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