The Marine Corps is creating a digital simulation to help leathernecks “read” the urban battlefield for signs of potential threats and to track down snipers and insurgents hiding in cities.
The simulation, which will deploy in 2011, will complement a training program called “Combat Hunter,” developed three years ago by the Marine Corps. The course garners the skills of game hunters and big city cops to instruct marines on how to observe, assess and track the enemy in a combat environment. All newly minted marines take the course.
Stressed for time to teach these skills adequately to marines, officials pushed for the computer-based trainer to help alleviate pressure on course instructors. A Woburn, Mass.-based engineering firm, Aptima, is developing the multimedia system to give marines more opportunities to learn the art of combat profiling — the ability to assess a situation by interpreting the behaviors of people.
Funded by the Office of Naval Research through a phase II small business innovation research contract, Aptima is focusing its efforts on producing the content of the software, called IMPACTS — “Improving and Measuring Perceptual, Attentional, and Critical Thinking Skills.” It’s a cognitive perception training tool, said Mike Paley, executive vice president.
The interactive program walks students through a number of scenarios in which they are asked to interpret what is going on and to look for clues that can tip them off to potential threats. For example, if troops are arriving in an area for the first time, they can look at the townspeople’s body language to learn about their attitudes. Details such as whether they are standing in an open or closed posture, exposing the soles of their feet — an insult in many Middle Eastern cultures — or making eye contact are subtle but crucial signs of friendliness or hostility.
The team is incorporating images and video footage captured by military photographers both in combat and in training exercises to give students practice in realistic scenarios.
A sampling of themes covered includes crowds, small group situations, street events and “innocent” scenes. Scenarios that appear innocuous, such as children playing on street corners, will train troops not only in the detection of threats but also the signs of friendly force movement that can help reveal the locations of improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. Crowd scenes will highlight the dress and behaviors of the indigenous people while small group situations will emphasize leader and follower issues, body language and dangerous postures. Large street scenes will teach the detection of roadside bomb locations.
The idea behind the virtual trainer is to expose marines to as many plausible situations as possible so that they hone their skills and establish their “mental muscle memory” before they are called upon to apply them under stress, said Paley.
Before sending them to war, the Corps puts units through a pre-deployment exercise called “Mojave Viper” at Twentynine Palms, Calif. The simulated battle gives marines a chance to test their cognitive decision-making skills against live actors who role-play tribal leaders, civilians and insurgents.
With the digital trainer, “we can better prepare the unit or leader for that live exercise through some of these other tools, and give them an opportunity to rehearse and remediate through numerous repetitions,” said Lt. Col. Dave Lucas, program manager of Combat Hunter.
Training marines for counterinsurgency operations is similar to preparing professional athletes for a big game. The more rehearsal time they have, the better they will perform in the end, officials said.
“You don’t want people learning the basics when they’re in the expensive, deployed training environment,” said Paley. “That’s what we’re developing — a tool that lets you create those skills before you go into a high-fidelity environment.”
Marines want to employ IMPACTS as a pre-training and evaluation tool as well as a refresher once they are deployed, officials at the Marine Corps Training and Education Command in Quantico, Va., told National Defense.
Aptima is customizing the system to allow units to modify the scenarios based upon their personal war experiences. Marines can upload photos and videos from actual battlefield encounters to help fellow teammates rehearse by learning from their mistakes.
After initial training, marines often deploy for four years before they return for more schooling. During that hiatus, the software also can help marines maintain their skills, said Lucas, who heads the ground combat section at TECOM.
Currently, the Combat Hunter training program leads up to a live exercise where role-players act out the parts of civilians or insurgents. Instructors evaluate how well each student interacts with the actors, but it is often a subjective assessment.
With IMPACTS, students and instructors will have a way to measure the learning objectively, said Lucas. Marines can take a pre-test before proceeding through a lesson. After completing it, they can take another test to see how their abilities improved.
“We haven’t had a tool or capability to … say, ‘yes, you’re at 80-some percent,’” said Lucas.
Students can walk through the results and compare their answers to the “textbook” responses and begin to understand the reasoning behind them better.
When the trainer is available, marines will be able to run the program off a CD or download it from the MarineNet website. Aptima plans to test the software at Camp LeJeune beginning next month, said Paley.
Newly commissioned second lieutenants and warrant officers go through a 27-week course at Quantico to learn war-fighting skills that prepare them for duty as rifle platoon commanders. During that time, they receive about three hours of instruction on combat profiling. IMPACTS will benefit them as well, said Greg Koziuk, publications and technology manager at the Basic School, which has seen the average class size increase from 250 to more than 300 students in recent years.
“We’re looking for opportunities to leverage technology, one, to reduce the administrative burden on our instructors and our staff, freeing them up to spend more time with students,” he said. And two, “to increase our instructional effectiveness.”
Students coming to the school are computer savvy and learn best by doing hands-on training, he added. They respond well to computer-based training and immersive multimedia technologies.
The system eventually will be incorporated into the Corps’ future immersive training environment, said Dave Dunfee of the Marine Air Ground Task Force training and simulation division. The $36 million technology experiment being funded by the Office of Naval Research will be a “live-action virtual environment,” where troops will train from their bases.
In the meantime, officials are looking to conduct a Combat Hunter “leaders’ course” geared toward officers and non-commissioned officers who have not had an opportunity for instruction. A pilot program begins next month.