Bruce Sterling - War Is Virtual Hell

Does this sound farfetched? Why? If something as delicate and precise as virtual surgery is possible (and it is), then why not virtual military manufacturing? Sure might solve a lot of pollution problems. And military storage problems. All kinds of problems, when you come to think about it.

Let's have a speculative look at the 21st-century USA. Amber waves of grain and all that. Peaceful place; scarcely resembles a military superpower at all. Hardly any missile silos, hardly any tanks, hardly any concertina wire. Until the Americans need it. Then 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.

Maybe you can believe that idea and all that it implies - "simulate before you build." Or maybe you might wax a little more cynical. 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. Only this time, after all the studies and form-filling, you end up with absolutely no tangible product at all!

Maybe it's just a bizarre Silicon Valley power-play. Every other major American industry has got a sucker deep in the military-industrial juice. Maybe it's time for the virtual reality, CAD-CAM, multimedia crowd to hunker down with the older industries and have some long, life-giving sips from the taxpayer's bloodstream. 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 - make your own decision. One thing's for sure though. The US military today is the most potent and lethal gold-plated military bureaucracy of all time.

You can't fault DARPA for lack of vision. Vision they've definitely got. There's one matter, though, which they don't discuss much. That's the possibility of a virtuality arms race.

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?