Posted on 02/14/2003 8:51:11 PM PST by VaBthang4
Ground Forces Training
The director gave his staff a sequence of commands: "Console one: We have tanks coming down the road. Record with camera nine. Console two: Swing the camera all the way to the left and cover the town's main entrance. Pick up the tank on the right with camera three. Console one: Pan camera 10 to the left toward the soccer field and capture the dismounted squad. That's good. Now pan down."
What appears to be a movie director filming a rapidly evolving battle for a soon-to-be-released combat action movie is actually the control station editor at a US Army Military Operations in Urbanized Terrain (MOUT) operations center recording a force-on-force training event. The US Army's Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC) at Ft. Polk, LA is home to some of the world's premier live training ranges and facilities. The Center's crown jewel the MOUT complex, supports the Army's effort to prepare its soldiers for urban warfare in a number of challenging enviornments.
VERSATILE TRAINING MISSIONS
The migration of populations into the world's coastal regions and their urban centers have forced the Army to focus on the specter of fighting an increasing number of urban battles, and the training challenges that inevitably arise from it.
Since the early 1990s, for example, the Army has found itself in challenging urban battlefield environments in Somalia, 2nd to Haiti, and the Balkans region. The Service has responded to this new mission requirement by investing in a MOUT facility at Ft. Drum, NY (Summer 2001 T&S) and continues to expand the Ft. Polk MOUT complex as well. The Army's commitment to MOUT training is evident in policy pronouncements that direct combat units to conduct training at Ft. Polk or other MOUT-configured sites during their annual training rotations. The Army conducts light and heavy force operations from the squad level up through the brigade echelon at the Ft. Polk MOUT facility. Force-on-force training is conducted throughout the MOUT complex with friendly, opposition, and neutral forces equipped with MILES (Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System) equipment.
The Ft. Polk MOUT complex consists of three sites:
Shughart-Gordon: This 29-building mock city contains a church, hospital, multi-story buildings, and other structures. The seven square meter area serves as the main assault complex during a training rotation. There is an underground tunnel and sewer system that connects buildings and contains other features that replicate an urban area. Specially-constructed buildings with plywood and other modifications allow platoons to use short-range training ammunition ("blue-tip" plastic bullets) during live-fire exercises. The Shughart-Gordon water tower supports observation and command and control teams.
Self Airfield: This seven-building airfield facility includes a warehouse, air traffic control tower, and other facilities. A full-range of airborne and air-assault operations, including airfield-seizure missions, can be conducted at the facility. Self Airfield can support C-130 Hercules and C-17 Globemaster transport aircraft operations, as well.
Word Military Compound: This five-building site is located one kilometer south of Shughart-Gordon and has similar features. The JRTC instrumentation system used during these excercises provides real-time video, audio, and data information on friendly, neutral, and opposition forces, as well as small-arms engagement data, to analysts and observer-controllers at the MOUT control center.
Cubic Defense Applications' Technical Services International division operates the MOUT facility's various systems. The firm is teamed with Anteon Corporation, which supports those systems.
MORE FIDELITY
Army Capt. Andy Ulrich, the Ft. Polk MOUT site's officer-in-charge, escorted T&S on a visit through the complex and described the technologies that support its training scenarios. A total of 16 external cameras and about 1,000 day and night-capable cameras located inside buildings provide video footage to the operations center of activities taking place throughout most of the complex, with the exception of the tunnel system. For example, Ulrich pointed out two cameras in one building's room "that provide a somewhat unique perspective. If the force that is being trained enters through one door in the room, you get their perspective. The other camera gives you the enemy's perspective." The cameras relay their video to the control center over some of the three million feet of fiber-optic cable at the JRTC.
The MOUT site is especially interested in providing effective night training. Jerry Bradford, an Anteon director, explained to T&S how video and audio instrumentation supports this training requirement. The rooms have infrared illuminators, so you can turn the lights off in those buildings and the soldiers can wear their night-vision equipment. We can illuminate the area with the infrared illuminators and not interfere with the night-vision devices. We can still see everything that the soldier does."
Microphones that record force-on-force and live-fire training missions are installed inside buildings and in exterior areas throughout the complex. Electricity is provided to the buildings to increase the fidelity of night urban training. Motion sensors are installed throughout buildings to alert the operations center's control station when a building is occupied. "These devices help us so we don't miss anything. We capture every room on video and with sound," Ulrich said. Rooms in the buildings are equipped with beds, desks, and other furniture to replicate an inhabited building.
In an effort to make training more realistic the Army has added Civilians On the Battlefield (COB) in its MOUT scenarios. This cadre is formed from military augmentees and contracted civilian personnel to replicate a civilian population in an urban environment. While up to 112 COB have supported recent scenarios, Ulrich recalled that the number of COB in scenarios swelled to "between 600 to 700" when Army forces trained for their Balkans deployment. "What we did was bring in native Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian, and Albanian-speaking role players for those exercises to provide another perspective to the training scenario. We like to say that 'we don't duplicate, we replicate' as much as possible," Ulrich said.
TIEING IT ALL TOGETHER
The operations center is the heart of the MOUT complex. Kevin Douty, Cubic's primary editor in the operations center's control room, told T&S that his facility and its operators respond to a scenario's observer and controller's requests to record an exercise's events, provide special effects during a training scenario, construct an after-action review product, and other tasks. The control center has the capability to collect and the and retrieve audio inputs and one terabit of digital video. "This is a large-capacity video capability," Anteon's Bradford said, and "it's a little bit larger than what your average television newsroom might handle at one time," he chuckled.
The control center also provides battlefield and urban audio effects, including rooftop explosions, barking dogs, and shouting people in order to replicate real-world combat situations.
The instrumented and audio-visual networked facility enables "the force commander to physically see everything on the battlefield that his unit is doing from the lowest unit to higher levels," Capt. Ulrich explained. Tactical displays, dubbed the Information System, provide a geographic representation of battlefield participants in the form of icons. Control center personnel can update the system with real-time reports from observer-controllers and other sources.
AFTER-ACTION REVIEWS
The operations center has a 46-seat theater that hosts AAR sessions, which are essential to a successful training mission. The Cubic team constructs after-action reviews and other requirements during a unit's JRTC rotation by producing an accurate frame-by-frame video and audio account of the event, and by supplementing it with maps, charts, and other visual displays. With these capabilities, the control center staff can furnish an AAR in under one hour, reported Douty, and the team can supply multiple AARs tailored for different operational echelons in order to best reinforce the training they've received.
The AARs contain a video and audio recording of the training events, which Douty opined, "is really the difference, besides the battlefield effects, between the type of training that soldiers get at [their] home station and [the training given] here. You can generally tell a soldier over and over again that he is doing something right or wrong, and he may or may not believe you. When you show it to him on video, from the '1,000-camera feed,' there's no question of what happened," Douty explained.
As a follow up to the training, AAR videos are provided to participating units to review at their home station after their training rotation is completed.
SUPER-BOWL LEVEL TRAINING
The Army wants to improve the site's capabilities to provide training at "the Super Bowl level, not the regular or pre-season levels," Ulrich said. An initial step to reach this goal was achieved when the Army awarded an omnibus contract to a Lockheed Martin Information Systems-led group in April 2001 to develop a Common Training Instrumentation Architecture to support the Service's Army Combat Training Centers and MOUT facilities (Fall 2001 T&S).
Ulrich noted that other ongoing program improvements at the Ft. Polk MOUT complex include fielding a "shoot-through-the-wall" instrumentation capability that replicates the impact on a room's inhabitants of a .50-cal or larger round fired into a building during force-on-force training. Five buildings are funded to have this capability.
Anteon's Jerry Bradford reported that his company is assisting in developing a "high-tech human target" for the complex.
"We completed a pair of initial tests several weeks ago. It's a 3-dimensional target that can raise its arms or shoot back at you using a MILES-shootback device. If you are shooting live ammunition at the target, it can fire a laser beam back at you, and if you don't engage the target, it can shoot you even if it is a live-fire exercise. We hope to have it fielded later this year." He added that the enhanced targeting system "will have some target discrimination devices that replicate children or non-combatants if we need to train soldiers not to shoot them by mistake."
The JRTC is eyeing other improvements that will support the Army's Interim Force. "We are updating our targeting systems to accommodate their weapons, and modifying the egress and ingress routes into the towns to accommodate the Stryker and their other vehicles."
Lockheed Martin Information Systems and teammate Schwartz Electro-Optics are producing MILES XXI equipment under an Army contract task order awarded in May 2001. These systems will be fielded in 2003 at the JRTC and its MOUT complex to replace legacy versions of the system.
Using MOUT-based training facilities provides a more realistic training environment and will ultimately help the Army better replicate the urban warfare scenarios that its troops are increasingly encountering. By utilizing technology to create, replicate, and record urban military encounters, the Service is helping to guarantee the success of its future operations in all combat environments.
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