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.