That’s the current state of the art, but the Army’s Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation in Orlando, Fla., is on the verge of transforming the video-game-like exercise of its six-year-old, much-used Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System 2000.

The Army actually has employed MILES tactical simulation training all the way back to the 1970s. The older MILES versions, however, could not capture event data for post-exercise feedback and evaluation. Now, under the pressures of real war, PEO STRI is trying to sharpen and consolidate training as well as testing of weapons systems under the One Tactical Engagement Simulation System (OneTESS) and other training applications, such as the One Semi-Automated Forces (OneSAF) Objective System.

With its $1.9 billion annual budget, PEO STRI maintains hundreds of training products and services. Plans for OneTESS will impact nine of its training areas: armor, air defense, artillery, aviation, combat support, command and control, infantry, fire support and mobility/countermobility.

The future scope of One-TESS is huge, initially training a brigade of 3,500 and eventually up to 20,000 simultaneous users who will fire electronic bullets—wireless data packets that travel from shooters to targets and back, bearing information about position, lethality and returned fire. The information will be detailed enough, for example, to prevent a rifle bullet that hits a tank from getting credit for “killing” it.

The mobile wireless OneTESS network will geocast this rich mix of information to participants over a wide area—even medics on the sidelines—within about 500 milliseconds of each trigger pull, approximating an M-16 bullet’s flight time. The network will also carry simulated fire from grenade launchers, mortars and M1 Abrams tanks. Down the road, developers anticipate broadening the simulation to add Humvees, unmanned aerial vehicles, other aircraft and even improvised explosive devices.

No Soldier Left Behind
“Our job is to make sure no soldier goes untrained,” says STRI program executive officer James T. Blake. “The one deficiency of MILES is that it requires a direct line of sight to the target. We need to train soldiers anywhere, anytime” to shoot over and beyond obstacles such as buildings, just as real weapons can.

Using “literally a couple of million items that we’ve been working on for years, we can glue together an open framework for simulation, link fixed and mobile sites and simulate a distributed fight,” Blake says.

PEO STRI’s hardware database alone covers almost 350,000 items, large and small. But Blake acknowledges that it takes “quite a bit of hands-on preparation” by his office, as well as by local contractors, to inventory, maintain and network the hardware and software to mimic exactly the kind of fight a particular commander expects to encounter.

Warfighters undergo 20 to 28 days of this simulation training at home stations, in the field or at fixed sites: the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, La., and the Joint Multinational Readiness Center in Germany. PEO STRI can also configure semi-permanent communications towers and antennas elsewhere under the Common Training standard protocols.

Each individual commander’s training strategy dictates what gear will be used, such as vest devices or helmets. “We train as we fight,” Blake says. “The choice of combat gear depends on whether the fighters will be moving around in the open or in wooded or urban areas.”

A fixed site has the most capability to monitor and cull data about individual performance. “We gather the score for each soldier—for example, whether a hit was fatal or not,” says Blake. “There’s a football-like critique board. It relays information such as where you were standing when you were hit.”

Eventually, this effort must hook into the Defense Department’s Global Information Grid and Future Combat Systems, which Blake calls “the most complicated program the Army has taken on, and a critical component for training. As we proceed with OneTESS and CTIA and OneSAF, there will be spinouts—capabilities we can pull out and field early.”

E-Bullet Architect
MILES’ laser-tag engagement vests, targets and line-of-sight limitations are going to give way to “pure radio frequencies,” says David Morley, the lead systems engineer for OneTESS contractor AT&T Government Solutions in Orlando. The vendor has been working for about two years on the project, potentially worth more than $74 million.

“OneTESS will be used literally for [training on] every piece of military equipment,” Morley predicts. “We’re building it to cover both testing and training communities to save money and eliminate duplication. We want to ensure that testers as well as trainers have full capability.”

Building an electronic bullet entails sensing the precise aiming and the force of the warfighter’s trigger pull, and calculating the bullet’s trajectory. “A wireless mesh network will transmit all those data packets, compare the paths and see their intersections,” Morley says. “The mesh network will pass the data from player to player.”

The wireless mesh will have to juggle ad hoc, impromptu communications among all the exercise participants, whose roles include live players, live targets, live medics, observer/controllers and feedback/trainers. Such a communications mesh could handle dynamic, decentralized routing of packets between players at high speed, but with groundbreaking differences from current commercial wireless networks.

WiFi networks can deliver 100 Mbps, faster than a speeding M-16 bullet. But they “lack sufficient range because we need to support engagements up to brigade level,” Morley says. “The National Training Center [at Fort Irwin] is almost the size of Rhode Island.” So for that site, an AT&T subcontractor is upgrading the training infrastructure to 22 wireless radio towers that stand 3 kilometers apart.

The simulated weapons can be up to 25 km apart, “and we don’t anticipate a single radio could transmit that far,” he continues. “The cumulative data rate won’t be 100 Mbps, but it will maximize the bandwidth available to each player.”

Ultimately, as many as 20,000 players could participate, up to 5,000 of them all using the same tower but perhaps different weapons: M-16 rifles, M-4 carbines, Mark-19 grenade launchers, mortars, tanks, trucks, land mines, aircraft and bombs. “The data packets will tell what bullet was fired, whether the target determines it was hit, and whether there was a wound or damage,” Morley says. “Then medic player units can apply the necessary medical treatment. If a target is hit, it is disabled from shooting back. The idea is to include everybody in real time, like a real event.”

Morley and 50 other software developers are on the job, working toward a milestone decision coming up in October 2008. He says the developers program “mostly in C.”

The OneTESS player box as now envisioned contains an embedded processor, a wireless radio, a Global Positioning System receiver, a headset and a Type I encryption device approved by the National Security Agency. The processor may be an Intel XScale chip.

Another contractor, Icon Systems Inc. of San Diego, which also has experience with PEO STRI’s MILES laser training system, is working on a prototype OneTESS box.

Some, but not all, of the OneTESS players will need the full range of multimedia—text, data, graphics, imagery and voice—as well as access to the Internet or the public switched telephone network. And the Army’s ultimate requirements for the OneTESS hardware are quite demanding:

• Worldwide operability anywhere soldiers go, with or without a fixed communications infrastructure
• Weight no greater than 2 pounds
• 72-hour operation on a single battery
• Individual cost of no more than $2,000 in volume.

“The most important thing, next to making the simulation persuasively real, is reducing the weight for soldiers,” Morley says. “We will work very hard to meet that 2-pound limit.” In addition to the 2-pound hardware version, the OneTESS software will also run on notebook computers, in contrast with current training systems that, Morley says, require “trailers full of equipment. An individual soldier will be able to fire at a target, or an entire squad can drill.”

MILES to Go
While OneTESS is being developed, work continues to update MILES 2000. A recent $19 million PEO STRI contract with Unitech of Centreville, Va., will add a simulator for shoulder-launched munitions to the MILES arsenal.

Using the simulator, warfighters will undergo force-on-force training for the Army’s AT-4 anti-armor weapon. Unitech will supply more than 3,500 AT-4 launcher simulators and 455 visual modification kits for precise simulation of opposing forces’ launchers.

Under another $19 million contract, Science Applications International Corp. is working with PEO STRI to produce block upgrades to the baseline One Semi-Automated Forces system for training personnel who fight from tanks and other vehicles. The OneSAF Objective System is a simulation application that, like OneTESS, will be used in multiple locations. It too is destined to train warfighters for Future Combat Systems.

Also, like OneTESS, the OneSAF Objective System will let individual commanders tailor training to the environments they expect their units to encounter. Specific goals might range from jamming communications and navigating via GPS satellites to reacting rapidly to loss of an aircraft or other sudden events.

Take Aim
PEO STRI’s Virtual Targets Center maintains a repository of thousands of software-simulated tanks, rocket launchers, big guns and other targets, which can be tailored to various resolutions and traced throughout their lifecycles.

All users of the Army Knowledge Online Web portal have some access to the Army Model Exchange visualization resources at the center. Defense personnel and contractors also have access to the simulated targets, available in versions for several operating systems. The virtual targets must be:

• Accurate 3-D models of physical targets, built with an object-oriented, hierarchical architecture to enable target modifications and variable resolutions
• In reusable formats for a range of modeling and simulation functions
• Easily interfaced with existing standard simulations
• Available for various signatures such as radar and infrared.

With an arsenal of virtual gear that Defense users can tap almost anywhere, Blake says his team’s development efforts focus on creating simulations so finely grained and malleable that they aptly mimic the environment and battle conditions that soldiers are about to confront. “A training solution is a toolkit, and the commander is the one who will choose the right tools.”

purchase reprint

link to this page