And not just connected, not just simulated. Seamless. "Seamless simulation" is probably the weirdest conceptual notion in the arsenal of military virtuality. The seams between reality and virtuality will be repeatedly and deliberately blurred. Ontology be damned - this is war!
Col. Thorpe emphasizes this concept heavily. And seamless simulation is not a blue-sky notion. It's clearly within reach.
Most of the means of human perception in modern vehicles of war are already electronically mediated. In Desert Storm, both air pilots and tank crews spent much of their time in combat watching infrared targeting scopes. Much the same goes for Patriot missile crews, Aegis cruisers, AWACS radar personnel, and so on. War has become a phenomenon that America witnesses through screens.
And it is a simple matter to wire those screens to present any image desired. Real tanks can engage simulator crews on real terrain which is also simultaneously virtual. Fake threats can show up on real radar screens, and real threats on fake screens. While the crews in real machines can no longer tell live from Memorex, the simulators themselves will move closer to the "scratch and sniff" level of realism.
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