The Pentagon's Brain (27 page)

Technology continued to advance at a radical new pace. In 1977 Harold Brown became President Carter’s secretary of defense, making Brown the first nuclear scientist to lead the Department of Defense. Brown believed that technological superiority was imperative to military dominance, and he also believed that advancing science was the key to economic prosperity. “Harold Brown turned technology leadership into a national strategy,” remarks DARPA historian Richard Van Atta. Despite rising inflation and
unemployment, DARPA’s budget was doubled. Microprocessing technologies were making stunning advances. High-speed communication networks and Global Positioning System technologies were accelerating at whirlwind speeds. DARPA’s highly classified, high-risk, high-payoff programs, including stealth, advanced sensors, laser-guided munitions, and drones, were being pursued, in the black. Soon, Assault Breaker technology would be battle ready. From all of this work, entire new industries were forming.

In the fall of 1978, Captain (later Colonel) Jack A. Thorpe, a thirty-four-year-old Air Force officer with a Ph.D. in psychology, was sitting inside a flight simulator at the Flying Training Division of Williams Air Force Base in Arizona when he got a radical idea. The flight simulator here at the Human Resources Laboratory was one of two of the most advanced simulators in the country—and the most expensive, having cost more than $25 million to build, roughly $100 million in 2015. The computer-driven simulator was mounted on a hydraulic motion system that moved like a carnival ride. The simulator Captain Thorpe was sitting inside was connected to a second computer, which made the pair state of the art and one of a kind.

“The other flyer’s aircraft appeared in the corner of my screen like a small cartoonish icon,” Thorpe remembers. “What this meant in 1978 was that this flight simulator was the only one in America where two pilots could engage in flight training research operations together, at the same time.”

Thorpe was struck with an idea. What if an Air Force pilot could sit inside a small room like the one he was sitting in now, but instead of looking at cartoonish icons moving across a computer screen, he saw the world in front of him in three dimensions? What if it felt like he was actually inside the airplane, with his wingman flying alongside? Jack Thorpe had a name for what he imagined. It was a “high-fidelity simulator,” a virtual world.

Back at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C., where he was stationed, Thorpe put his thoughts down on paper. In “Future Views: Aircrew Training, 1980–2000,” Thorpe described a flight-training situation in which a whole squadron of pilots could prepare for combat readiness together, training on individual but networked flight simulators. Each airman would be flying a separate aircraft but in the same battle space. In this virtual reality, pilots would be in visual contact with one another and in audio contact with a commander, who would work from a remote information center, imagined as a real place, which Thorpe called a Tactical Development Center. Thorpe’s Tactical Development Center would have “a three dimensional, holographic, electronic sand table,” he wrote, “a place where tacticians and strategists could see what the pilots in their simulators were doing.” In this computer-generated environment, a commander would be able to “see” what was happening in the battle space, in real time, thanks to an overhead satellite source delivering data. In this new virtual world, pilots would train and their commanders would strategize.

These simulators would allow for “real-time dress rehearsals,” Thorpe wrote, teaching pilots how to train in groups, with the immediacy of real battle situations but without the lethal consequences. On the basis of the outcomes of various simulations, commanders could quickly decide what course of action each pilot should take. Without having access to any information about DARPA programs, and certainly not being privy to newly formulated classified details of the Assault Breaker program, Thorpe had envisioned almost the same thing that Wohlstetter saw. Only Thorpe’s high-fidelity simulator was a training tool for war, played in a virtual world, and Assault Breaker was a billion-dollar weapons system to be developed and deployed in a real war.

Thorpe was invited to present his thoughts to a group of senior officials. “They were all command pilots, each with thousands of hours of flight time,” Thorpe recalls. “Here I am, this clown with
no wings, proposing to take away flight training time from air officers. I did not articulate myself very well. I got my lunch handed to me.” The senior officials chuckled at his idea.

Thorpe figured he was missing a key piece of this puzzle he was designing, but he just did not know what it was yet. “There is nothing like getting yelled at to make you think harder, to really reflect,” Thorpe says. “I figured out you can’t take away flight training time. The simulator would be a better place to practice certain combat skills that can never be practiced except in battle,” he says. “For example, you could practice with equipment like jammers, which you would never turn on in peacetime, [which] an opponent could [potentially] see. As soon as I had the ‘ah-hah’ moment, that the real value of the simulator was to teach and practice skills you could not practice until the first day of real combat, that’s when the way to design the simulator became clear to me.”

Thorpe ran the idea by a few senior officers, but it was just too difficult a concept for most people to visualize. Then, “by happenstance,” says Thorpe, “I was offered the services of a graphic artist in the Pentagon, and he illustrated the key components of the proposed concept.” Thorpe’s paper, which now included elegant drawings, was reviewed by senior Pentagon staff. “Everyone said, ‘Hey, that’s cool,’” Thorpe recalls. “But they also said, ‘The fact is, the technology isn’t there yet.’” Most colleagues who looked at Thorpe’s drawings said to him, “We don’t even know how to start building something like that yet.”

One of the greatest stumbling blocks to Thorpe’s vision in 1978 was how these simulators could possibly be connected to one another. “The idea of networks connecting distant military installations was not yet imagined,” says Thorpe. “The ARPANET experiments connecting a small number of computers between different universities were under way, but the results were not well known.” Mostly they were still classified. With his vision for the future seeming more science fiction than science, Thorpe’s paper was shelved.

Thorpe went back to school, to the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, and in January 1981 he was assigned to DARPA, on loan from the Air Force. He was made a program manager in the Systems Science Division, next door to the Information Processing Technology Office that was being run by Bob Kahn, the man who, together with Vint Cerf, had invented the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). Thorpe recalls what an exciting time it was at DARPA, “the center of the universe for gadgets.” DARPA was located at 1400 Wilson Boulevard in Arlington, Virginia, and the Systems Science Division had its own demonstration facility across the street, “a place to try out all the new gadgets, take them apart, put them back together again, or maybe integrate one with another system.” Thorpe remembers one such example when one of the world’s first compact disc players arrived in America, at DARPA, in 1981 or 1982. It had been sent from a small electronics company in Japan. “There were only a few CDs in the world at the time,” Thorpe recalls, “and they had music on them. Our director wasn’t interested in listening to music, but we were interested in thinking about using the technology for data storage.” The CD player was the size of a suitcase.

In the DARPA building, down the hallway from Thorpe’s office, was the Cybernetics Technology Office, where DARPA’s artificial intelligence work was under way. One day Thorpe’s boss, Craig Fields, the former program director of cybernetics technology, asked Thorpe if he had any bright ideas.

“I pulled out the old high-fidelity simulator drawings,” recalls Thorpe. “Fields, a brilliant guy, and later the director of DARPA, says, ‘I like that.’ He suggested we go talk to the director, Larry Lynn.” Thorpe explained his idea to Lynn, who said he liked it, too.

“How much to build this synthetic world?” Thorpe recalls Lynn asking.

“Seventeen million,” Thorpe told him.

“Let’s do it,” Larry Lynn said.

“So we went ahead and started the program,” says Thorpe.

Captain Jack Thorpe’s paper was now a DARPA program called Simulator Networking, or SIMNET. Broadly speaking, the goal of SIMNET was to add a new element to command and control (C2), namely training. C2 would eventually become C2U, “with a ‘U’ for university,” says Thorpe.

In April 1983, SIMNET was just another DARPA program. Nothing like it had ever been attempted before, and like other blue-sky science endeavors at DARPA, SIMNET was given room to succeed or to fail. “DARPA, unlike most agencies, is allowed to fail some fraction of the time,” says Joe Mangano, a former DARPA program manager.

“In the early 1980s, most people in the defense community accepted the notion that building an affordable, large-scale, free-play, force-on-force worldwide networked war-fighting system was impossible,” retired colonel Neale Cosby recalled in 2014. Cosby served as a SIMNET principal investigator for DARPA for five years. But SIMNET would astonish everybody, not only for its military application but for the multibillion-dollar industry it would help create. “William Gibson didn’t invent cyberspace,”
Wired
magazine reported in 1997, referring to the science fiction author who coined the term in 1982, “Air Force captain Jack Thorpe did.” SIMNET was the first realization of cyberspace, and it was the world’s first massively multiplayer online role-playing game, or MMORPG—more commonly known as an MMO.

MMOs first became popular in the gaming community in the late 1990s, and by 2003 they had entered the mainstream. MMOs are now able to support enormous numbers of game players simultaneously, with each individual gamer connected to the game by the Internet. One of the most popular MMOs is
World of Warcraft,
which sold more than $2.5 billion worth of subscriptions in its
first ten years. Each month, some 10 million monthly
World of Warcraft
subscribers explore fantastic virtual landscapes, fight monsters, and complete quests using an avatar.

MMO users became so great in number that in 2008, the CIA, the NSA, and DARPA launched a covert data-mining effort, called Project Reynard, to track
World of Warcraft
subscribers and discern how they exist and interact in virtual worlds. To do so, CIA analysts created their own avatars and entered the virtual world of
World of Warcraft.
That the CIA was spying on MMO users was classified and remained unknown until 2013, when former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden disclosed top secret documents detailing the program, which also involved British intelligence agencies. “Although online gaming may seem like an innocuous form of entertainment, when the basic features and capabilities are examined, it could potentially become a target-rich communication network,” reads one top secret report, “WoW [
World of Warcraft
] may be providing SIGINT [signals intelligence] targets a way to hide in plain sight.”

But back in 1983, SIMNET was just getting started. MMOs were far in the future and still a figment of the imagination. SIMNET was about training warfighters for battle. And Jack Thorpe had more than a decade of work ahead of him.

O
n the evening of March 23, 1983, a long black limousine pulled up to the south gate of Ronald Reagan’s White House. In the back sat Edward Teller, now seventy-five years old. Teller was not exactly sure why he was here. He had just flown in from California, where he lived, because the aide who called him three days earlier said President Reagan thought it was important that he be at the White House on this night.

Walking with a limp and a cane, Teller made his way through the White House foyer, up the stairs, and into the Blue Room. There he was greeted by Admiral John Poindexter, the Military Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. Poindexter suggested Teller have a seat. Thirty-six chairs had been set up in neat rows. Teller sat down and waited. In another seat was the Jason scientist and Nobel laureate Charles H. Townes, the principal inventor of the laser.

At 8:00 p.m., in a nationally televised address, President Reagan announced to the world his decision to launch a major new research
and development program to intercept Soviet ICBMs in various stages of flight. The program, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), would require numerous advanced technology systems, the majority of which were still in the development stage. DARPA would be the lead agency in charge until SDI had its own organization.

President Reagan said that the reason for this radical new initiative was simple. When he first became president, he was shocked to learn that in the event of a Soviet nuclear strike, his only option as commander in chief was to launch an all-out nuclear attack against the Soviets in response. Reagan said he was not willing to live in the shadow of nuclear Armageddon—mutual assured destruction. The United States needed the capability to strike down incoming Soviet missiles before they arrived. This bold new SDI program would allow for that.

For decades, defense scientists like the Jason scientists had been grappling with this conundrum of ballistic missile defense and had concluded that there was no way to defend against an onslaught of incoming ICBMs. Now, Reagan believed that technology had advanced to the point where this could be done sometime in the not-so-distant future.

The Strategic Defense Initiative involved huge mirrors in space, space-based surveillance and tracking systems, space-based battle stations, and more. But the element that got the most attention right away was the x-ray laser, which scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had been working on since the 1970s. Very few people outside the Livermore group understood the science behind an x-ray laser, and even fewer knew that x-ray lasers were powered by nuclear explosions.

Several days after Reagan’s speech, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger was leaving the Pentagon to brief Congress on SDI. Walking alongside him was Undersecretary Richard D. DeLauer, a ballistic missile expert. Secretary Weinberger was having trouble
grasping the science behind SDI and DeLauer was trying to explain it to him.

“But is it a bomb?” Secretary Weinberger asked.

DeLauer was candid. As the former executive vice president of the missile company TRW, Inc., and with a Ph.D. in aeronautical engineering, DeLauer understood the science behind the x-ray laser. “You’re going to have to detonate a nuclear bomb in space,” he told the secretary of defense. “That’s how you’re going to get the x-ray.”

This put Secretary Weinberger in an untenable position. President Reagan had assured the public that his new program would not involve nuclear weapons in space. “It’s not a bomb, is it?” Weinberger asked a second time.

DeLauer chose his words carefully. He said that the x-ray laser didn’t have to be called a bomb. It could be described as involving a “nuclear event.”

In a 1985 interview for the
Los Angeles Times,
DeLauer relayed this story verbatim. He said that the secretary of defense “didn’t understand the technology,” adding, “Most people don’t.”

The laser was invented in the late 1950s by Charles Townes, who in 1964 was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics. In the most basic sense a laser is a device that emits light. But unlike with other light sources, such as a lightbulb, which emits light that dissipates, in a laser the photons all move in the same direction in lockstep, exactly parallel to one another, with no deviation. To many, the laser is something straight out of science fiction. In a 2014 interview for this book, Charles Townes, then age ninety-eight, confirmed that he had been inspired to create the laser after reading Alexei Tolstoi’s 1926 science-fiction novel
The Garin Death Ray.
“This idea of a flashing death ray also has a mystique that catches human attention,” said Townes, “and so we have Jove’s bolts of lightning and the death rays of science fiction.” A half century after
Tolstoi wrote about the Garin death ray, George Lucas modernized the concept with Luke Skywalker’s light saber in the science-fiction film
Star Wars.

One of the first sets of experiments involving lasers, mirrors, and space took place in 1969 and has been largely lost to the history books. The experiment began on July 21 of that year, said Townes, when, for the first time in history, two men walked on the moon. While on the lunar surface, “astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin [Buzz] Aldrin set up an array of small reflectors on the moon and faced them toward the Earth.” Back here on earth—which is 240,000 miles from the moon—two teams of astrophysicists, one team working at the University of California’s Lick Observatory, on Mount Hamilton, and the other at the University of Texas’s McDonald Observatory, on Mount Locke, took careful notes regarding where, exactly, the astronauts were when they set down the mirrors. “About ten days later, the Lick team pointed the telescope at that precise location and sent a small pulse of power into the tiny piece of hardware they had added to the telescope,” said Townes. Inside the telescope, a beam of “extraordinarily pure red light” emerged from a crystal of synthetic ruby, pierced the sky, and entered the near vacuum of space. A laser beam.

Traveling at the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second, the laser beam took less than two seconds to hit the mirrors left behind on the moon by Armstrong and Aldrin, and then the same amount of time to travel back to earth, where the Lick team “detected the faint reflection of its beam,” explained Townes. The experiment delivered volumes of scientific data, but one set was truly phenomenal. “The interval between launch of the pulse of light and its return permitted calculation of the distance to the moon within an inch, a measurement of unprecedented precision,” said Townes. The laser beam was able to measure what stargazers and astronomers have wondered since time immemorial: Exactly how far away from earth is the moon?

While the astrophysicists were using laser technology for peaceful purposes, the Defense Department was already looking at using lasers as directed-energy weapons (DEW). In 1968 ARPA had established a classified laser program called Eighth Card, which remains classified today, as do many other laser programs, the names of which are also classified. Directed-energy weapons have many advantages, none so great as speed. Traveling at the speed of light means a DEW could hit a target on the moon in less than two seconds.

After hearing Reagan’s historic announcement from a front-row seat in the White House Blue Room, Edward Teller and Charles Townes had decidedly different reactions. Teller embraced the idea and would become a leading scientist on the Strategic Defense Initiative and the follow-up program, called Brilliant Pebbles. Charles Townes did not believe Reagan’s SDI concept could work.

“For a president who doesn’t know the technology one can see why [it] might be appealing,” said Townes. “It doesn’t really seem very attractive to me, or doable. But you can see how from a matter of principle it sounded good to Reagan. It’s like an imaginary story of what might be done.”

The day after the speech, Senator Edward Kennedy criticized the president’s initiative, calling it a “reckless ‘Star Wars’ scheme.” The name stuck. From then on, the president’s program became known around the world as “Star Wars.” Science fiction and science had crossed paths once again. For the general population, real-world lasers, death rays, and directed-energy weapons were scientifically impossible to grasp. Science fiction was not so hard.

Congress worried that SDI was not technically feasible and that it was politically irresponsible. That even if the technology were successful, it could trigger a dangerous new arms race with the Soviets. But after debating the issue, Congress gave the Reagan White House the go-ahead for the Strategic Defense Initiative, and
over the next ten years, nearly $20 billion was spent. It is often said that the Clinton administration canceled the SDI program, when in fact it canceled only certain elements of the Strategic Defense Initiative. SDI never really went away. In 2012 the
Fiscal Times
reported that more than $100 billion had been spent on SDI technologies in the three decades since Reagan first proposed the idea, $80 billion of which had been spent in the past decade.

Space remains a domain where domination has long been sought but where all-out war has never been fought. For scientists and engineers working on DARPA’s SIMNET program, the focus would remain on land. There had been steady progress with the SIMNET program in the year since director Larry Lynn gave it the go-ahead, including the fact that the Army was now involved. Which is how, in the spring of 1984, Jack Thorpe, now a major, found himself maneuvering a sixty-ton M1 Abrams tank up over a muddy hill deep in the pine-forested back lot of the legendary armor school at Fort Knox, Kentucky.

“When we started SIMNET, the threat was on Soviet armor warfare,” says Thorpe, “meaning tanks.” This meant that simulating tank warfare was SIMNET’s first priority. The desired goal was to create a virtual reality that felt real. So Thorpe and the DARPA team were at Fort Knox, driving through the mud, attempting to “capture the sense of tankness,” says Thorpe. DARPA had big plans for SIMNET, with a goal of building four SIMNET centers to house a total of 360 simulators, roughly 90 per site. At the time, Thorpe and the DARPA team were working on the first two simulators, which would be models of M1 Abrams tanks.

Because there would be no motion in these simulators, the emphasis was placed on sound. Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) of La Jolla was in charge of working with field units at instrumented training ranges and collecting data. The
defense contractor Perceptronics Corporation of California was hired to design the fiberglass and plywood simulators and wire them for sound. “For someone on the outside, the sound of the hundred-and-five-millimeter tank gun firing at a target downrange is incredibly loud, but for a person inside the tank the experience is totally different,” says Thorpe. Because of the overpressure, there is almost no noise. “It’s incredibly
quiet.
” What there is inside is movement, which, Thorpe says, “is a totally different kind of sound.” The audio specialists with Perceptronics replicated the sound inside the tank by simulating the loose parts that vibrate when the gun fires. “Coins in the glove box,” recalls Thorpe, “loose bolts, anything that’s not tied down.” Back in the laboratory, to convey that rattling sound, audio engineers filled a metal pie plate with nuts and bolts, then glued the pie plate to the top of a subwoofer which they hid behind the fiberglass in the tank simulator. Then Bolt, Beranek and Newman of Boston, which had been a principal contractor on ARPANET, developed the networking and graphics technology for the simulators.

The 1986 annual armor conference at Fort Knox was a milestone in SIMNET history, the first test run of two DARPA SIMNET simulators. General Frederic “Rick” Brown and another general would test the systems, and there was a lot resting on what they thought of a simulated war game. Thorpe recalls the first two simulators as being “about eighty percent [complete], made of fiberglass and plywood, with one hand control to control the turret.” The two SIMNET tank simulators had been set up roughly twenty feet apart. The generals took their seats and the DARPA team piled inside.

“Neither general had any experience in the virtual world,” says Thorpe. “Here’s General Brown looking at a screen in front of him with an icon of the other tank. I say, ‘There in that tank, that is the [opposing] general.’ He doesn’t get it. So I say, ‘Turn the turret and
point it toward the other tank.’ The turret turns. General Brown got a little giddy. He gets it, I think,” Thorpe recalls. “I tell him to load a sabot [round]. ‘Sir,’ I say, ‘if you trigger here, you can shoot the general.’”

General Brown fired the virtual weapon. On the screen, General Brown watched the other general’s tank blow up. “Everything went dark,” Thorpe recalls, in the virtual world, “the general and his crew were ‘dead.’” From the other tank, in the other fiberglass and plywood box, Thorpe heard the other general call out, “‘Reinitialize!’” Inside his simulator, the second general’s tank came back to life. He swung his turret around, put General Brown in his sights, and fired at him.

In that “reinitialize” moment, Thorpe says, he became convinced that both generals were sold on SIMNET. “The behavior in a virtual world is the same behavior as the behavior in the real world,” Thorpe says.

After its initial trials, and with the endorsements from two U.S. Army generals, the SIMNET project had considerable momentum, and the DARPA teams went into production mode. In nine months, DARPA had constructed a building at Fort Knox the size of a small Costco. Inside there were roughly seventy tank simulators, each made of fiberglass, and each with the approximate dimensions of an M1 Abrams tank or a Bradley fighting vehicle. “The building was designed like a hockey rink,” Thorpe says. Power and networking cables dropped from the ceiling. “Entire tank battalions would enter the SIMNET center and begin training together, as if they were in a real tank battle.” Real-world problems had been built into the system. “If you left your virtual electricity on overnight, in the morning your battery would be dead,” Thorpe recalls. “If you didn’t pay attention to landmarks and disciplined map reading, you got lost in the virtual battle terrain. It was force on force. One group against another.” Competition drove the training to a whole new level. “The desire to win
forced people to invent new concepts about how to beat their opponents.”