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.
A Virtual Military/Industrial Complex?
What is it that Col. Thorpe and his colleagues really want? Well, of course, they want the unquestioned global military pre-eminence of the American superpower. Of course, they want to fulfill their patriotic duty in the service of the United States and its national interests. They want to win honor and glory in the defense of the American republic. Those are givens. Col. Thorpe and his colleagues already work to those ends every day.
What they really want is their own industrial base.
They want the deliberate extension of the American military-industrial complex into the virtual world. They want a wired, digitized, military-post-industrial