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Granted, simulators still won't fire real shells. "They know how to load shells," Col. Thorpe points out. "That's not what we're trying to teach them." What he's trying to teach them, in a word, is networking. The wired Army, the wired Navy, the wired Air Force and wired Marines. Wired satellites. Wired simulators. All coordinated. All teaching tactical teamwork.

A wired Armed Forces will be composed entirely of veterans - highly trained veterans of military cyberspace. An army of high-tech masters who may never have fired a real shot in real anger, but have nevertheless rampaged across entire virtual continents, crushing all resistance with fluid teamwork and utterly focused, karate-like strikes. This is the concept of virtual reality as a strategic asset. It's the reasoning behind SIMNET, the "Mother of All Computer Games." It's modern Nintendo training for modern Nintendo war.

The War We Won

The walls inside the Institute for Defense Analyses are hung with Kuwaiti topography. In some entirely virtual, yet final and terrible sense, the USmilitary now owns Kuwait. The Pentagon has a virtual Kuwait on a hard disk - SAKI, the Saudi Arabia-Kuwait-Iraq database. It has the country mapped meter by meter, pixel by pixel, in 3-D, with weather optional. You can climb into one of Col. Thorpe's tank simulators and you can drive across that cyberspace doppleganger voodoo Kuwait exchanging gunfire with the polygonal ghosts of Iraqi T-72 tanks.

There was a war in Kuwait recently. They don't call it "Desert Shield-Desert Storm" at IDA or DARPA. They certainly don't call it the "Persian Gulf War" - that would only irritate the Arab coalition allies who insist on calling that tormented body of water the "Arabian Gulf." No - they like to call this event "the war in Southwest Asia."

The US military hasn't forgotten Southeast Asia. To hear them talk, you would think that they had discussed very little else for the 16 long years between Saigon and Kuwait City. In Southeast Asia the Pentagon sent Americans into tunnels below the earth to fight peasant guerrillas hand-to-hand with knives and pistols. They sent soldiers sweeping through rice paddies in hopes of attracting gunfire from some Viet Cong group large enough to be spotted from helicopters. As the situation became more hopeless, they sent in more American flesh to be ambushed and pierced with punji sticks. The United States lost a major war in Southeast Asia.

However, the US recently won a major war in Southwest Asia. With some handy but basically political and cosmetic help from its Coalition allies, the US destroyed the fourth-largest land army on the planet in four days at a cost of only 148 American dead. Geopolitically, this war may have been less significant than Vietnam (with almost everybody in the civilized world versus a clear megalomaniac, victory of some sort was probably not much in doubt.) Strategically and tactically however, Desert Storm was one of the most lopsided and significant military victories since Agincourt. And the American military is quite aware of this.

"Southwest Asia" may have vanished into the blipverse of cable television for much of the American populace, but the US military has a very long institutional memory. They will not forget Southwest Asia, and all the tasty things that Southwest Asia implies, for a long time to come.

Col. Thorpe and his colleagues at DARPA, IDA, and the Army Office of Military History have created a special Southwest Asian memento of their very own - with the able help of their standard cyberspace civilian contractors: Bolt Beranek & Newman and Illusion Engineering. The memento is called "The Reconstruction of the Battle of 73 Easting."

This battle took place at a map line called 73 Easting in the desert of southern Iraq. On 26 February 1991, the Eagle, Ghost, and Iron Troops of the US 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment attacked the Tawakalna Division of the Iraqi Republican Guard. These were untested UStank troops, without any previous combat experience, blundering forward in a sandstorm to confront entrenched Soviet-made heavy tanks manned by elite veterans of an eight-year war. Thanks to the sandstorm, the Americans had no air support either; this was a straight-on tank- versus-tank scrap in the desert, right out of the Rommel and Patton strategic notebook.

The Americans annihilated the Iraqis in 22 minutes.

The Battle of 73 Easting has become the single most accurately recorded combat engagement in human history. Army historians and simulation modelers thoroughly interviewed the American participants, and paced the battlefield meter by meter. They came up with a fully interactive, network-capable digital replica of the events at 73 Easting, right down to the last TOW missile and .50-caliber pockmark. Military historians and armchair strategists can now fly over the virtual battlefield in the "stealth vehicle," the so-called "SIMNET flying carpet," viewing the 3-D virtual landscape from any angle during any moment of the battle. They can even change the parameters - give the Iraqis infrared targeting scopes, for instance, which they lacked at the time, and which made them sitting ducks for high-tech American M1s charging out of blowing sand. The whole triumphal blitzkrieg can be pondered over repeatedly (gloated over even), in perfect scratch-free digital fidelity. It's the spirit of Southwest Asia in a digital nutshell. In terms of American military morale, it's like a '90s CD remix of some '60s oldie, rescued from warping vinyl and remade closer to the heart's desire.

Col. Thorpe and his colleagues first demo'd "73 Easting" in late 1991 at the Interservice/Industry Training Systems and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) #13, the premier convention for the military training, simulation, and VR industry. The virtual battle was the hit of the show, and it went on to tour the Senate Armed Services Committee, where it much impressed Sam Nunn and John Glenn.

"The Reconstruction of the Battle of 73 Easting" is an enormously interesting interactive multimedia creation. It is fast and exhilarating and full of weird beauty. But even its sleek, polygonal, bloodless virtuality is a terrifying thing to witness and to comprehend. It is intense and horrific violence at headlong speed, a savage event of grotesque explosive precision and terrible mechanized impacts. The flesh of real young men was there inside those flam- ing tank-shaped polygons, and that flesh was burning.

That is what one knows - but it's not what one sees. What one really sees in "73 Easting" is something new and very strange: a complete and utter triumph of chilling, analytic, cybernetic rationality over chaotic, real-life, human desperation.

Battles have always been unspeakable events, unknowable and mystical. Besides the names of the dead, what we get from past historical battles are confused anecdotes, maybe a snapshot or two, impressions pulled from a deadly maelstrom that by its very nature could not be documented accurately. But DARPA's "Battle of 73 Easting" shows that day is past indeed. The omniscient eye of computer surveillance can now dwell on the extremes of battle like a CAT scan detailing a tumor in a human skull. This is virtual reality as a new way of knowledge: a new and terrible kind of transcendent military power.