A recent war game sponsored by the Marine Corps is offering insights
into the challenges of fighting urban wars and is helping participants
to determine what military technologies will be needed in the future,
said officials from the Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities.
CETO was established last year as a partnership between the Marine
Corps and the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies.
As part of its plan to identify emerging threats and find solutions
for future military war-fighting challenges, CETO has been running
a urban warfare exercise, called Project Lincolnia, since October
2000. The exercises will end this fall and the center will start
working on recommendations, which will be submitted to Defense Department
officials.
The war-game project had a $700,000 budget.
CETO designed Project Lincolnia to find a methodology that combined
strategy, operation and tactics for military operations in urban
terrain (MOUT). “All of that was being done under a common
scenario,” said the director of the project, Gary Anderson,
a retired Marine Corps colonel.
Under this methodology, “the ambassador can ask the lieutenant
why he blew up a certain building,” said Anderson. “You
get cross talk that you don’t traditionally see in operations.”
MOUT operations have more than a military dimension, said Anderson.
Current urban operations have economic and diplomatic implications
and also are used for aid relief.
“One of the main criticisms of Panama [when the United States
ousted dictator Manuel Noriega] was that it had been a good military
plan, but it did not have a follow-on piece on how to transition
the country from Noriega and repair the damage from an economic
and diplomatic perspective,” said Anderson.
According to CETO, Project Lincolnia is the Defense Department’s
first attempt to examine military operations in urban terrain at
the strategic, operational and tactical levels. In fact, it was
initiated as a response to a General Accounting Office report, which
said that current Pentagon efforts are too focused on tactical operations
and neglect strategic and operational concerns.
The project, for the most part, was built around war game seminars
that put together strategic and operational-level simulations. The
force-on-force exercises tested decisions and information developed
during the strategy and operational games, said Anderson. The first
force-on-force exercise took place at the former George Air Force
base, in California, at the beginning of this year as part of Lincolnia
I, while the second one occurred at the MOUT facility in Quantico,
Va., as part of Lincolnia II.
The war game’s scenario is set in the mythical nation of
Nicolesia. During Lincolnia I, role players negotiated a cease-fire
among three factions vying for control of the capital, Lincolnia.
However, the situation in Lincolnia was deteriorating and it became
evident, during project Lincolnia II, that a weapons-control process
would be needed to reduce civilian casualties, restore the cease-fire
and provide security for a humanitarian relief effort in place.
Role players representing the State Department, the intelligence
community, a joint task force and the United Nations were tackling
this problem. The United States established a military presence
on the ground. Troops had to monitor the demilitarized borders between
historically hostile factions and also were responsible for heavy
weapons detection, inspection and collection. This part of the exercise,
additionally, used a network of simulated robotic sensors designed
to detect heavy weapons in the city and increase situational awareness.
Most of the simulation in this project was based on the joint conflict
and tactical simulation (JCAT). JCAT is the latest model of the
joint conflict and joint tactical simulation family, which are both
Janus-like models. Janus was the first conflict simulation to use
the graphical user interface as the standard for viewing the information.
JCAT is a multi-sided, interactive, entity-level construction simulation
that U.S. government agencies use for training, exercises, analysis
and mission planning. JCAT uses real terrain and elevation data
and models the world three-dimensionally. This allows for a detailed
examination of individual and small-unit performance in realistic
rural or urban scenarios.
The CETO exercise integrated two sites into the city of Lincolnia.
One was Yoda Ville, the target city with Vietnam-era containers
that the Marine Corps built in Yuma Arizona, and the other one was
the former George Air Force base. “If you try to simulate
live fire, you put it into the computer,” said Anderson. “If
you want the troops running around, then you put them in another
place.”
JCAT can simulate almost anything from individual service members,
tracked and wheeled vehicles aircraft, surface ships, submarines,
environmental factors, complete 3-D buildings, multi-resolution
terrain, precision-guided weapons, effects of biological and chemical
agent release, human behavior characteristics, casualties, damaged
equipment and both anti-tank and anti-personnel minefields.
To test certain equipment, the project organizers selected an incident
and put it into the computer on a map of a local area. At first,
they ran the war game without any computer-based simulations, to
see what exactly happened when the technology was not available,
said Anderson. “Then we added the technology to see if friendly
casualties would go down. You can do multiple runs and change the
variables,” he explained.
Anderson said, “One of the biggest challenges you have [in
an urban environment] is situational awareness on the ground,”
because of the abundance of corners, bridges and hidden places.
“Generally, UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) are useful, but
they can’t see what is going on underneath structures,”
said Anderson.
The latest force-on-force exercise that took place at Quantico
experimented heavily with ground and airborne sensors. Cameras and
sensors were also placed on the MOUT site and were teamed with the
micro-robots to simulate the capability of additional eyes. The
ground sensors communicated with killer unmanned aerial vehicles,
said Anderson, to give the robot operators the ability to call in
fire against moving and mobile targets.
Employing small or micro-robots into the exercise is part of CETO’s
Reconnaissance Surveillance and Target Acquisition (RSTA) Cloud
concept. The RSTA concept attempts to overcome the limitations of
using western human reconnaissance teams in Third World urban environments—where
they stand out among the civil population. A responsive and accurate
targeting capability is needed, said Anderson.
That is why CETO has been pushing the testing of micro-robots for
ground reconnaissance. “We tried to get small robots on the
ground and make them small enough so that they can’t be discovered,”
Anderson said. “They have, at the other end, a human eyeball
watching from a safe distance.”
“We have been looking at killer UAVs to do things that you
would normally not want a manned helicopter to do for live-fire
support,” explained Anderson. “We’ve found that
helicopters are very vulnerable in urban environments. ... We’ve
got some really good results in combining some ground robots with
UAVs,” he added.
The tactical experiments have provided an opportunity for the technologists
to get together with Marines to see what worked and what did not,
said Anderson. He explained that people developing the tools would
know how they would be employed on the field and what capabilities
the Marines needed.
“The Marines are very good to tell you what works and what
doesn’t work,” said Anderson.
Under the RSTA Cloud concept, individual Marines can request reconnaissance
assets, said Lt. Col. Wade Johnson, a Marine reservist who worked
on the war game. “You normally don’t see Marines at
the lower levels getting that kind of information,” said Johnson.
“All these assets go to higher levels usually.”
He explained that, traditionally, a lot of the planning will occur
at the battalion level, then the company commander would get the
information, but the squads and platoons can’t see “on
the other side of the hill.”
“Even with the limited technology [in the exercises], we
have found it useful to push data from company level to squads and
individual Marines,” said Johnson. Marines were able to maneuver
more confidently when they knew they could go across the road or
that enemies were hiding in the buildings and they should not make
a move.
Anderson said that ground sensors and transmitters still need to
be miniaturized, so they are less visible. “Our most capable
robots right now are too big to be really covert, but the small
ones are too small to transmit data,” said Anderson. “But
I don’t think we are ever going to replace manned reconnaissance
completely.”