"What the hell happened then?"
"The pilot made an error. In the dark, he flew his aircraft into the side of a mountain."
"What!" Hixon was livid. "No way. Where are you coming up with this bullshit?"
Meng transfixed the general with his black eyes. "This 'bullshit' as you call it, General, is coming from the flight simulator that your men were piloting at Edwards Air Force Base. If you'd like, you can pick up the phone and call them yourself. The data link to the crew will no longer work, since the computer cut it off as soon as it determined that the plane had crashed." Meng stood up. "Dragon Sim-12 is over. You may pick up a copy of the analysis prior to the outbrief tomorrow, sir."
Hixon was shaken but not defeated. "There's a big difference between flying a simulator and the real thing. And there's a big difference between our running the real thing and this computer game you've set up here."
Meng addressed the general in a calm voice. "General, my system works fine. Perhaps you ought to ask yourself why you think using a billion-dollar-plus aircraft to attack a dam of limited economic and strategic value is a valid plan. Did not your own staff suggest using a B-52 with cruise missile firing from standoff? Did not your own operations officer suggest leaving flight plan and en route decisions up to the airship pilot — a suggestion that the printout of the communications between here and the aircraft will clearly show you blatantly ignored a few minutes ago? I believe that the after-action report may well find that it was your refusal to allow the aircraft commander to increase his altitude or use his radar that led to the crash."
Sutton tried intervening. "Perhaps we'd best wait—"
But Meng wasn't done. "The purpose of these simulations, General, is not just to test the validity of various war plan and strategic retaliatory strike missions. More importantly, it is also to test the effectiveness of the command and control structure of these missions. Your people in this Tunnel are the primary ones being tested, not the aircrew at Edwards."
With that last comment, Meng turned and strode out of the room. He was waved through by the various security guards manning every corridor of the underground complex. Built next to the sprawling new headquarters for the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, the "Tunnel," as it was referred to by those who worked there, was actually a series of three major tunnels approximately 180 meters long by 60 meters wide. The main tunnels were connected by two cross tunnels at either end, which were basically corridors. Tunnel 3, the one Meng was just leaving, was the most secure and housed the mainframe computer that was Meng's brainchild. It was also the room where the strategic mission simulations, commonly called Strams, were conducted.
Tunnel 2, where Meng was heading, held the offices of the computer experts whom Meng controlled. Meng's own office, at the north end, was blocked off from the rest of the Tunnel by a thick cinder-block wall. Tunnel 1, to the east, was the outer tunnel, the workplace of the military staff officers who helped translate the various operations plans for the Strams.
Meng slammed the door behind him and sat down at his desk. The office was dominated by a series of large flat tables, arranged in a circle about his desk. It was on these tables that Meng laid out the flowcharts for every Strams exercise. He normally labored over the specific programming of every mission for at least two days.
Strams had a history that spanned almost a decade. Until Meng came along, it existed only as a concept in the mind of an idealistic army chief of staff in the Pentagon during the early 1980s. This chief of staff had watched what his own service was doing at Fort Irwin, California, and wondered if the same thing couldn't be done at the strategic level, particularly to test command and control structures.
At Fort Irwin, the army had developed a massive simulation of armored combat against a Soviet foe. The complex, called the National Training Center (NTC), was designed to approximate the conditions of mobile, armored combat as closely as possible, short of actual war. Every single soldier, vehicle, and aircraft at the NTC was equipped with a system of laser emitters and detectors that simulated the action and effect of the various weapon systems. Two battalions of American soldiers were stationed at Fort Irwin full-time to act the roles of the Soviet forces. These units used Soviet tactics, had vehicles that looked like Soviet vehicles, and in general acted like the enemy. The army NTC system, in fact, had been copied from the air force Red Flag program, in which a flight detachment simulated Russian aircraft and engaged in mock combat with American pilots.
Even more importantly, at the NTC every vehicle and major weapon system was tracked by a computer, which then correlated the results so that in the aftermath of a confused desert battle, the participating commanders could sit down with observer-controllers and analyze the battle step by step with computer printouts and videos. The NTC program had proven invaluable for training armored and mechanized infantry task forces up to brigade level — so invaluable that a similar setup for light infantry units had been subsequently located at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, and designated the Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC).
The chairman had designated a task force made up of a few officers and directed them to set up a strategic training center. Part of the impetus for this task force had also been the after-action reports on the Desert One failure and on the less-than-perfect invasion of Grenada. There was a glaring need to test the U.S. military's ability to conduct strategic missions requiring high-level command and control. The truth of the matter was that the ability to test the plans and the capability of the commanders and staff diminished rapidly the higher the chairman looked on the U.S. military strategic ladder. The ability and reactions of a tank crew commander or a jet pilot in simulated combat could be tested relatively well, but there were no means to test the abilities and reactions of high-level commanders and staff.
The early Strategic Simulation Task Force pondered the situation for more than a year. Doctor Meng had been invited to participate when it became increasingly obvious that such a strategic training center was going to have to rely heavily on computer simulations. Meng had a long history of consulting with the Department of Defense (DOD). He had been teaching computer programming at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for almost eighteen years and was internationally recognized as one of the three top computer simulation programmers in the world. Initially Meng had been told that he would be needed only for six months to get the program started. Those first six months had dragged on to two years as Meng had wrestled with the myriad variables required to be programmed into such a system.
Working out of two offices, with only one assistant and a secretary to help him, Meng had attacked the problem from several angles. He'd looked at the NTC system and extracted those parts he deemed useful. Meng also looked at another army program called ARTBASS, a tactical-level computer simulation program designed to test commanders and staffs below division level. It consisted of a building where the various unit commanders and their staff were placed in separate simulated field headquarters and communicated with each other by radio. They were allowed to see only the part of an electronic battlefield that their actual immediate units would occupy. The computer simulated the effects of various engagements between the American units and a computer-generated Russian enemy. Meng realized that he was being asked to construct a strategic-level ARTBASS. The difficulty in doing so lay in the fact that at the strategic level the number of variables affecting outcomes increased geometrically to an almost unmanageable number.
The factor Meng had discovered from studying both the NTC and ARTBASS simulations was that communications would be the cornerstone to any scenario. At the strategic level the commanders and staff never saw the face of battle. They worked entirely with electronic inputs and outputs connecting them with the forces that would execute the mission. Meng believed that he could simulate those inputs and outputs.