FEATURE ARTICLE

December 2004

Quick Mission Rehearsals Goal of Joint Training

by Michael Peck

Slashing the rehearsal time needed for joint training missions from months to days is one of the goals of the joint national training capability (JNTC), a concept designed to move joint warfare from rhetoric to reality.

Yet today's joint exercises are anything but quick. Major war games such as CJTFEX 04-2, a Joint Forces Command exercise that included 28,000 American and British troops as well as a carrier battle group, take six to nine months to plan, according to Warren Bizub, director of JNTC's advanced training technology program.

"It is a long process to do the planning piece, the design piece, the database development piece and then the after-action review," Bizub explained.

"If a commander calls and says, 'I need training for this particular area of the world because I've got to go there in 72 hours; give me a mission rehearsal capability from the operational down to the tactical,' I'll tell you right now that we couldn't do it. It takes a long time to take all the data, environmental, geospatial intelligence, targets, order of battle, and bring all these different databases together."

JNTC's goal is to shorten the joint exercise life cycle, from commander's intent to after-action reports, to days rather than months. "Some people have said it should take no more than 96 hours," said Bizub. "I like to say we'll get it down to the shortest possible time."

Currently some mission rehearsal can be done in as little as 48 hours, said Bizub. But these tend to involve special operations forces using archived data. Yet most planners don't have the luxury of information at their fingertips. They require quick access to databases scattered across the military, the intelligence community, academia and multinational partners. These databases are often classified and nestled behind the walls of turf-sensitive agencies with dismal histories of cooperation. Even such seemingly mundane areas as range instrumentation create headaches in a multinational exercise where allies are required to exchange data on the performance of their weapons.

Bizub sees the technical solution as a data management system capable of working with differing databases. Continuing progress on the Defense Department's global information grid will help matters. As for cooperation issues, "there will have to be organizational, policy and technological issues addressed," he noted.

Nonetheless, Bizub is confident these challenges can be surmounted. "I compare this to the issue of time sensitive targeting. A couple of decades ago, if you told a commander or pilot that we could get the kill chain down from days to under a minute, he would laugh at you."

The advanced training technology program, which came to life in September 2002, was scheduled to achieve initial operational capability in October 2004 and full capability in 2009. It currently is working on six broad technical challenges, including command-and-control, instrumentation and after-action review, knowledge management and information technology, live virtual constructive environment, and standards and architecture.

There also is a laundry list of 30 joint tactical tasks ranging from sharing information between services and joint combat identification, to joint close air support. About 10 were scheduled to be accomplished by October.

A key challenge of JNTC is building a realistic training environment. A utopian live-virtual-constructive world is one where live, virtual, that is, real troops using simulators, and constructive, or totally simulated units, participate in the same exercise-and no one can tell the difference.

For example, a constructive scenario for division commanders might feature live troops advancing on a training ground in California with their path paved by virtual air support from pilots flying simulators on a carrier cruising off Virginia. As far as the division commander and his staff are concerned, it doesn't matter whether the symbols on their maps are live or virtual.

With U.S. forces overstretched from Bosnia to Baghdad, assembling live forces for joint training is becoming problematic. Simulated units enable planners to easily add, for example, the air or special operations forces that complete a joint exercise. JNTC recently selected test and training enabling architecture as the integration mechanism to bring live entities into the live-virtual-constructive environment during joint training exercises. 

"There are a myriad of things from the joint perspective that we cannot do very well right now," Bizub said. "For example, we have never really done joint training down to the tactical level."

Peace support operations have not received enough attention either, Bizub pointed out. These include peacekeeping and humanitarian missions. "That's clearly a shortfall. Let's say we have to provide humanitarian aid, and there are insurgents in the area. The commander needs information, from the kind of dirt on the ground to the thickness of buildings for urban operations. Right now, we can gather the information but collating it in a rapid fashion and providing a realistic training venue is a huge challenge.

"Those are areas where we need to step up and provide that training from the strategic and operational down to the tactical level."

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