Twisted rebar, concrete, and splintered furniture lay scattered across the floor of this room. Our view through a jagged hole in the wall looks out on to the city, showing steady civilian traffic crossing a bridge over a river below. Sparrows flap through the grey haze, and Arabic music and the voices of merchants filter up from the street. An army major beside me, Paul Tyrrell, scans the high-rises on the other side of the river through his laser rangefinder. He is the frontline eyes of the coalition, responsible for calling in air strikes. A platoon sergeant named Donald Prado tells Tyrrell that an office tower half a mile to the west is an enemy stronghold.
In eight minutes, coalition soldiers will storm across the bridge. Prado radios in for the air force to drop a smoke screen for cover. He’s also spotted snipers on the roof but cautions the major that the civilian facility is off-limits for targeting. Then Tyrrell sees something Prado missed. Three of the antennas on the roof are tactical radio masts, a tip-off that insurgents are using the hospital as a communications base. “That’s a high-payoff target, brother,” says Tyrrell. He gets approval to deliver a “limited lethality” fragmentation bomb on to the hospital roof. The office tower will receive the full treatment—a 1,000 pound GPS-guided bunker buster. Seconds later, the missiles smash into their targets in perfect synchrony. Smoke and dust billow out in bright plumes, followed by shouts and the keening of ambulance sirens.
The air is thick with heat, but it’s not the merciless 120-degree swelter of Baghdad. It’s late spring in Lawton, Oklahoma. We’re in the battle lab of an Army base called Fort Sill, and the air-conditioning is on the fritz. The river, the bridge, the civilian traffic, the birds, the bombs, and Sergeant Prado are all virtual, a simulation generated by flat-panel displays on the walls, a subwoofer in the floor, and half a dozen Windows and Linux boxes down the hall. Only the smashed furniture, the officer standing beside me, and the adrenaline spikes are real.
So begins Steve Silberman’s account. Wired magazine’s columnist was the first civilian to experience a new form of military training in 2004.1 The Joint Fires and Effects Training System (JFETS) is a video game based on the immersion of soldiers in semi-virtual worlds that reproduce real combat conditions on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan. JFETS is the latest in a series of war games and the prototype for “synthetic theaters of war” which combine immersion in an interactive virtual world with a narrative of a story that is lived by characters. There are several different exercises based upon different scenarios, providing high-resolution images, a 360-degree field of vision, and very high quality sound. After spending an hour in this virtual theater, Silberman felt disoriented. “I notice an unexpected after effect of spending an hour in the holodeck. Glancing out a window, my brain no longer trusts that I am seeing the real world. The freeway traffic and trace houses of Marina del Rey seem virtual.”
This masterpiece of simulation is the product of unprecedented collaboration between the Pentagon, the University of Southern California, and Hollywood studios under the aegis of the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), a think-tank set up in 1999 by the army’s Simulation, Training, and Instrumentation Command (STRICOM), with a budget of $45 million. In 2004, ICT’s contract with the Pentagon was renewed for a second five-year period, and its budget more than doubled. Housed in futuristic offices designed by a set-designer who once worked on Star Wars, ICT’s headquarters have always been in a tower near the port of Santa Monica in Los Angeles. It is home to a team of designers, scriptwriters, graphic artists, video designers, researchers working on artificial intelligence, and directors … all from Hollywood. They are developing simulation models that allow players to behave “as though their experiences were real.” Mastery of this type of virtual, interactive, and multisensory environment is now seen as indispensable to the visualization of the battlefield and the training of troops. The founders of the new institute designed it to use the simulation technologies developed by the video-games industry and Hollywood’s expert storytellers to devise a new military training system adapted to the strategic issues of the twenty-first century.
When ICT opened, explain Tim Lenoir and Henry Lowood, Army Secretary Louis Caldera said:
“We could never hope to get the expertise of Steven Spielberg or some of the other film industry people working just on Army projects.” But the new institute, Caldera said, will be a “win-win for everyone.” … Flight and tank simulators are excellent tools for learning and practicing the use of complex, expensive equipment. However, movies, theme park rides and increasingly even video games are driven by stories with plot, feeling, tension, and emotion. To train for real world military engagements is not just to train on how to use the equipment but how to cope with the implementation of strategy in an environment with uncertainties, surprises, and participants with actual fears.2
This was not the first time the Pentagon had used simulation techniques and special effects to train its soldiers. Hollywood had already produced military training films, and the universities are accustomed to signing contracts with the US Army. To take only one famous example: in 1965, the Department of Defense commissioned a computer simulation game called “Politica” for Project Camelot. Designed by the Cambridge-based research organization Abt Associates, “The game was first loaded with data about hundreds of social psychological variables in a given country: degree of group cohesiveness, levels of self-esteem, attitudes toward authority, and so on. Then it would highlight those variables decisive for the description, indication, and control of internal revolutionary conflict.”3
The simulation was in fact about Chile, where Salvador Allende had come close to winning the previous year’s election. A few years later, it was to outline the CIA’s role in the process that led to the bloody overthrow on the Popular Unity government on September 11, 1973.
In the 1990s, the very existence of STRICOM was testimony to the Pentagon’s determination not to be left behind in terms of simulation and special-effects technology, and to exploit the new technologies and products of the entertainment industries (movies, video games, theme parks, etc.). But this joint venture between Hollywood and the Pentagon was based on an unprecedented agreement; for the first time a multi-disciplinary production structure was developed on the Department of Defense’s initiative. As The Village Voice’s film critic Ed Halter remarked in 2002, it was as though the military had tried to develop its own studio in the 1930s, and as though that studio had become one of the big players in the cinematographic industry.4
The establishment of the ICT was the culmination of a long process of collaboration between the Pentagon and the Hollywood studios, but it was primarily a response to the new strategic issues that had emerged since the end of the Cold War. In the early 1990s, the US Army had to face new challenges: in an age of urban warfare and the struggle against terrorism, decisions had to be taken lower and lower down the chain of command. Teaching new recruits to shoot and to march in step was therefore no longer enough.
Interviewed in February 2000, STRICOM’s scientific director Michael M. Macedonia—who was one of the main architects behind this strategic turn—told the New York Times:
The model was: “Go prepare for the cold war on the central front in Europe—mass Soviet armies.” That model doesn’t exist any more. Essentially, the missions that we do in the Army are very complex today. Look at Kosovo, look at Bosnia, look at what we had to do in Haiti. The fact is that our soldiers have to learn to work in a disciplined process and have some empathy and have some understanding of the cultures and of the people and of the context that they’re in.5
The end of the Cold War completely changed the nature of the army’s missions. New fields of intervention have emerged in American strategic doctrine. “Operations other than war,” for example, include interceding between rival factions after a ceasefire, distributing humanitarian goods and services, deploying multinational forces, supervising elections, supplying humanitarian aid during a conflict or after a natural disaster, building states by training police and security forces, helping to build infrastructures, supervising disarmament, creating humanitarian corridors, destroying coca or opium fields, supporting “fragile democratic states,” the struggle against rogue states, the war on terror, urban guerrilla warfare, and much more.
“It became apparent during the first Gulf War,” Nick Gillette wrote in the Guardian, “that American soldiers were being needlessly exposed to the risk of death and serious injury through lack of training in urban combat. Realizing that this mode of fighting was likely to become even more prevalent, the US Army decided to educate recruits in military operations in urban terrain (or MOUT).”6
There were budgetary constraints as well as new strategic conditions: after the collapse of the Soviet Union, public opinion and Congress began to demand the “peace dividend,” or major cuts in a defense budget that seemed to be quite irrelevant to the new geostrategic context. It fell by 13 percent during the 1990s. On the basis of military information predicting the closure of military bases and the cancellation of long-term projects a Congressional office of assessment estimated in 1992 that 2.5 million defense-related jobs would be eliminated between 1991 and 2002.7
These budgetary restrictions forced the army to change its training systems. Large-scale maneuvers with hundreds of thousands of men in real situations, like the “Reforger” programme of 1988 that mobilized 175,000 men in Germany at a cost of $53.9 billion, were now out of the question. The new “Reforger” programme of 1992, which was based upon the new cooperative capabilities acquired thanks to the simulation programmes adopted by the army and especially the air force, mobilized only 6,500 soldiers (who simulated 175,000 men) at a cost of $19.5 million.8
Growing reliance on reservists is a further argument in favor of simulated exercises: they made it possible to organize “at home” training weekends. Reservists can use the new systems from their home bases and prepare for complex operations before they are mobilized. This considerably improves the quality of their training.
“Whereas during the cold war American forces had been dispersed to fixed forward bases abroad, future missions will require rapid deployment of small flexible forces to trouble spots around the world. Finally, the army may have to fight in joint operations with multinational forces, with or without United Nations or foreign senior command over its soldiers.”9
It is striking to note that, during the 1990s, America’s military organization experienced the same restructuring process as the big bureaucratic and hierarchical firms (see chapters 2 and 3 above). The collapse of the old Fordist model, which was bound up with the industrial capitalism of the postwar period, and the emergence of a new model that was decentralized, flexible, and structured into networks, affected the army too. It too conformed to the paradigm of an organization made up of supposedly autonomous individuals who could take decisions and adapt to an uncertain environment. And it had to be able to adapt to the changing situation as the conjuncture changed by constantly inventing new forms of cooperation that were limited in terms of both time and space.
“ ‘We have been able to demonstrate for several years now the use of networked simulations,’ said Michael Macedonia. ‘There has always been a goal, for example, to link up 100,000 players. But we’ve never really done that.’ ”10
The fact remains that, as early as 1995, the Pentagon had decided to codify its new rules and training techniques by developing a new system known as Distributed Mission Training. DMT created virtual theaters of war by connecting the players to real-time simulators that generated synthetic environments by using the latest advances in virtual reality technology.11
The air force was obviously the first to implement this reform in the 1990s, when it replaced individual flight-simulation systems with networked simulations that allowed several people to take part and to share tasks. Robert Haffa Jr. and James H. Patton Jr. summed up the changes in an article published in the Army War College Quarterly in 1998: “Traditional military missions, once separated in time, distance, platform, and function, are now being fused. This integration of surveillance, information, battle management, and precision strike has become known over the last few years as a ‘system of systems.’ ”12
In his 2000 interview with the New York Times, Michael Macedonia stated:
You look at what Sony is doing, or Microsoft or Electronic Arts, and although their technology is imperfect, they are rapidly refining it. Basically, they are providing those large-scale virtual environments. And we can call them games. But they really are large-scale collaborative virtual environments where people can express themselves. They are defining how the technology will go, and they are also defining the art. That is, how do you create the content for these virtual environments, and the expectations of what people will see in them. We find that very intriguing. The problem, oddly, is that most computer games are too militaristic for the Army. In Command and Conquer, for instance, you amass huge stockpiles of weapons and train legions of soldiers for an all-out, full-face assault. But that sort of confrontation is no longer in the Pentagon playbook.13
All the more reason for the Pentagon to develop its own games…
In 1997, two years before the ICT was set up, a conference in Monterey, California, brought together video-games specialists and military trainers. They were to lay the foundations for an institutional collaboration designed to share advances in graphic design, sound effects, human–machine interfaces, and virtual immersion. And yet the military and the representatives from the entertainment industries had their differences from the very beginning.
Oddly enough, their differences were not about ethical or political issues (Hollywood’s involvement in a war went almost unchallenged), and still less were they about strategic issues (their conception of modern warfare). They had to do with aesthetic questions and, more specifically, their respective views as to the meaning of realism when it came to simulation, imitation, or virtual immersion. Whereas the military had a photographic conception of realism, the video-games specialists put the emphasis on the credibility of the stories that were being told. That controversy has been part of the aesthetic debate ever since the days of Plato and Aristotle, but it was also an expression of an old struggle between the army and Hollywood over who should have the monopoly of representation.
In his book War and Cinema, Paul Virilio recalls that Joseph Goebbels wanted to outrival Hollywood.14 His civil defense advisers used columns of light to simulate cities, thus illustrating the old collusion/rivalry between war and cinema, which both involve stage management. The new simulation tools used by the US Army to train its troops confirmed what Paul Virilio was saying when his book was first published in French in 1984: the battlefield is not just a space of combat but also a representational space. From Ordnance Survey maps to the first aerial photographs taken during the First World War to today’s satellite images, weapons of war have always been used alongside instruments for optical or cartographic reconnaissance that can reconnoiter the theaters of operations, locate the enemy, record losses, and ascertain what damage has been inflicted on the enemy. Virilio writes:
The functions of the weapon and the eye merge in the sights of guns and the ranger-finders of long-range artillery. Nadar’s invention of the first systematic aerostatic photography in 1858, and aerial photo-interpretation during the First World War, are perfect illustrations of the cinematic dimension of the destruction that is inflicted on whole regions, of the never-ending destruction of a landscape that must be immediately reconstructed with the help of series of photographs, and the cinematic pursuit of uncertain territories in which film replaces the staff’s maps.15
The technical refinement of optical instruments is a response to the “tactical” demand for visibility and encourages attempts to make the battlefield transparent by developing night-vision systems, satellite images, GPS navigation, target-guided missiles. At the same time, there is a growing need to deceive the enemy by using decoys. The increased use of optical technology—lighting up targets, night-time air raids, flares—and the growing use of visual decoys transform battlefields into real film sets, battles into a series of special effects, and troop movements into choreography.
“Soldiers’ perceptions have for decades been technically mediated by computers and other aids embedded in various weapons systems,” notes Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, “but the augmented reality systems of DMT go beyond making the synthetic environment appear as close as possible to the actual sphere of combat and change soldiers’ perceptions of the actual battlespace.”16
Seeing is not enough to do that; we have to believe in a virtual world. When we are fighting a war, we cannot trust what we see: the goal is not just to win territory, but also to win minds.
The never-ending refinement of visual and representational systems has, however, a paradoxical effect. As Jean Baudrillard remarked of the first Gulf War, it encourages incredulity. Seeing was once proof that things were real. The credibility of images fades as they become more widely available. Seeing is no longer enough; we have to believe a story.
One participant in the 1997 conference in Monterey recalled: “Whereas the DOD [Department of Defense] has tended to emphasize the fidelity of interactions between objects in a simulated environment (using science-based models), the entertainment industry has tended to promote visual fidelity and uses principles of good storytelling to help participants suspend their disbelief about the reality of a synthetic experience.”17 Another remarked: “In this view, the goal of a simulation is not to approximate reality as nearly as possible, but to present individuals with the appropriate set of clues to produce the training effect desired.”18
For his part, the Walt Disney Company’s Danny Hills explained: “If you want to make someone frightened, it is not sufficient to show them a frightening picture. You have to spend a lot of time setting them up with the right music, with cues, with camera angles, things like that, so that when you put that frightening picture up, they are startled.”19
The team led by Paramount Digital Entertainment’s Richard Lindheim (who was to become the ICT’s first director) emphasized that the role played by the story and characters in a science-fiction video made in 1997 was much more decisive than the technology: “Video and audio are the means to help you get to know the characters. But it is the characters and the stories that draw the participant into the event and create a compelling feeling that it is 2010 and these are real crises.”20
In his 2004 article, Wired’s Steve Silberman explained: “The architect of the current wave of innovation is Michael Macedonia, the head of the Army’s simulation office”:
Macedonia takes a long view of his work. “People have been using simulation for thousands of years, as long as there’s been a military. They told stories, drew pictures in the sand, invented chess,” he says. “They made these abstractions in the hopes that they could understand the nature and dynamics of war … Now all these modes are converging in the new breed of training simulations,” he says. Macedonia draws a parallel between the real-life combat scenarios employed by ICT and the epics of Homer—tales told to pass on the wisdom of seasoned warriors to those who are called to fight … “The big challenge isn’t getting the technology right,” Macedonia tells me. “We’re almost there. The challenge is, Do we have the right story? Does it map to reality? Are we teaching the right thing? The real story of warfare is that your buddy’s dying—what do you do?21
In October 1996, a workshop financed by the National Research Council (NRC) brought together representatives of the leisure, movie, and video-games industries, members of the Department of Defense, and academics.22 All those involved in the new media thought that the best way to achieve experimental immersion in the electronic media was not hypertext, but the good old techniques of storytelling. Alex Seiden of the special-effects and animation company Industrial Light and Magic explained: “I’ve never seen a CD-ROM that moved me the way a powerful film has. I’ve never visited a Web page with great emotional impact. I contend that linear narrative is the fundamental art form of humankind: the novel, the play, the film … these are the forms that define our cultural experience.”23
They do in fact now make it possible to get players to enter a virtual environment by fostering the illusion that it is a real world. The credibility of simulation exercises is based upon “the perception that a world exists into which participants can port themselves and undertake some actions.” The NRC report on the workshop describes the “human operator’s relationship to the synthetic environment as ‘experiential rather than cognitive.’ ”24 Storytelling appears, then, to be the key to making these virtual worlds “credible.” Unless they are credible, the simulation is still a game that is played at a distance and not an effective form of training that can trigger the desired attitudes and aptitudes in the subjects who are being trained.
As the French political scientist Maurice Ronai explains, Paramount Digital Entertainment began to collaborate with the air force’s Defense Modeling and Simulation Office (DMSO). Their goal was to “train officers to take decisions in times of crisis.” The new techniques had to put troops “in situation” and prepare them to make decisions in remote combat zones. To that end, “Paramount Digital and the University of California’s Information Sciences Institute developed a ‘situation generator’ known as the Story Drive Engine.” 25
In 1999, ICT decided to develop two prototype simulations: a mission designed to rehearse maneuvers, and one for leadership training. “ICT’s deputy technology director explains that to teach recruits how to navigate complex situations, ICT’s training packages are built around the oldest form of immersive experience: storytelling.”26 Both prototypes therefore include storylines for each simulation—complete with character profiles, simulated environmental conditions (wind, temperature, humidity, and smells)—a game for the networked training, to be played in virtual theaters of war inside the ICT building.
This tool was tested at the Industrial college of the Armed Forces in an exercise code-named “Final Flurry.” A group of officers were presented with multi-media story lines: the officers were plunged into a crisis in the Middle East as Iran and the United States came into conflict against a background of nuclear war between India and Pakistan. The officers’ reactions were immediately converted into realistic images and text. When an officer launched a naval attack in the Straits of Hormuz, the system immediately generated real-time images from ZNN-TV, an imaginary replica of CNN. At the end of the exercise, the officers drew conclusions from the exercise and explained them to an equally imaginary President of the Republic.27
Every morning, they were given the day’s storyline, which included a set of geopolitical data, and private and public commentaries. On this basis, the players had to define the appropriate national security policy. The interactive nature of the exercise made it a learning experience that exposed erroneous data, missed opportunities, illusions, deceptions, etc.
The game’s novel feature was that it left the players free to determine their course of action, while allowing the director to orchestrate how they behaved. Discussing the problems inherent in this kind of virtual reality theater, Margaret Thomas Kelso and her collaborators explain: “We wanted to know if the interactor could be guided without feeling manipulated. We believe that providing a satisfactory experience for an interactor relies on maintaining a delicate balance between freedom and control … allowing the interactor maximum freedom of choice while still presenting a shaped experience.”28 Michael Macedonia, who was one of the project’s founders, explains: “By exercising control of these elements, the Director ensures that the exercise follows the intended story line so that the intended training goals can be achieved.”29
For his part, Larry Tuch, Paramount’s manager for the demonstration project, stressed the importance of interactivity:
In the Story Drive experience the students are more like a movie audience with the teachers as the director. He can orchestrate story events by sending the students e-mail, voice mail or electronic video mail, and specific information in the form of television newsclips, briefing documents, maps, and intelligence reports. But, of course, this is more than a movie. And that means the students also have the power to react to and affect the direction of the story.
We are a long way from the video games in which the player is a shooter who has to kill as many victims as possible. Computer-programmed storylines mobilize all the players’ senses—sight, hearing, touch, and smell—and allow them to come face to face with real characters that can, in theory, react to the situation exactly as real human beings would react. Rather than having to put up with the bellowing of a Sergeant Hartman, from Stanley Kubrick’s film Full Metal Jacket, the soldiers can talk to an intelligent robot within the video game. The danger of this kind of immersion has to do with the fact that the player is stimulated so as to achieve a high level of concentration. Some psychologists think that these techniques can have terrible effects: there is a great danger that they will produce soldiers who are over-trained, dehumanized, and who have no sense of compassion or pity. They may create cyborg warriors who are cut off from the real world and trained to kill—as we have seen in Iraq since 2003.
In June 2006, Time magazine revealed that US Marines had perpetrated a massacre in Haditha on November 19, 2005. Some 100 kilometers north of Baghdad, twenty-four civilians—including ten women and children who were executed at point-blank range—were killed in cold blood by the Marines. The main accused, twenty-six-year-old Sergeant Frank Wuterich, was accused of murdering twelve people and ordering the massacre of another six.30 At his trial in December 2006, Wuterich’s lawyer told the court that the Marines had simply done what they had been trained to do.
“By turning to Hollywood in the 1990s, the military has not shifted its authority for shaping the subjectivity of its forces from seasoned professionals to the Scheherazades of sensation and sentiment,” Sharon Ghamri-Tabrizi concludes in her study of the convergence of the Pentagon and Hollywood. “But,” she adds, not without a certain naiveté, “it is important to remember that when the simulation tests more senior command levels and strategic policy making, what is needed most is depth and complexity in the crisis scenario. Leaders must be trained to deliberate over the relevant information, not to respond with a spasm of primal emotion.”31
According to Richard Lindheim, Paramount Digital Entertainment’s vice-president and the man behind ICT, the Vietnam generation had been raised on television, whereas the young soldiers of today have grown up on video games. An army study shows that 90 percent of the 75,000 young men who enlist every year have already used video games, and 30 percent regard themselves as “hardcore gamers.”32 Faced with a serious shortage of volunteers, the US Army relies upon a vast audience of hardcore gamers to make up for the shortfall. Launched on the army’s website on July 4, 2002, America’s Army (www.americasarmy.com) is used by its recruitment sections. Available free on the Internet, it is one of the five most popular online video games. A presentation by its designer Mike Zyda leaves no doubt as to its intentions: “Weapons of Mass Distraction—America’s Army recruits for real war.”33
The game includes links to the www.goarmy.com site that allows players to explore the possibility of a career in the military and to contact a recruiter. According to Colonel Casey Wardynski, the game was downloaded by 6.1 million users in 2005. Its effectiveness as a recruitment tool is undeniable: between 20 and 40 percent of new recruits to the army had already played the game. “Instead of moving the classroom into the field, we’re moving the field into the classroom,” said ICT’s deputy technology director Randy Hill.34
As Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby explain in their book Smartbomb (2005),35 America’s Army is not just an excellent PR and recruitment tool; it is also a way of testing a recruit’s military aptitudes. Mike Zyda admits that its designers did seriously think of using players’ aptitudes and profiles to recruit them directly. That suggestion was not taken up, but players who request information about a career in the military reveal their usernames to the recruiters and may find that their performances have been correlated with their real identities with a view to enlisting them into the army.
In an article published in the British Guardian in 2005, the games designer Greg Costikian baldly stated: “Given that we have a volunteer military, the military needs to recruit. And if it’s legitimate for them to use TV and print advertising, what’s wrong with doing so through a game?”36
Another article in the same newspaper made the cautious suggestion that: “If you were a sensationalist, you might describe this colonization of youth entertainment as the biggest militarization of an adolescent population since the Hitler Youth.”37
Video games are therefore not just used to train soldiers. They are used in recruitment drives, and they are also a valuable way of treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in troops who have come back from the front. One of ICT’s projects is designed to help veterans overcome the problems that, according to a study by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research dating from 2004, affect more than 15 percent of combat personnel returning from Iraq.38 The ICT’s website informs us that this program consists in using the “environment as the basis of treatment, whereby a veteran with PTSD can experience a combat-relevant scenario in a low-threat context to therapeutically process emotion and decondition the effects of the disorder.” The Guardian’s James Verini describes the process: “By recycling virtual graphic assets built for the combat tactical simulation game, Full Spectrum Warrior and other ICT assets, the project is able to build prototypes quickly and cost-effectively … to help veterans overcome the effects of PTSD and restore quality of life to them and their families.”39
According to Robert McLay, a Navy psychiatrist specializing in the therapeutic application of virtual reality, therapy for trauma often requires visits to the actual scene of the assault: “ “You don’t want to send someone who is traumatized back to Iraq. This allows us to bring someone back, but within the situation here.” And, he said, some PTSD sufferers are unable or unwilling to recall things in counseling sessions without stimuli, such as the digital images of a combat hospital, a recorded Islamic prayer melody or the smell of cordite explosives misted into a psychologist’s office.40
On February 9, 2007, the LA Times journalist Larry Gordon revealed that the National Institute of Mental Health was funding a $2 million study at Emory School of Medicine using a virtual Iraq in combination with the drug D-cycloserine, which has been shown to reduce the fear of heights.41 Both combat training and trauma therapy obey the same rules: immersion in a virtual world. For ICT, treating traumatized soldiers and training men to fight is the same thing.
It may seem even more astonishing, but it is very logical in this context: the way storytelling and the virtualization of reality through digital technologies have transformed representations of war has had a profound influence on American politicians’ “worldviews” and the way they make decisions faced with the complexity of global geopolitics and the challenges posed by “hyper-terrorism.”
A few days after the 9/11 attacks, the international press reported that a meeting had taken place between senior officials from the Department of Defense and a number of Hollywood screenwriters and directors. They included John Milius (who co-wrote Apocalypse Now), Steven E. De Souza (the co-writer of Die Hard), and, more surprisingly, Randal Kleiser (who directed the musical Grease). The group’s findings have never been made public, but the press repeated the official line that the purpose of the meeting had been to ask Hollywood’s screenwriters to come up with possible scenarios for a future terrorist attack and possible responses to it.
The idea that screenwriters and directors can predict the future and act as advisers to the government in the same way that the Delphic oracle or Roman chiromancers did is so typical of Hollywood that it has inspired many films and novels. In Sidney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor (1975), adapted from James Grady’s bestselling novel, the main character Joseph Turner (Robert Redford) works for a New York CIA branch operating under the cover of a so-called “Society for American Literary History.” His task, along with that of his colleagues, is to read every novel published in every language in search of possible scenarios or leaks. Their notes are then recorded on a computer and centralized further up the hierarchy. All the leads are compared with the CIA’s data and intelligence to detect possible overlaps with signs of subversive activity.
In the days that followed 9/11, there was much discussion of the predictions made in Tom Clancy’s novels and the storylines of disaster movies such as The Towering Inferno or, more recently, the Die Hard trilogy, in which Bruce Willis confronts terrorists in various situations. The fact that three biggest hits of the 1990s—Independence Day (Roland Emmerich, 1996), Armageddon (Michael Bay, 1998), and Deep Impact (Mimi Leader, 1998)—all deal with mass destruction was grist for the mill for those who believe in predictions and premonitions, as are news stories such as the murder of John Lennon in December 1980. On the day of the murder, his killer Mark David Chapman was carrying J. D. Salinger’s novel Catcher in the Rye as though it was a prayer book. Then there is John Hinckley, who tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in 1981, and who claimed to be another of the novel’s fans.
The one thing that all these episodes have in common is the idea that fiction anticipates reality. The same idea reappears in Steven Spielberg’s film Minority Report (2002), adapted from a remarkable short story by Philip K. Dick. Brains that have been plunged into an artificial vegetative state have dreams that allow them to foresee, or actually see, images of crimes before they are committed. The criminals can then be arrested before they have done anything. In Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (1997), where the world is under a complete American hegemony after “an immense reshaping of the world,” the agents of “psyCorps”—a sort of high tech Gestapo—are capable of telling the future. They can read their enemies’ minds and influence the people they tune into. This, writes Jean-Michel Valentin, is “a metaphor for the infodominance capacity that Space Command is trying to develop.”42
Paradoxically, the task of deconstructing this illusion fell to the novelist Don DeLillo. Having described a fictional firm (see Chapter 3 above), he now describes American society as a world that is saturated in fictions, under a spell, and “Quixotic” in the sense that it prefers fiction to reality and that its most famous “heroes” (Kennedy, Hoover, Nixon, Sinatra, Monroe, Oswald…) behave as though they were fictional characters. This is how DeLillo’s novel Libra describes the fictional character he calls “Win Everett,” a former CIA agent and the brains behind the plot against John F. Kennedy:
Win Everett was at work devising a general shape, a life. He would create a gunman out of ordinary dog-eared paper … An address book with ambiguous leads. Photographs expertly altered (or crudely altered). Letters, travel documents, counterfeit signatures, a history of false names. It would all require a massive decipherment, a conversion to plain text. He envisaged teams of linguists, photo analysts, fingerprint experts, handwriting experts, experts in hairs and fibers, smudges and blurs. Investigators building up chronologies. He would give them the makings of deep chronos, lead them to basement rooms in windy industrial slums, to lost towns in the Tropics … Win would scratch onto these miniature pages enough trails, false trails, swarming life, lingering mysteries, enough real and fabricated people to occupy investigators for months to come … You have to leave them with coincidence, lingering mystery. This is what makes it real … They wanted a name, a face, a bodily frame they might use to extend their fiction into the world.43
The meeting between officials from the Department of Defense and Hollywood screenwriters was quite in keeping with the unreal atmosphere of a post-9/11 period in which fictions and indoctrination flourish. It was not held in the Pentagon, but at the Institute of Creative Technologies in Los Angeles. The man who organized the meeting was none other than Karl Rove, the architect of “Scheherazade’s strategy” who was to preside over the post-9/11 reconfiguration of the world, spread his fictions throughout the world, and busy himself with the unresolved mysteries and coincidences that make things real. Rove was the man behind the new transfictional policy of “war storytelling.” Anything that the terrorists had destroyed could be rebuilt by the architects of Scheherazade’s strategy: a counter-narrative.
Hollywood and the Pentagon Work Together
There were more and more indications of collusion between Hollywood and the Pentagon, especially after September 11, 2001. At the beginning of January 2002, Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld attended the Washington premiere of Scott Ridley’s film Black Hawk Down, which “fictionalizes” the US Army’s fiasco in Somalia in 1993 (overseas American bases were sent cassettes of the film). When We Were Soldiers was released in March 2002, a private screening was organized for George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice; it is a very patriotic account of the battle between American and North Vietnamese forces at Drang in 1965. And in 2003, the Pentagon used Phil Alden Robinson’s The Sum of All Fears (2002) in its recruitment drive. Robinson had been given access to Pentagon and CIA files that were classified “confidential.”
But that is not all, as Samuel Blumenfeld described in an article in Le Monde in 2002: “Attorney General John Ashcroft waited until the Monday following the second weekend of the release of The Sum of All Fears to announce the arrest of the terrorist Abdullah al-Mujahir, or José Padilla to use his original name. He had links with al-Qaeda and had been plotting an attack similar to that described in Phil Alden Robinson’s film. Stranger still, John Ashcroft happened to be in Moscow when the arrest was announced, as though to echo the ending of The Sum of All Fears, in which Russian–American cooperation saves the world from chaos.”44
War storytelling cannot, however, be reduced to purely ideological affects or to a set of deceptions designed to conceal economic or military interests. Such ideological affects do not fall from the skies; they are grounded in institutions, practices, and powers. ICT is an important actor in war storytelling, but it is also a laboratory for testing new forms of cooperation between knowledge-disciplines and power-technologies. It is experimenting with new paradigms for leadership, training, education, and mobilization, and with new ways of articulating the handling of weapons and the training of individuals, and relations between simulation technologies and the cognitive sciences.
When the Hollywood studios began to describe themselves as an “industry,” it was an indication that films were undergoing a process of industrialization. Storytelling is now the object of an equivalent process: in the Hollywood-like setting of the ICT and thanks to the magic of virtual realities, new technologies of power are being developed. They allow the military institution to not only “discipline and punish, as it did in the disciplinary society described by Michel Foucault, but to use fictional war to train and control, to recruit and mobilize.
This overall structure articulates discursive forms and practices (training, recruitment, storylines, and software) with investments and markets. It is what Tim Lenoir and Henry Lockwood described, in an article that has often been cited here, a military-entertainment complex. The expression alludes to the “military-industrial complex” described by President Eisenhower (1953–61) after the Second World War. Eisenhower’s complex has not vanished, as we might have thought for a moment at the end of the Cold War, and has in part been restructured around the new technologies and the virtual industries. “Indeed,” they write, “a cynic might argue that whereas the military-industrial complex was more or less visible and identifiable during the Cold War, today it is invisibly present, permeating our daily lives.”45
According to Lenoir and Lockwood, the ICT and other agencies (Waves, Mitre Cooperation) are the visible part of this new complex. They focus on activities that are wrongly described as entertainment (their goal is not to entertain, but to mobilize). Thanks to the explosion of new transmission and visualization technologies, they became strategic; they are now subsumed under the category of digital storytelling. This is a new complex of activities, and it has its own production offices, special-effects studios, budgets calculated in billions of dollars, and cutting-edge technologies (weapons, artificial intelligence, cognitive sciences).
The old theater of war, with its rules and spatio-temporal constraints, its logistics, the “visual” genius of its strategists and the physical courage of its soldiers, has given way to virtual battlefields and “augmented reality” systems. These create a new hybrid environment in which wars are no longer fought on a real battlefield but amongst a proliferation of signs. This virtual warfare is fought not with weapons, but with data, systems for decoding information, and storylines whose ultimate goal is not so much the annihilation of the enemy as the mythical construction of the enemy.
“Cooperation between Hollywood and the Pentagon has allowed the new genre of the national security thriller to emerge,” writes Maurice Ronai,
and its narratives involve “asymmetrical challenges” such as hijacked missiles, stolen nuclear warheads, the proliferation of biological weapons or cyber blackmail. But while the screenwriters are very inventive when it comes to describing the “threats” and “crises,” their descriptions of the enemy are very sloppy: it is always the mafia, a terrorist group, a rogue state. The “crisis” is handled at the highest level of the American government (increasingly personified by the national security adviser, when it is not the president himself), but it is played out on the ground, with the intervention of special forces.46
Redeploying the battlefield by modifying perceptions is no longer enough; we have to create what reception theorists call a “horizon of expectation” for the war. The war effort has to a large extent become a story that justifies torture and the deployment of special forces on the ground, explains and demonstrates new weapons, and tests and promotes transmission and visualization technologies—films, video games, TV series, and the media are the fictional vectors for this mobilization drive. Storytelling is its operational mode and, as the title of the cult series about the hero Jack Bauer openly boasts, it works in real time, 24 hours a day.
24: Fiction Normalizes States of Emergency
The worldwide success of this American series cannot be explained solely in terms of the nature of the events it describes—the desperate attempts of the Los Angeles-based Counter Terrorist Unit to thwart an attack that could have unpredictable consequences—or even in terms of the parallel montage of the various story lines, which heightens the tension. The explanation lies in the way it uses real time to enmesh the viewer in both narrative and temporal terms. Each season consists of 24 hour-long episodes covering the events of a single day. The length of the commercial breaks is part of the episode’s temporality, which is materialized by the on-screen presence of a digital clock. The temporality of the action is therefore perfectly synchronized with that of its perception. The synchronization of fiction and reality does away with the temporal and symbolic distance that is characteristic of all representation. Events are shown both as they are lived and as they are represented, acted out, and perceived without any distance, and in a synchronization that makes it possible to fuse virtuality and reality.
The action is no longer conjugated in the imperfect tense of fiction, but in a new tense designed to convey a sense of normalized urgency or a permanent state of emergency which, as the Slovene philosopher Slavoj Žižek remarks, involves more than a suspension of moral judgment (“a kind of suspension of ordinary moral concerns”). According to Žižek, this state of emergency takes the form of an injunction to use torture as something “that simply has to be done” in circumstances of normalized emergency. There is no need to be hung up about it: the new law allows everyone to interrogate everyone else—fathers can torture sons, husbands can torture wives, and sisters can torture brothers—in order to obtain information that concerns everyone. This, observes Žižek in an allusion to Kundera’s “realm where moral judgment is suspended” (he is referring to the novel), is a “sad indication of a deep change in our ethical and political standards.”47
The real issue is the prescriptive nature of Hollywood’s fictions and their function, which is to justify actions that are unconstitutional or simply immoral. The invention of a social model in which federal agents—real or fictional—must have enough autonomy to act in order to protect the population adequately is nothing other than the establishment of a permanent state of exception which, because it cannot be justified in legal or constitutional terms, seeks and finds its legitimacy in fiction.
Should further proof be required, it has already been provided by Antonin Scalia—a judge sitting in the US Supreme Court and with a duty to respect the Constitution—at a legal conference held in Ottawa in June 2007. He justified the use of torture, not on the basis of an analysis of legal texts, but by using the example of Jack Bauer. Thinking of the second season, in which we see the hero save California from a nuclear attack thanks to information obtained during interrogations involving torture, he boldly asserted: “Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles … He saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Are you going to convict Jack Bauer? … Say that criminal law is against him? You have the right to a jury trial? Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don’t think so. So the question is really whether you believe in those absolutes. And ought we believe in these absolutes.”48
The fact that an eminent judge sitting in the Supreme Court—the institution which, in theory, guarantees that the laws and actions of the executive are constitutional—can claim to use a TV series as an argument to justify the validity of acts of torture that are illegal under international law, and thus establishes what has to be called “Jack Bauer jurisprudence,” indicates how far political life had degenerated under the Bush administration. As we shall see, the effects of this “Jack Bauer jurisdiction” are being felt at the highest levels of government and the state, where American business’s power to fictionalize the real world, allows prejudice to triumph over the most basic morality, and allows the omnipotence of representations that claim to be transforming the real world to negate its existence.