First, I need to acknowledge something: this whole “remembering to blog weekly thing” is harder (for me) than it should be. So, no more scheduling. Of any kind. Though I will (probably) go back in and fill in some holes. Especially about Peak, a book that is somewhat relevant to today’s post (at least in my mind), but I still haven’t managed to put together my thoughts in a sufficiently coherent manner, so I’m not ready to push “publish” on last week’s post quite yet.

For a number of reasons, this year, I haven’t been able to travel the way I have in years past. So instead, I’m going to events at various DC think tanks. It’s that, or I never leave my house. As an introvert, I’m pretty comfortable with that, but it’s not healthy, so… think tank events it is. Last week’s was “Army Readiness, Fight tonight and Fit for Tomorrow” at the Center for New American Studies. The speakers were Mr. Daniel Feehan, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (Readiness); MG Walter E. Piatt, Director of Operations, Readiness and Mobilization, Army G3/5/7; Mr. Andrew Hill, U.S. Army War College; and Ms. Katherine Kidder, Center for a New American Security.

Readiness is GEN Milley’s top priority and, as he says “there is no other number 1”. Readiness is the ability to defeat one peer competitor while holding back a second without losing ground in the war on terror. That’s a lot to expect from an Army that has 14 years of continuous asymmetric warfare under its belt; no full spectrum operations in that time (and very little training for it); and soldiers who are tired from the continuous cycle of deployments. rip

Readiness is usually seen as a tri-pod; manning, equipping, and training must balance for the organization to be ready. For the Army, manning levels are set by someone else. (Though there is a lot the Army can do to effect its manning by having the right people – recruitment and retention – that’s not today’s topic.)  Equipping? Soldiers have a lot of good equipment – thanks to 14 years of warfare – and what they don’t have now, they won’t have any time soon, based on development timelines. (In fact, in February at New America’s Future of War Conference – I told you, I’m going to a lot of think tank events – GEN Milley said he doesn’t see any major new systems coming, just upgrades to legacy materiel, for the next 5-10 years.) So the key to improving readiness, it seems to me, is training.

Training systems – whether live, virtual, or constructive – are expensive and cumbersome. They all introduce various levels of non-realism. And all are limited, either by the number of people who can use them at once, by the echelon that is going to get priority, or by the terrain they cover. Many are ‘better than nothing’ – but often, the juice (cost and what it takes to make them work) isn’t worth the squeeze (the learning achieved). And our soldiers (and taxpayers) deserve better than this. And readiness demands it. Time at CTC, the premiere training event, has been shown to be more effective for organizations that have had more pre-CTC homestation training. So how do we get more out there?

Complaints about the current training systems are plentiful.

Live training (e.g., MILES)

• Easily confused: Dust, dirt, mud, and foliage all interfere with effectiveness
• Expensive live cycle costs: Requires heavily networked area to calculate lethality of shots and a cadre of contractors to run the system
• Feels unrealistic: Harnesses and halos; interrogator placement effects weapon balance
• Cumbersome to deploy and use: interrogators don’t stay aligned well; especially on vehicles, systems must be reattached regularly

Virtual training (e.g., DSTS)

• Expensive to purchase, operate, and maintain
• Limits mobility of infantry in an unnatural way
• Cumbersome and unnatural feeling – too much added equipment
• Extra gear interferes with soldier’s ability to use body language and facial expressions to communicate with team

Constructive training

• Completely artificial
• Do not provide soldiers, particularly in the maneuver fields, any level of realism

None of these concerns are new or unknown to the Army. PEO STRI is working to field new systems, but the process is so slow that it will be 2025 before there is a new individual MILES system fielded, and 2028 before an integrated live, virtual, constructive, and gaming system is fielded.

But what about the next 10 years? What about readiness now? How do we increase full-spectrum operations training?

I’ve spent almost a decade working this issue. It can actually be resolved fairly easily, but there’s actually no path through the system for an easy training system. That being said, here are my observations:

Most organizations – governmental (PEO STRI and the USMC both have MILES issues, and both are looking at them the same way) and other companies – look at the issues with MILES as primarily an issue with the interrogator. If the laser could penetrate better, the system would work better. To that end, they’ve considered other wavelengths (1550 nm vs the current 908 nm), other technologies (e.g., geopairing), etc, for the next generation systems – and wind up back with the old system (partly because of backwards compatibility issues that STRI can’t seem to break free from).

When we first started designing TIS, the Training and Identification System, we didn’t focus on components. We looked at SYSTEM requirements. Because of that, we have a very different solution. Rather than fixing the issues at the interrogator end, we were free to look at the whole issue. And that’s what we did. By making one addition to the MILES communication code and adding a COTS smartphone (in place of any other kind of radio) on the target, we can resolve three of the four complaints about MILES. (Details to follow in a subsequent post – or contact me for details.)

But we didn’t stop there.

Because we know that the long-term goal is to incorporate live training with virtual, constructive, and gaming technologies, we wanted to make sure that TIS could do that. So we incorporated plans for alternative means of firing the laser (current MILES technology “fires” off the force of the blank leaving the barrel – this could be very dangerous in an LVCG environment where the shooter may be facing something or someone other than what he is seeing), designs for incorporating the shot into the virtual world, and so on – again, using a COTS smartphone as one of the major components.

Training can be modernized – training MUST BE modernized in a much shorter timeline – to improve readiness. Homestation training can be available without expensive instrumentation (that requires environmental assessments and approvals), to multiple groups, without need for a lot of extra space or people to run the systems. Guard units can actually make full use of their 48 Unit Training Assemblies and at 15 days of Annual Training rather than spending most of the time trying to get the gear to work (if they can use it at their armories at all).

Realistic, affordable, useable training systems in the hands of soldiers is the key to increasing readiness. But it requires a means other than the traditional process, or it will be late into the next decade before soldiers have it.