PowerScene

PowerScene is the digital mapping simulation program that U.S. government and Pentagon officials had Slobodan Milosevic (Yugoslavia), Franjo Tudjman (Croatia), and Alija Izetbegovic (Bosnia) play under the watchful tutelage of Wesley Clark at an airforce base in Ohio to reach the Dayton "peace" accords in 1995. Powerscene was also used in NATO's Operation Deliberate Force in Bosnia in 1995. The Dayton agreement instituted the tripartite territorial division of Bosnia into ethnically homogenized enclaves. The u.s.-designed accords effectively legitimized ethnic partition and the violent redrawing of borders through ethnic expulsions in one of the most ethnically mixed areas in the region. PowerScene was used previously in NATO airstrikes against Bosnian Serb

PowerScene was also used by the US Air Force to rehearse bombing missions on Baghdad throughout the 1990s.

A pilot's-eye view of Baghdad

The U.S. Air Force has released an unclassified version of the kind of animated satellite imagery that U.S. pilots have used to rehearse bombing missions over Baghdad.

The imagery, made from commercial satellites, allows pilots to fly simulated missions, and see what they would see in an actual bombing run over the Iraqi capital.

Image of Baghdad generated by "POWERSCENE"
 
The system is called "POWERSCENE" and looks like a video game, except that the imagery shows actual targets, a sort of "virtual reality map".

The pictures show a pilot's-eye view of what strikes against Baghdad might look like, but without any sounds or animated xplosions. U.S. pilots used it in Bosnia to practice NATO air strikes.

21 Days in Dayton

"WASHINGTON - The wine was drunk, a lavish lobster dinner eaten, and it was time to resolve one of the most delicate issues in the Bosnian peace talks: the creation of a route for the Bosnian government from Sarajevo through Bosnian-Serb territory to the beleaguered Muslim enclave of Gorazde.

President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia made his way to a high-tech auditorium to play Powerscene, the Pentagon's computer mapping program that reproduces terrain on a vast movie screen. The Serbian leader was adamant that the corridor could be no more than two miles wide.

Gen. Wesley K. Clark, the senior American military official at the negotiations, whisked Milosevic off on an imaginary aerial tour of the region to show why such a narrow corridor made no strategic sense. "As you see, God did not put the mountains two miles apart," Clark said.

Milosevic downed a large whisky, considered this geophysical fact, and the deal on a five-mile-wide corridor was consummated. It became known as the "Scotch Road." "

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."