In the 1970s, the Soviets were notorious for maintaining a network of spies in and around Washington, D.C., and it did not take long for the Russians to learn about DARPA’s classified Assault Breaker plans. When they did, the Soviet military brass began studying the concept and planning countermeasures. In 1978 an article about Assault Breaker appeared in the classified Soviet military journal Military Thought. That the Soviets knew about DARPA’s “system of systems” might have gone unnoticed had it not been for the sharp eyes of Andrew W. Marshall, a former RAND analyst and Wohlstetter protégé who now had his own office inside the Pentagon. Marshall served as director of the Office of Net Assessment, created by the Nixon White House in 1973 and dedicated to forecasting future wars. At RAND, Marshall had secured his reputation as a master game theorist, and at the Pentagon, his wizardry in prognosis and prediction earned him the nom de guerre Yoda, or the Jedi Master. It also put him in regular contact with DARPA directors and program managers, as he continued to be for over forty years.
Part of Andrew Marshall’s job in the 1970s was to monitor what Soviet generals were writing in their classified journals. In reading Military Thought, Marshall learned that the Soviets felt so threatened by the prospects of an Assault Breaker–like system of systems that they were running exercises to practice countermeasures against one. Soviet fears of DARPA’s Assault Breaker concept did not stop there but made their way to the top of the Soviet military chain of command. In 1984 Marshall Nikolai Ogarkov, chief of the general staff of the armed forces of the Soviet Union, worried in a classified memo that Assault Breaker gave the Americans the ability to conduct “automated reconnaissance-and-strike complexes,” a capability that must be regarded as a “military-technical revolution.” Marshall renamed the Russian pronouncement a “revolution in military affairs,” which had since become a celebrated Pentagon maxim. The saying defines what happens when one country or fighting force creates a technology or tactic that makes everything else subordinate to it and makes many of the other side’s earlier weapons systems obsolete.
Just a decade before, in the wake of the Vietnam War and with his agency’s budget slashed, Stephen Lukasik had appealed to Congress to allow DARPA to pursue “high-risk projects of revolutionary impact.” Lukasik told Congress that in the modern world, the country with the most powerful weapons would not necessarily have the leading edge. He argued that as the twenty-first century approached, the leading edge would belong to the country with the best information—with which it could quickly plan, coordinate, and attack. Eleven years later, his vision proved correct. The Soviets felt deeply threatened by DARPA’s C3-based revolution in military affairs.
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 arti
st 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.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Star Wars and Tank Wars
On 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-ba
sed 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.”