Virtual War and Peace

Virtual War and Peace

Virtual War and Peace

During the Bosnian peace negotiations last November, talks briefly broke down over a minor point of topography. Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic balked over the width of a strip of land that would run through Bosnian-Serb territory, insisting that the corridor could be no more than two miles across. American negotiators were convinced such a narrow opening through the mountainous terrain was strategically indefensible. One of the negotiators dragged Milosevic into the map room, sat the Serb leader down in front of a computer screen, and, with the help a mapping program called PowerScene, flew him off on a virtual reality tour of the area.

"As you can see," said the negotiator, as the computer operator swooped in over the area, "God didn't put the mountains two miles apart." Looking at the screen, Milosevic swallowed a large gulp of whiskey and conceded to a strip five miles wide. Time and again during the 21-day talks, PowerScene was used to break such stalemates, settling details as small as on which side of a particular road a border would fall.

The first virtual reality program ever used in peace negotiations, PowerScene - developed by Cambridge Research Associates of McLean, Virginia - combines pictures from satellites and spy planes with highly accurate terrain-elevation information to generate a level of visual detail that shocked many of the warring leaders. One of the Balkan presidents spotted his grandparents' house, while another flew past a stream where he fished as a boy. "They were totally blown away," says Vic Kuchar, an official from the Defense Mapping Agency who did most of the simulated flying. "They had never seen anything like it."

As handy as PowerScene proved during the Dayton, Ohio, negotiations, other uses for the technology were also clear to everyone present. The military value of the application was driven home when Milosevic noted a problem with one virtual scene. "Stop the flight," Milosevic told Kuchar at one point. "See that bridge there. It is gone. You bombed it away." Indeed, NATO pilots training for last year's air attacks on Bosnian Serb targets in September had used PowerScene to practice their bombing runs.

The US government's love affair with this new technology will continue long after the peace agreement takes effect. The two US$400,000 systems used during the negotiations have been shipped to Germany to train the US Army's First Armored Division and to Tuzla to train other troops.

"We knew PowerScene was a remarkable tool to make war," says Jerry Moore, Cambridge Research Associates's director of new business. "It was gratifying to discover that it could help make peace as well."


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