A Virtual Military/Industrial Complex?
What is it that Col. Thorpe and his colleagues really want? Well, of course, they want the unquestioned global military pre-eminence of the American superpower. Of course, they want to fulfill their patriotic duty in the service of the United States and its national interests. They want to win honor and glory in the defense of the American republic. Those are givens. Col. Thorpe and his colleagues already work to those ends every day.
What they really want is their own industrial base.
They want the deliberate extension of the American military-industrial complex into the virtual world. They want a wired, digitized, military-post-industrial complex, reformed and recreated to suit their own terms and their own institutional interests.
They want a pool of contractors and a hefty cadre of trained civilian talent that they can draw from at need. They want professional Simulation Battle Masters. Simulation system operators. Simulation site managers. Logisticians. Software maintenance people. Digital cartographers. CAD-CAM designers. Graphic designers.
And it wouldn't break their hearts if the American entertainment industry picked up on their interactive simulation network technology, or if some smart civilian started adapting these open-architecture, virtual-reality network protocols that the military just developed. The cable TV industry, say. Or telephone companies running Distributed Simulation on fiber-to-the-curb. Or maybe some far-sighted commercial computer-networking service. It's what the military likes to call the "purple dragon" angle. Distributed Simulation technology doesn't have to stop at tanks and aircraft, you see. Why not simulate something swell and nifty for civilian Joe and Jane Sixpack and the kids? Why not purple dragons?
We're talking serious bucks here. It's not the most serious money in a superpower's massive military budget, granted - at least not yet, it isn't - but it's very damned serious money by the standards of your average Silicon Valley multimedia start-up. The defense simulation market is about $2.5 billion a year. That's Hollywood-serious and then some. Over the next 10 years the Pentagon plans to drop about $370 billion on electronics R&D. Some of that money will fall to simulation. Maybe a lot of it, if the field really takes off.
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.