Posted on 03/17/2003 12:35:18 PM PST by jimlilko
Military Brings 3-D Advantage to War Preparation-WP-30317Story Below
The Navy's Topscene modeling technology allows pilots to program a target into the computer, so they can practice picking a specific structure out of a crowd as they approach at speeds exceeding 500 mph.
Hurtling over hostile, unfamiliar landscapes at speeds exceeding 500 miles per hour, today's combat pilots have just seconds to identify their targets.
"When you're going a mile every six seconds you don't really have a lot of time. You need to rapidly figure out: That's where the target area is, that's where the friendlies are, and that's where I'm going to put my weapon. That's all the time you have," said Joe, a U.S. Marine Corps aviator preparing for conflict with Iraq.
The last time the United States waged a major military campaign in the Persian Gulf region, pilots prepared for missions by studying detailed photos and maps. But in the 12 years since Desert Storm, the Pentagon has invested tens of millions of dollars in new technologies that let pilots actually "pre-fly" combat missions in a three-dimensional environment.
One of these systems is Topscene, developed by the U.S. Navy using technology from Mountain View, Calif.-based Silicon Graphics Inc. Pilots use Topscene to explore vast computer models of enemy environments to familiarize themselves with the quirks of the landscape -- training that can help undermine the enemy's home-field advantage.
Joe, a major assigned to Marine Aircraft Group 11, is a weapons and sensors officer on an F/A-18D Hornet fighter-bomber. He first used Topscene in Afghanistan following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and now oversees the sole Topscene system at his airbase in the Persian Gulf region. Marine officials asked that his last name and the exact location of his base not be identified.
"For us, the big advantage is it allows us to very rapidly assimilate a situation on the ground," he said. "In Afghanistan, if we knew where the friendlies were, then we weren't worried about dropping our weapons."
To the uninitiated eye, Topscene and other 3-D modeling systems resemble advanced computer games. A fully equipped Topscene rack contains two screens, a computer about the size of a standard computer desktop monitor and a set of flight controls similar to those in combat aircraft. Before he flies a mission, Joe can sit down at the machine and "fly" over a nearly photo-realistic 3-D map of his bombing run.
The program recreates an "out-the-window view" similar to what Joe would see from the cockpit, and mimics his planned airspeed and altitude. By rehearsing missions this way, he develops a mental image of his target, reducing the chance that he'll later fail to identify it on his breakneck combat approach.
In 1992, the Navy had two Topscene "racks," each of them powered by four refrigerator-sized computers housed on aircraft carriers. The Navy now has more than 300 Topscene systems -- with some versions running on laptops.
Every aircraft carrier in the Navy fleet now carries a Topscene rack with flight controls and interchangeable hard drives containing 3-D models of various global "hot spots." Exchange one shoe box-sized hard drive for another, and a pilot can leap from Afghanistan to Iraq without leaving the squadron briefing room.
The man in charge of the Pentagon's Topscene program knows how important it is for combat pilots to be as prepared as possible for combat missions. As a B-52 bombardier in Vietnam, Alan Herod and his comrades had photos and maps of their targets, but could not practice their missions with 3-D models ahead of time.
"It was tough to go in blind, looking at a radar scope to see and identify your target where you've never been before," said Herod, now a civilian Navy employee.
A keystone principle in designing technology like Topscene was to ensure that pilots would never again "go in blind" to their targets.
"Back in Vietnam, they found out that if a pilot survived his first six missions, he was immortal. They never got shot down, because they were there, they lived it, breathed it and got used to it," said John Burwell, senior director for government industry at Silicon Graphics. "What the Department of Defense has done is they've tried to develop simulation technologies that would allow these pilots to get through those first half a dozen missions in simulation."
Military rules of engagement require that aircrews positively identify their targets before releasing weapons. With the exception of some weapons that rely on the Global Positioning System for guidance, most of the rockets and bombs carried by an F/A-18D can be fired only after a weapons officer identifies his target, Joe said.
"What [Topscene] allows us to do is be more successful on the first pass," Joe said. That reduces a combat aircraft's "exposure time" and the possibility that a crew will have to abandon a mission out of concern for fuel or ground threats, he said.
For the Foot Soldier, an Unproven Technology
Unlike combat pilots, who are being trained to accept and in some cases even demand 3-D mission rehearsal capability, ground soldiers have only recently begun to see models detailed enough to be of use in preparing for combat, Silicon Graphics's Burwell said.
RealSite, developed by Melbourne, Fla.-based Harris Corp., was designed with the ground soldier in mind. It allows users to recreate views from likely sniper perches or quickly measure the distance between buildings and other geographic features. Anticipating a conflict against Iraq, Harris created a 3-D RealSite model of Baghdad, complete with scale renderings of Saddam Hussein's urban palaces and the headquarters of the Iraqi dictator's Republican Guard.
Major Brent Cummings, an instructor at the United States Army Infantry School at Fort Benning, Ga., said advances in 3-D modeling have been impressive, but added that such tools are, at best, a small piece of the puzzle for infantry. "Simulations that we're using here are never going to replace muddy boot training. You can't replicate the experience" of battle, he said.
"In the near term, the gee-whiz stuff you're going to see [will be] within the aviation community. From a ground standpoint we're in our infancy right now," said Lt. Col. William Banker, chief of the Army's Special Operations Digital Environment Center at Fort Bragg, N.C.
Silicon Graphics marketing materials tout RealSite as being capable of "taming the urban maze" for soldiers. One release suggests that some of the American soldiers killed in the urban battle that erupted in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993 might have been saved if they had had access to RealSite.
But Banker questioned the value of even the most meticulous urban model.
"It's wonderful [but] if I'm running around outside in the streets, I'm trying to spend as little time as possible out in the streets. When I get into that building, I'm in a labyrinth. I've not seen one vendor come up and say, 'We're modeling the interiors of buildings,'" he said.
Despite his skepticism, Banker conceded that 3-D models eventually will become indispensable to ground soldiers. "There's no doubt. We're going to get there," he said.
An Expensive and Relatively Scarce Technology
Topscene, RealSite and a modeling system developed by McLean, Va.-based Cambridge Research Associates called PowerScene, use data from high-resolution satellite images. In some cases, terrain elevation data provided by the National Imagery and Mapping Agency is used to recreate landscape features.
The level of detail in the 3-D models is limited only by the precision of the satellite images and the processing power of the computers running the simulations, Burwell said. RealSite, for instance, is designed to run on supercomputers 10 times more powerful than a top-of-the-line PC.
In the case of both RealSite and Topscene, public demonstrations (see video) contain far less detail than the models available to soldiers in the field.
Modeling technology has been around since before Desert Storm, but has grown cheaper, faster and far more available in recent years, said Mark Darder, a civilian contractor who works on Topscene.
"There are 1,000 percent more users now," Darder said. "It's an everyday event that you expect to see your mission in 3-D before you fly it."
But from the vantage point of Joe the Marine aviator, 3-D mission rehearsal remains something of a luxury for most pilots in the military.
Many pilots deployed to the Persian Gulf region come from stateside bases lacking Topscene or similar technologies, and even when they are familiarized with the system, they rarely get to use it for longer than five minutes at a stretch, Joe said.
The high cost of many of these systems is a factor. While slower PC and laptop-based versions of Topscene cost less than $1,000, the fully outfitted Topscene racks that are the most useful to combat pilots set the Navy back as much as $300,000 each. RealSite can be even pricier, setting a buyer back anywhere from $100,000 to $5 million in hardware and software costs. That doesn't include the cost of the satellite images necessary to create the models.
"We don't have a lot of these out, and a lot of the guys here are not very familiar with it. Guys are coming on board slowly," he added. "Most guys can't really hog it. We've got a lot of people here and we've only got one [system]."
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