QUANTICO – Military trainees talk to Afghan elders, earn the trust of villagers and roll over Humvees – all without interacting with another person.
The use of computer programs to simulate combat situations is growing in the military, despite concerns over their limitations. And as budget cutbacks hit the Defense Department, cheaper computer training options will only become more attractive.
Computer simulations have been important training tools in the military for decades. Digital computers were first used for flight simulation in the 1960s. But the gaming aspect to some simulations is relatively new. The Marine Corps bought Virtual Battlefield System 2, which creates a virtual reality environment similar to the popular Sims game, in 2001.
The Marine Corps Training and Education Command boasts at least 14 different virtual training programs. But the gaming aspect of this training, leadership at Marine Air-Ground Task Force Training Simulations Division said, is irrelevant. What is important are the decision-making cycles the simulations reinforce.
“It’s like ‘Groundhog Day.’ But at the end of the day hopefully you’ve made your mistake in software and you won’t make them in the real world,” said University of Pennsylvania professor Barry Silverman who works on computer simulation programs for the Marine Corps.
“I’d rather make my mistakes in software, and at the end of the game you get a feedback.”
And although the new technology is cheaper long-term than live training, new technology is expensive – especially as many departments struggle with shrinking budgets.
As the Department of Defense recovers from what Gates called “the delays, cancellations and mitigations we have been forced to put in place this year,’” President Barack Obama’s proposed budget for the Army cut research funding for next generation training and simulation systems from almost $26,000,000 in 2010 to about $18,000,000. Research on manpower training technology was reduced by almost 15 percent.
“There’s a fallacy that virtual training is cheaper than live training. Well, maybe in the long hold but this is one of those things you got to spend money to save money,” Dennis Thompson, retired Marine and director of Marine Air-Ground Task Force Training Simulations Division said. “What you do save in a simulation is you can run different scenarios is a shorter time and can give the people more repetitions.”
Different simulators allow units and battalions to practice situations impossible without virtual reality – like rolling over Humvees or driving convoys over mountainous Afghan terrain unavailable at training bases.
Tools like these allow for hands-on exercises on what would have historically been taught in a classroom. They also allow for distance learning – provided the tools are used correctly.
“This gets into training design,” said Thompson. “It doesn’t make sense at the [beginning] to go with a high-end training capability. It’d be great if we could afford it but we can’t. So this is where you use the low-cost things like things that are computer based on a lap top.”
The next step, according to retired Marine Dave Dunfee of the Squad Immersive Training Environment, is allowing different units from across multiple bases to train together on the simulations because that’s how they’ll operate when they are deployed. Often these units do not get to train together in person until 30 days before they deploy.
Before this training becomes a reality, though, Dunfee and Thompson said the military needs to have the capability to protect the information across networks to allow the cross-unit training.
But skepticism about gaming persists, and the Sgt. 1st Class Paul Ray Smith Simulation and Training Technology Center, an organization of the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, is conducting a study into why some might be reluctant to embrace the virtual training.
“It comes from a bit of ignorance,” said Doug Maxwell, the Science and Technology manager for virtual worlds strategic applications at the Center. “What Tami [Griffith] and I have to do is be patient with those folks and try to educate them and bring them up to speed.”
In some cases, commanders are just being pragmatic.
“You only get credit for the live [training] so why do I do the simulation?” Dunfee explained. “There’s only this many hours in the day, and if I do the simulation this many hours, I only have this many hours left to do the live.”
Doug Campbell, director of the Center for Strategic Leadership at the Army War College, said that there are limits to what a computer can handle, and simulations are best left for basic organization.
“The difficulty with simulations is they don’t add the fog and friction of war,” Campbell said. “Very rarely do platoons or tanks get stuck in the mud in simulations, but that happens a lot in real life.”
Computers are useful in basic situations but cannot think or act with the complexity of a human being.
“What a computer simulation is giving me is background for a less complex issue,” Campbell said. “The level of options that the humans may choose to do…is much more complex than a computer can understand.”
But Silverman said virtual reality is getting more and more complex with new technology like his program NonKin Village, which could be rolled out for the military during the upcoming year.
“The agents are cognitive, they can make decisions, they are aware of their world, they are aware of the issues, they are aware of what they are deprived of,” Silverman said. “They’re aware of what you do in that world.”
Ultimately, researchers, MTSD directors and strategists believe that computer simulations help optimize scarce live opportunity as each type of simulation counterbalances the defects of the other.
Silverman said that in 10 years, simulations will become as crucial to ground forces as flight simulators are to the Air Force. And most military experts agree that budget cuts will enforce the importance of cheaper simulations that do not require live actors.
As Thompson noted, “The old days of just going live, they won’t be able to do that anymore.”