While the crews in real machines can no longer tell live from Memorex, the simulators themselves will move closer to the "scratch and sniff" level of realism.