Navy’s virtual training exercises expanding in realism and scope

By Grace Jean

NavyVirtual NAVAL STATION NORFOLK, Va. — Inside the darkened combat information center aboard the USS Anzio, sailors wearing headsets scrutinize console screens, tracking aircraft flying in the area. Earlier, the watch team fired off Tomahawk missiles, one of many missions during an operation to stabilize a post-war region.

While on-board instruments indicate the guided missile cruiser is steaming off the coast of a landmass resembling the southeastern United States, in reality, the ship is tied to the pier in its homeport here and participating in “Operation Brimstone,” one of the largest simulations ever attempted.

The Navy’s use of modeling and simulation-based training has increased during the past several years, in part because of the improvement in computer technologies that can simulate complex scenarios, and in part because of better network capabilities that can connect numerous communications and battle systems.

“The technical architecture has allowed us to provide high-fidelity, challenging training across the full spectrum of strike group operations,” says Capt. William Kovach, interim executive officer for the Navy’s Tactical Training Group Atlantic, a command that prepares carrier and expeditionary strike groups for deployment on the East Coast. A similar command exists on the West Coast.

Major fleet training exercises, such as Operation Brimstone, now encompass multiple strike groups in varying stages of readiness and coalition forces, whose crews participate from aboard their vessels or ashore in mock control centers. Other services increasingly provide joint play — with airmen, Marines and soldiers carrying out missions from simulators on their respective bases.

Combining strike groups at different points in their training cycles has been done in the past, when the Navy conducted most of its training at sea in live exercises. But Kovach says such training can be conducted more effectively through virtual simulations.

“We can place strike groups that are earlier in their work-up cycles in less stressful or dynamic environments while placing those strike groups that are next to go in very intense scenarios, all in the same game, but perhaps in different areas of responsibilities,” he says.

Operation Brimstone is training three groups at key points in their work-up cycles: the Eisenhower carrier strike group, which will deploy to the Arabian Gulf next month; the Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group, which just returned from deployment, and the Bataan expeditionary strike group, which is commencing its training cycle.

“We can put them all together for one exercise. We have the flexibility to do that and still get them what they need,” says Kovach.

The “Operation Brimstone” synthetic exercise encompasses thousands of participants in 10 time zones, spanning from the west coast of the United States and across the Atlantic Ocean to the United Kingdom and Germany. The largest concentration of players is here in Norfolk, where the Anzio, which is part of the Eisenhower carrier strike group, is one of 14 “live” ships playing pier-side. But through a network called “Navy continuous training environment,” naval entities as dispersed as the crew of the USS Annapolis, playing from a submarine simulator in Groton, Conn., and a crew operating an EP-3 aircraft simulation trainer in Whidbey Island, Wash., are also linked into the war game.

British and German ship crews participate from simulators overseas. USS Bataan officers are inside the Atlantic training command’s headquarters, in nearby Dam Neck, Va.

Sitting inside a mock control room filled with modules and large monitors, the Bataan flag staff plans how it will position its ships to pick up Marines ashore while they track some submarine contacts.

“They’re talking to each of their ships on the radios,” points out Kovach. Two of the strike group’s ships are participating from pier-side, while another is being simulated and played by a person at a computer.

Down the hallway, in a large auditorium, the game director and his staff orchestrate the entire exercise on what is called the “tactical floor.” Its atmosphere resembles that of a NASA space shuttle control room.

From two arcing rows of tables filled with computers, phones and papers, the staff pushes out and monitors about 400 scenarios each day from the thick pages of a game book that was carefully crafted during the months leading up to the three-day exercise.

The actual network operations are being piped out down the road at Gallery Hall in a large room bustling with people, some in uniform, others in civilian clothing, who are operating computers and answering radio calls and telephones. The first four rows are filled with “white cell” operators who are playing as many as four opposition ships in the game. Subsequent rows contain workstations for those playing Navy entities that have been virtually constructed and inserted into the game. The monitoring and troubleshooting network takes up the back portion of the room, where a large group of contractors, engineers and uniformed personnel monitor the communications links and keep the simulations running.

“The fidelity that we have gotten is in large part because of this monitoring capability,” says Kovach. The command’s previous major exercise in March marked the first time in history that the Navy certified a strike group for major combat operations through a synthetic exercise.

“It was a real bold step and quite an achievement,” says Kovach.

Time constraints prevented the USS Enterprise carrier strike group from having the traditional live exercise for certification. But because it had attained all of its training objectives, the group was authorized for deployment based upon its performance in the synthetic exercise.

“The fidelity of the networks that we have now are so good that the training they get through synthetic exercises is just as good as they get at sea,” says Kovach. “As one of the ships’ commanding officers says, ‘all you’re missing is rocking and rolling and being at sea.’”

A year ago, he couldn’t have said that, he notes. The communications network wasn’t as robust, and in one particular exercise, the network became overloaded and crashed.

“The ships were just sitting there looking at blank screens,” recalls Kovach. “Now they’re not fighting the network — they’re fighting the battlefront, which is what we want them to do,” he says.

Distributed training has progressed rapidly in the Navy, says Kovach. Ten years ago, when he came through the schoolhouse on his way to a staff tour on a carrier, the training was done inside classrooms and mock modules and then at sea with strike groups. Synthetic training began fermenting shortly after, but it wasn’t until about three years ago that distributed training — and the idea to federate multiple ships, and eventually, simulators — began to blossom.

Following a synthetic exercise in August 2005, the Naval Warfare Development Command in Newport, R.I., made a commitment to revamp the training communications suite, which was plagued with problems. The improved system rolled out during the exercise in March. “This was considered the first major, multi-joint exercise that was a complete success in terms of training,” says Kovach. “That was really a watershed event.”

By conducting large-scale exercises through simulations, the Navy is saving millions of dollars, says Kovach. Operation Brimstone is estimated to cost about $750,000. To run a comparable live exercise could run around $50 million, says Kovach. While it costs more up front to put the network architecture in place, he concedes, savings inevitably follow.

“The advantage is, we’re not under way, saving about $180,000 a week in fuel that we don’t have to burn,” says Capt. Perry Bingham, skipper of the USS Anzio.

In addition to saving money, synthetic exercises allow planners to throw more opposition forces at a training audience than they’ll ever get live, says Kovach.

“Exercises in which one or two submarines are available to play the opposition force are rare. In a synthetic exercise, there can be dozens,” he says.

Also, scenarios can be quickly altered to accommodate needs on the fly. Bingham says the initial team manning the Anzio’s combat information center watch appeared bored on the first day of the exercise, and the trainers aboard the ship asked to have more challenges tossed their way.

“Every single scenario we see is being continually morphed to match what we’re going to see on deployment,” says Bingham. Piracy, for example, has been incorporated into the exercise.

“If you said ‘piracy’ to me back when I had my first command in 2000, 2001, I would’ve said, ‘Piracy? You’ve got to be kidding me!’” says Bingham. “Now we see it’s a real issue with the Somalians.”

Kovach says training used to focus on bombing campaigns, but now the Navy has realized there are other things, often non-kinetic, such as information operations, that require attention.

As a result, non-traditional scenarios are being incorporated into the Brimstone exercise, such as boarding tanker ships suspected of drug or weapons smuggling.

Last year’s active season of natural disasters — the hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes — also exposed a seam that the Navy wants to address in training.

On day two of Operation Brimstone, the Anzio is escorting the USS Eisenhower off the coast of Garnet, a fictitious nation that lost a war against coalition forces and is now being stabilized. As Anzio’s crew reinforces no-fly restrictions and intercepts air tracks near the strike group, the Eisenhower meets up with the Theodore Roosevelt, forming into an expeditionary strike force.

“We’re doing something we don’t do very often,” says the Anzio’s operations officer, Lt. Cmdr. Tadd Gorman. “There are times when strike groups work together in the same theater, but they’re often spread apart. Here we are operating on top of each other.”

That requires the groups to come together on the same communications plan, operating procedures and orders. “That’s not an easy thing to do,” says Kovach. “In the United States Navy, we are very used to operating as a single strike group … But now you’ve got three that you’ve got to coordinate together. It’s a management issue.”

Integrating several strike groups not only gives crews a chance to experience what they likely will encounter in theater, but it also gives them the opportunity to make mistakes.

“We can simulate it, get all the lessons learned, get rid of that steep learning curve now, rather than do it when we have to do it, be it off the coast of Taiwan, be it off the coast of the Horn of Africa, be it off the coast of South America. We can do it now, in port, in Norfolk,” says Bingham.

More ships and more people means more challenges for even veteran sailors.

“It’s much more intense with two battle groups integrated,” says Lt. Rob Anderson, combat systems officer in Anzio’s combat information center.

Taking a momentary pause from controlling air assets for the strike group, Lt. Mike Green, air defense officer, concurs.

“I’ve done this before, three years at the Missile Defense Agency, but it’s changed a lot,” he says. The learning curve has been “very, very steep.”

While they are engaged in battle group training, the Anzio sailors get an internal workout, from mammal sighting and low visibility drills, to the cooks shifting their meal hours as though they were underway, says Bingham. The flight deck crew runs through a “smash and crash” drill, involving a simulated helicopter that crashes shortly after picking him up en route to the carrier, he says. Later in the afternoon, the crews will go through a main space fire drill.

Such internal rehearsals are not mandatory as part of the synthetic exercise. But it was something the ship decided it wanted to do.

Pier-side participants note there are downsides to doing synthetic exercises. Peering out the windows on the Anzio’s recently painted bridge yields a view of the pier parking lot, which detracts from the realism of the training the bridge watch team receives.

“We don’t actually see what they’re talking about. We just have to get a picture in our heads of what we hear over the net,” says Ensign Jeff Parks, who joined the crew at the beginning of the year.

Seamanship — the hands-on under way capabilities that sailors must acquire — is something that simulations cannot easily replicate. But it is something crews can compensate for in transit, says Bingham.

Training in port also has a negative effect on maintenance, says Bingham, as he points to a contractor who is sitting nearby, waiting.

“They may not be able to talk to the chief engineer because the chief engineer is on watch for five hours down in CIC. It’s one of those negatives that you have to deal with when you’re doing these things,” he says.

From the schoolhouse perspective, the downside to synthetic training is at the tactical level, says Kovach. In this exercise, the crews play for eight to 10 hours a day, as opposed to the previous training session, which ran continuously for 56 hours.

“You’re not putting quite the same stresses on the ship and crews and staffs,” says Kovach. The benefit to being underway at sea is that crews will rotate through three watches. If one watch team is weak, the ship will discover it in the course of the exercise. In this exercise, however, two watch teams are typical, so “you don’t know where your seams are unless you go out for multiple days, multiple hours and really stress those seams,” says Kovach.

Bingham says having that continuous play eliminates the need for each ship to spend time getting back up to speed on its systems the next morning. The training command floods the network with information at a set time, but crews are in different stages of readiness when that happens.

“I’m not sure the other ships were ready to rock and roll,” he says. From the operational level, however, there’s absolutely no difference between a synthetic exercise and one done at sea, says Kovach. A conference room inside a building resembles the ones found on ships, and staffs will conduct business as usual, no matter their venue.

“For operators and planners like myself, this is probably about 95 percent transparent that we’re doing a synthetic exercise. All the planning we do would be the same as if we were underway,” says Gorman.

Synthetic simulations are not considered a substitute for underway training, says Kovach. Ideally, it’s a mix of the two, he adds. In debriefing sessions about the Brimstone exercise, the flag staffs for the two carrier strike groups gave positive feedback and indicated that they would have preferred a longer training session. Kovach interprets this as indicative of an increasing appetite and acceptance of simulation training.

“That’s why it’s going to get bigger — people are believing in it,” he says.

The synthetic exercise is feeding into a joint live exercise, which will certify the Eisenhower strike group for deployment.

In an email during the live exercise, Bingham, the skipper of the Anzio, reports that “integrating the two carrier strike groups and expeditionary strike group is going far easier due to our period of planning and working through the synthetic exercise.”

Tactical Training Group Atlantic is planning for several fleet synthetic exercises in 2007. Kovach says developers will take a closer look at anti-submarine warfare and will pull more types of simulations into play. They may also have actual submarine crews in simulators playing against naval crews training up for deployment.

Eventually, he says, they will have the ability to pit one strike group against another, having people trying to outwit an adversary who is more than just a contractor sitting on a computer.

“That would be really great training for the strike groups,” says Kovach.

Email your comments to GJean@ndia.org