Chapter 71 13.5 Battle of numbers

In the spring of 1991, Captain McMaster of the 2nd U.S. Armored Cavalry Regiment walked across a quiet desert battlefield.The desert was covered with rubble, and it was as quiet as when he first came here a month ago.And the twisted wreck of an Iraqi tank is the same as it was when he left it a few weeks ago, only without the raging flames.Thank God he and his troops survived.But the Iraqis were not so lucky.A month earlier, neither side had known they were fighting a pivotal battle in Operation Desert Storm.The situation is developing rapidly.Thirty days later, this fateful engagement has acquired a name among historians: the Battle of Dongli 73.

Now, at the behest of some fanatical analysts behind the US, McMattus has been called back to the barren land.The Pentagon asked all military officers to return to the battlefield of the "Battle of East Distance 73" while the United States still controlled the territory and the memory of the battle was still not fading.The military is preparing to recreate a 3D simulation of the entire battle so that any cadet at a future military academy can go in and experience that battle from scratch. "A living history book," they called it.A simulacrum of war. Here in Iraq, real soldiers are sketching out a month-long campaign.They did their best to recall the fierce action of the day, repeating their actions as far as they could recall.Some soldiers also provided diaries to help reconstruct operations.A few even produced videos they had taken during the chaos.Traces in the desert provide the emulator with precise lines of motion.The black box installed on the tank, which uses three satellites for positioning, can accurately measure the ground coordinates to eight effective figures.Every missile fired left a thin trail in the sand, lying there quietly.There is a tape in the command center recording the radio communications sent from the battlefield at that time.Photos taken sequentially from the sky by satellites provide important views.Soldiers walked up and down the sun-dried field, arguing furiously about who had hit whom.Laser and radar mapping produced a digital topographic map of the site.By the time the Pentagon men left, they had all the information they needed to reconstruct the most detailed battle in history.

Back at the Simulation Center — a division of the Institute for Defense Analysis in Alexandria, Virginia — technicians spent nine months digesting the excess information, piecing together thousands of fragments. A synthetic reality.A few months later, they showed an early version of the "game" to an actual desert safari stationed in Germany at the time.The simulacra has come to life: Soldiers can sit in tank simulators and take part in virtual battles.They pointed out revisions to the technicians, who made changes to the model.One year after the end of the battle, Captain McMaster made the final inspection, and then, the reappearance of the "Eastern Distance 73 Battle" was performed for the first time by the military high-level.McMaster said succinctly and understatedly that the simulacrum gave "a very real sense of being in that battle in a chariot".This copy records the movement of every chariot, every soldier, every firefight, and every death.A four-star general who was far away from the battlefield at the time but had experienced hundreds of battles participated in this virtual battle. When he came out of the simulator, the hairs on his arms stood on end.What exactly did he see?

A panoramic image is displayed on a 50-inch TV with image resolution comparable to the best video games.Oily smoke blackened the sky.The gray desert floor, wet by the recent rain, faded into the black horizon.The destroyed steel-blue hull of the tank spewed out yellow-orange flames.The fire slanted and drifted in a constant and steady wind.More than three hundred vehicles—tanks, jeeps, oil trucks, water trucks, and even two Iraqi Chevrolet pickups—float around the frame.At dusk, a Sharma sandstorm with a speed of 40 knots blew up, forming a yellow fog that reduced visibility to 1,000 meters.Individual infantrymen can be seen marching on the monitors; hundreds of Iraqi soldiers can be seen scrambling out of dirty bunkers and jumping into tanks after realizing the shelling was not a precision-guided air strike. Scenes.The helicopter was on the scene for about 6 minutes before being driven away by the raised dust; while the fixed-wing aircraft was participating in a battle deep behind the Iraqi front.

The general can choose any vehicle to join the battle, and can see everything the driver can see.Like a real battle, there might be a tank hidden behind every small hill.The view is blocked, the important things are hidden, nothing can be seen clearly, everything is happening at the same time.However, in the virtual world, you can ride the flying carpet that every soldier dreams of owning, and swim quickly on the battlefield.If you rise high enough, you can see the same picture as the celestial map seen by the divine eye.What's really crazy is that you can go into the simulation and ride a missile towards a target, arcing like crazy through the sky.

This system is currently only a 3D movie.Here's the next step, though: Future cadets could take on Iraq's Republican Guard by setting what-if conditions in the simulation.What if the Iraqis had infrared night vision gear?What if their missiles had twice the range they have now?What if they didn't climb out of the tank in the first place?Can you still win? Without the ability to ask "what ifs," this "Battle of East 73" simulation would be nothing more than a very expensive riveting documentary.But as long as the simulated system is given the slightest power to move in unplanned directions, it acquires a kind of soul and becomes a powerful teacher.It's going to become something real in nature, not just a battle somewhere in Iraq.After tweaking parameters and equipping different military forces, the simulated battle begins the same way in the same place, but quickly runs into its own future.Those cadets immersed in the simulation are engaged in a hyper-real war, a battle only they know and can participate in.These battles they fought are as real as the simulation of "Battle of East Distance 73", maybe even more real, because the outcome of these battles is unknown, just like real life.

In daily training, the U.S. military puts troops into hyper-real battlefields.More than a dozen U.S. military bases around the world are linked together into a military system called SIMNET, and it was through this system that the four-star general entered the simulated "Eastern Range 73 Campaign."Tank and fighter pilots are confronted in this simulated three-dimensional land-air battle.In the words of Defense Magazine columnist Douglas Nelms, SIMNET "transfers ground personnel and aircraft from planet Earth to another world where they can put security, money, environment and geography aside. Fight in the back of your head." In fact, the first place the samurai scout in SIMNET is their own backyard.At Fort Knox, Tennessee, the crew of 80 M1 Tank Simulators piloted the simulator through an astonishing virtual world: the outdoor battlefield of Fort Knox.Every tree, every building, every stream, every utility pole, and every slope in this hundreds of square miles of land can be displayed on SIMNET's 3D landscape after being digitized.This virtual space is so large that it is very easy to get lost in it.Troops may be driving greasy real tanks across real roads one day, but the next day they may be crossing the same place in the simulation world—only without the smell of burning diesel in the simulator.After troops have conquered Fort Knox, they can teleport themselves to another location through a computer menu option.Also perfectly modeled are: the famous national training ground at Fort Irwin, parts of the German countryside, hundreds of thousands of square miles of open space in the oil-rich Gulf states, and there seems no reason why the city of Moscow should not be The center is also simulated.

The standard M1 tank is the most common entity on SIMNET's virtual ground.From the outside, the M1 emulator never moves: It's a giant fiberglass box shaped a bit like an oversized trash can anchored to the floor.A four-person driving team sat, squatted, or leaned against the ground in their narrow post.The emulator's inner room mimics the interior setup of the M1, which is full of various equipment.Crews quickly manipulate hundreds of replicated dials and switches while keeping an eye on monitors.When the driver fires up the tank simulator, it roars, groans and shudders, just like driving a real tank.

Eight or more of these big fiberglass boxes are connected by wires to the drab warehouse in Fort Knox.One M1 can fight other M1s on the ground of SIMNET.Long-distance telephone lines link 300 simulators around the world to form a network that allows 300 tanks to appear in the same virtual battle at the same time - no matter where the drivers and crew are located - maybe some in Irvine, California Fort, while the others are in Gravenburg, Germany. In order to improve the fidelity of SIMNET, military programmers have also designed some artificial intelligence-operated vehicles, which can be easily looked after by only a computer operator.Putting these "semi-autonomous forces" into the virtual battlefield, this force can get more than a larger and more effective living force.Neil Cosby, director of the simulation center, said, "We once put 1,000 entities in SIMNET at the same time. One person can control 17 semi-automatic combat vehicles on one console, or a company of tanks." Cosby continued Explain the advantages of this semi-autonomous force: "Let's say you're a captain in the National Guard. You're guarding an armory with 100 soldiers on a Saturday morning. You want to take your company against a battalion of 500 men." Well, where are you going to get 500 people on a Saturday morning in San Diego? Well, here's a good idea: you can call SIMNET, get 3 other guys, and each man two or three consoles. Take control of the armed forces that are attacking you. You send this message: Meet at the Panama database at 21:00 tonight, ready for action. The person you are talking to may be in Germany, Panama, Kansas, or California, and everyone will be on the same virtual map And you never know if these semi-autonomous tanks are real or just digital replicas."

What Cosby means is that you won't know if they are real simulations or fictional simulations (hyper-real), and the military is only now starting to appreciate this new feature.That imperceptibly blurred line between reality, fiction, and hyper-real fiction can be used to some advantage in warfare.U.S. forces in the Gulf War upended a popular view among experts on both sides.The traditional view is that the Iraqi army is older, more experienced, and has experienced the baptism of war; while the US military is younger, inexperienced, and a group of guys who play games and watch TV all day.This point is true: According to statistics, only 1 in 15 American pilots have any combat experience; most of them are fresh out of flight school.However, the one-sided victory won by the United States in the Gulf War cannot simply be explained by the lack of fighting spirit on the Iraqi side.Military insiders attribute this to simulated training.A retired colonel once asked the commander of the "Battle of Dongli 73" this question: "How do you explain this impressive victory you have achieved? Not a single officer or soldier in your team has any combat experience, but you beat them on the Republican Guard's own combat exercise field?" The commander replied: "Ah, we have experience. We have participated in six full simulation campaigns at the National Training Center and in Germany. This fight is no different from training."

The experience of the combatants in the "East Distance 73 Campaign" is not unique.90% of the U.S. Air Force Group participating in Operation Desert Storm had previously participated in high-intensity combat simulation training; 80% of the ground force commanders had also participated in high-intensity combat simulation training in advance.The National Training Center has carefully created different levels of SIMNET simulation equipment for soldiers.The National Training Center is about the size of Rhode Island and is located in the western California desert.The center has built a high-tech optical fiber and wireless network worth 100 million US dollars, which can simulate the battle scene of tanks in the real desert.Playing against the home team, proud American veterans would wear Russian uniforms, fight according to Russian drills and combat regulations, and occasionally communicate in Russian.They claim to be undefeated.Not only did U.S. soldiers in training fight fake Iraqi troops rehearsing Soviet-style tactics, but they sometimes simulated specific tactics until they became "second nature" to them.For example, the US Air Force pilots rehearsed the shocking air attack plan against the target of Baghdad very carefully for as long as a month through the simulation device.As a result, only one of the 600 Allied fighters failed to return on the first night.Colonel Roe Kern, commander of the Gulf Infantry Brigade, told the electrical engineering magazine IEEE Survey: "Almost every commander I've talked to would say that the combat conditions they encountered in Iraq were not as difficult as those in the country. The difficulty of training in the training center." What the military is exploring is a type of so-called "embedded training" -- a kind of simulation training that can't tell the difference between real and fake.It is no leap of faith for a modern tank gunner or fighter pilot to believe that he has more combat experience from a SIMNET simulator than from the Iraq war.A real gunner in a real tank, stuffed into a tiny hole in a multi-million dollar steel compartment.All around him are various electronic devices and instrument panels and LCD readout screens.The only channel between him and the outside battlefield is this small TV monitor in front of him, which can be rotated by hand like a periscope.And the contact between him and his colleagues is also carried out through the headset.This is practically the same as manipulating an emulation device.And everything he knows—the readings on the dashboard and the images on the monitors, even the explosion caused by the missile he fired—can be rendered by the computer.So what does it matter if the inch-tall tank on the monitor is real or not? For the combatants who participated in the "East Distance 73 Campaign", the so-called simulation is actually a trinity.First of all, the soldiers are engaged in a simulated battle.Second, combat is truly done through monitors and sensors.In the end, combat simulation is history.Maybe one day, they won't be able to tell the difference either. Anxiety and unease about the issue was raised at a NATO-funded conference on "embedded training."Michael Mosher of the Institute for Simulation and Training recalls that someone read highlights from Orson Scott Card's famous 1985 science fiction novel at the meeting.Card began writing the novel in the virtual space of an electronic conferencing system for readers who relished the surreal aspects of life online.In the novel, a group of boys are trained to be generals from an early age.They play various tactical and strategic games non-stop in a weightless space station.The final stage of training is very realistic computer war games.In the end, Ender, the greatest player and natural leader, takes his teammates against their grown-up mentor in a large, complex game of war.However, unbeknownst to them, their mentor has switched the system's input, and these Nintendo boys are no longer playing games, but commanding real starships (with real people on board) against real aliens invading the solar system.In the end the kids won the war by blowing up the alien planet.Afterwards, they were told the truth: what they had done was not just a training session. This switch between real and virtual can be used in other places as well.Since there is little difference between simulated tank drills and actual combat, why not use simulated tank drills for real warfare?If you can drive a tank through simulated Iraq from Kansas, why not drive a tank through real Iraq from an equally safe location?This dream, which coincides with the Pentagon's top directive to minimize American casualties, is widely circulated in the military.A prototype unmanned patrol Jeep, driven by a "telepresence" driver at a rear base, is already on real roads.These mechanical soldiers still "need someone to help them in the same boat", but they won't do any harm to people, so they are favored by the military.Unmanned but still manned aircraft played a huge role in the recent Gulf War.Picture a giant model airplane with video cameras and computers.These remotely guided aircraft receive piloting instructions from bases in Saudi Arabia and hover over the enemy to complete tasks such as reconnaissance or passing orders.And in the back, a human being thrown into the simulation. The military's vision is grand, but progress has been slow.The rapid development of cheap smart chips exceeded the Pentagon's predictions.As far as I know, as of 1992, the military's simulation and war games were not much better than the commercial games played by ordinary people.