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FEATURE ARTICLE
May 2007
Recruits virtually experience the high-tech Navy
By Grace Jean
 Five years into an ambitious program to overhaul an outdated training regimen rooted in the Cold War, the Navy appears to be making progress.
With sophisticated warships poised to enter its fleet during the next several years, the Navy is relying more and more on technology to train sailors. Ships also will have smaller crews so every sailor will be trained for multiple jobs, said Vice Adm. Kevin Moran, commander of Navy Education and Training Command, at a training and simulation conference. “We are building hybrid sailors,” he said.
That thinking is shaping the way recruits and sailors prepare for service.
At the recruit level, the Navy Service Training Command has focused on team-building and small arms weapons training, said Rear Adm. Arnold Lotring, commanding officer.
One of its newest training technologies is Battle Stations 21, an $82 million facility that will test recruits’ capabilities and sailor-worthiness with an immersive 12-hour simulation beginning next month (see related story).
“It puts these young people into a team environment, so they understand how important it is in the Navy to work together and work across the group that they’ve been assigned,” said Lotring.
Previously, the Navy tested its recruits in a rudimentary fashion, running teams from drill to drill across the campus. Now with realistic simulations and special effects, it can appeal to a generation of tech-savvy recruits.
Battle Stations 21 more accurately reflects the environment recruits will see once they get into the fleet, retired Vice Adm. Alfred G. Harms, former commanding officer of the Navy Education and Training Command, said at the conference. With technologically advanced ships, such as the littoral combat ship, the next generation CVN-21 aircraft carrier and the DDG-1000 destroyer coming into the future Navy, knowing how to work together in smaller crews will be critical, he said.
“I think we’re going to see more tools such as this for other pieces of Navy training,” he added.
The Navy will continue to invest in firefighting and damage control trainers. But Battle Stations 21 would integrate the trainers into more of a coordinated event, Lotring said.
The operational factors of fighting in Iraq have also fed back into unit-level training.
For the Navy’s riverine force, that meant bringing in Iraqi American actors and a Hollywood production company for a pre-deployment exercise.
Many times sailors go to the Navy’s schoolhouses and the experience is rather benign, said Lt. Chris Cowart, training officer for the Navy’s Riverine Squadron One, which deployed to Iraq in March.
“It’s one thing to train folks in a Powerpoint presentation. But we actually get to see that live, writhing patient who’s had catastrophic wounds and injuries, yelling and screaming for his life. It’s amazing what that stress does, and gets that person to focus on what they’re doing,” he told reporters during a visit to Fort Pickett, Va., where the riverine squadron participated in a week-long exercise accentuated by Hollywood-grade explosions, rocket propelled grenades and combat trauma.
“It’s nice to put in that level of combat stress we don’t normally get with standard training. It’s advantageous,” said Construction Mechanic 2nd Class Christopher Immoos, who is now serving in Al-Anbar province with the 2nd detachment of Riverine Squadron One.
Sailors rarely have a chance to train as a unit from start to finish, but the 224 officers and enlisted sailors who were called to fill the ranks of the Navy’s riverine force did exactly that, said Lt. Cmdr. Mike Egan, executive officer of Riverine Squadron One. Because it was a new unit composed of sailors from various backgrounds, the group trained together at the Marine School of Infantry at Camp LeJeune, N.C. The squadron is conducting maritime security operations at Haditha Dam and along the Euphrates River.
For more traditional units, the Navy has been pushing simulator-based training ashore as a way to prepare sailors for deployment while reducing the time and costs of conducting drills at sea.
“If you can train pier-side in a realistic at-sea environment virtually, then when you do go to sea, your days underway are optimized,” said Russ Williams, program manager for the joint training and technology department at Fleet Forces Command.
Newer warships, such as the Virginia-class submarine and the LPD-17 amphibious vessel, have training capabilities embedded in their combat systems to allow sailors to hold drills aboard the ship. These ships can plug their combat information systems into cables ashore and link directly into a war game, enabling them to battle from the pier.
Virtual training is not only saving money in terms of steaming hours, “but it’s really going to standardize the way we operate in the future in the maritime environment,” said Vice Adm. Mark Fitzgerald, director of Navy staff.
The Navy within the next five years expects to be able to practice combat missions aboard ships that are underway. Its ultimate goal is to link naval mission rehearsals with other services and foreign allies, he said.
“Quite frankly, we have a ways to go before we can get there,” said Williams. “It’s one thing to hook up to a global information grid through pipes at pier-side. It’s another to do it at sea.”
Bandwidth requirements are too high, acknowledged Fitzgerald. There’s no way to pump enough electrons through the ship systems to run the simulations that the service conducts ashore, he said.
“I don’t think we’ve fully recognized how much bandwidth we’re going to need,” said Williams.
Throughout the last year, representatives from the Naval Expeditionary Combat Command have been gathering information to see how sailors who work primarily in shallow waters and ashore may fit into pier-side virtual training exercises.
“The Navy’s training has been largely platform-centric, because that’s what we’ve done. We have ships, we have aircraft, we have subs. And it’s easy to plug into a simulator to do that kind of scenario-based, simulated training. It’s not so easy to do it when your main weapon is a sailor with a gun. How do you simulate that?” said Capt. Robert McKenna, assistant chief of staff for readiness at NECC.
One possible solution is to look to the Army, to see how that service has incorporated ground forces into virtual training environments, said Williams.
But the littoral environment is tricky to replicate virtually and following troops inland is even more difficult, he pointed out. While engineers have produced computer-generated landing craft and Marine assets, they “are not quite there yet for expeditionary forces,” said Williams.
Once the technology is hammered out, McKenna said he expects the expeditionary command’s sailors to be full players in fleet war games in two or three years.
Please email your comments to GJean@ndia.org
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