Virtual War

The institute's director, Col. Timothy Reese, and a handful of officers watch Kennedy as he directs the ride like a back-seat driver. He uses his remotes to scroll through information in the side panels. He tells a technician seated at a massive computer terminal in the back of the room when to speed up and where to turn. Onscreen, he's zooming fast through the desolate landscape. Intersections rise and fall. The convoy has spent the past 59 hours on the road traveling from Kuwait, and fatigue has set in.

The roadside hovels turn from sporadic dots to a blur. In less than a minute, the convoy unexpectedly enters a city. Kennedy calls for the vehicle to stop. He wants a look at his surroundings. The technician pans the view from left to right. Every building looks identical in monochromatic khaki. Kennedy duplicates the moves made by Lynch's convoy and turns around to retrace his steps. It's a mistake, he says, because the insurgents saw the convoy pass and are ready for its return. He stops near a series of small buildings, noting that this is the point where the convoy comes under fire.

Onscreen, there are no insurgents flooding the street, no speakers blasting the ricochet of rapid-fire rifle reports. There's no first-person-shooter perspective as in the video game Doom, just the same droll landscape panorama. Kennedy explains that this is the point at which the institute's instructors jump in to explain what's happening: insurgents firing from the tops of buildings, bullets showering the vehicles.

He drives forward fast, getting even more lost. Instead of using GPS units and communication systems, Lynch's convoy panics. Soon, the vehicles are separated.

Kennedy points out sniper positions on overpasses and on rooftops. Later, he zooms away to offer a bird's-eye view showing how rows of slums can create an "urban canyon" effect, casting confusing shadows and creating the feeling of being trapped in a maze.

Kennedy explains that 11 soldiers would be killed, nine wounded and seven— including Lynch— taken prisoner. Reese notes that the academic setting allows him to be "intellectually honest" about how screwed-up that military operation became. His critique of the Lynch debacle is blunt: "There was a lot of personal bravery but a lot of things that went wrong at the command level."

He admits that the scenario shows one way in which U.S. forces were unprepared to fight the insurgency: Leaders underestimated the threat posed along supply routes. "We didn't understand the degree that there would be guerrilla forces left behind that wouldn't fight [in major battles] and then would wait for the softer convoys to come up behind and take their chances," he says. With the war in Iraq stretching into it's fourth year, Reese says the virtual rides may help understand operational blunders.

"I think the staff ride fits into an Army culture that grew up in the 1980s after Vietnam that said we need to learn from our mistakes. We need to get better. Whether there's a successful campaign or a failure, we analyze it. The staff ride is part of that better self-critiquing process." Using the Army's new battlefield simulator, Col. Timothy Reese travels down the same road as Pvt. Jessica Lynch.