Interactivity is not about obscuring the game with layers of statistics or talking pictures of grandpa. Rather, it’s about pulling the audience out of the armchair and pushing them into the baseball park. It’s about flying around the stadium and becoming a player in the game. These more subtle forms of interaction-based on simulation and spatial metaphor – hold much greater promise … It is this vision of interactivity that will sell new media technology in the long run.
If military virtuality really works, everyone’s gonna want it. Now imagine two armies, two strategically assisted, cyberspace-trained, post-industrial, panoptic ninja armies, going head-to-head. What on earth would that look like? A “conventional” war, a “non-nuclear” war, but a true War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, analyzed by nanoseconds to the last square micron. Who would survive? And what would be left of them?
Maybe what we’re presented here, under the slick rhetoric of the Paperless Office, is yet another staggering stack of old-fashioned Pentagon paperwork – a brand new way to make megabuck hammers and toilet seats to an entire new set of ridiculous, endless bureaucratic specs … Maybe the whole scheme is just updated hype – for that same old fat-cat, imperialistic, hypertrophied, overfed, gold-plated military bureaucracy… Could be. It could go either way, maybe both ways at once.
The whole massive, lethal superpower infrastructure comes unfolding out of 21st-century cyberspace like some impossible fluid origami trick. The Reserve guys from the bowling leagues suddenly reveal themselves to be digitally assisted Top Gun veterans from a hundred weekend cyberspace campaigns. And they go to some godforsaken place that doesn’t possess Virtual Reality As A Strategic Asset, and they bracket that army in their rangefinder screens, and then they cut it off, and then they kill it. Blood and burning flesh splashes the far side of the glass. But it can’t get through the screen.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.