Our friend, DT con­trib­u­tor and crusty avi­a­tion gumshoe Bob Cox has a great story run­ning on Military​.com today about the Air Force’s high speed new flight sims.

L-​​3 Link Simulation and train­ing has devel­oped the SimuSphere that improves on the visu­als and com­put­ing speed of cur­rent sims to make images at near visual qual­ity, or 20–40, Cox reports. He said it looks like Luke Skywalker plink­ing wamp rats in his T-​​16 back home (or fly­ing the thun­der run down into the Death Star’s power core).

Link’s new sim­u­la­tion sys­tems incor­po­rate the lat­est devel­op­ments in high-​​definition video, off-​​the-​​shelf dig­i­tal imag­ing tech­nol­ogy devel­oped for ani­ma­tion and gam­ing, and a “physics-​​based envi­ron­ment gen­er­a­tor” that allows cre­ation of up to 30,000 inter­ac­tive images in a sin­gle simulation.

The sim­u­la­tion is dri­ven by dozens of net­worked PC-​​type com­put­ers made from read­ily avail­able com­mer­cial com­po­nents, such as Intel dual core proces­sors and $400 graph­ics cards, installed in indus­trial qual­ity cases with greater cool­ing capacity.

The end result is video imag­ing that is of 20–40 visual acu­ity, only a lit­tle less than per­fect eye­sight. Previous gen­er­a­tions of sim­u­la­tors were no bet­ter than 20–80. Schaefer says the only thing pre­vent­ing even bet­ter images is that exist­ing pro­jec­tors can­not yet gen­er­ate 20–20 images at jet air­craft speeds.

“A lot of our com­pe­ti­tion, you can see a piece of that tech­nol­ogy, but they can’t deliver the whole pack­age,” Schaefer said. 

Read the rest of the story here and be sure to watch the vid…

— Christian

Yesterday I had the oppor­tu­nity to par­tic­i­pate in a DoD-​​sponsored Blogger’s Roundtable with U.S. Air Force Col. Michael Wobbema, Chief of Staff for the Coalition Air Force Transition Team. His job? Help rebuild the Iraqi Air Force.
With the recent MQ-​​9 Reaper kill that we talked about here on DT, my first ques­tion was if UAVs were going to be included in the the future Iraqi Air Force. With ISR assets (intel­li­gence, sur­veil­lance and recon­nais­sance) such a large part of any oper­a­tion, I was curi­ous if the suc­cess of any Coalition UAV ISR pro­gram is in the cards. COL Wobbema’s reply:

I do not think that we have any kind of unmanned vehi­cle pro­gram estab­lished in the long-​​term plan­ning. Basically what we’re doing is we’re using a manned form of the same type of intelligence-​​gathering equip­ment in the form of a Caravan, a Cessna Caravan, that we’ve put an ISR suite on, which is oper­ated by a sen­sor oper­a­tor that’s actu­ally fly­ing in the aircraft.

My next ques­tion cen­tered around what sort of air­craft the Iraqi Air Force can be expected to be fly­ing in the near future:

Well, in the future, of course, you know, I’ve been a fighter guy my whole career, and a lot of the Iraqi air force pilots are all for­mer fighter pilots. And, of course, if they had an unlim­ited bud­get and didn’t want to worry about any­thing else, we’d be buy­ing F-​​16s, F-​​18s for them. Or they would be buy­ing them for them­selves. That’s what they’d be want­ing to do.
But we have to walk before we can run, and right now we’ve got some C-​​130 air­craft on the ground that they’re oper­at­ing. There are some MI-​​17 for the rotary-​​wing side. They’ve got a few Hueys. And then we’ve got this Cessna Caravan. The Cessna Caravan will also become — there will be an armed vari­ant of that that will come online. And then they’ll move into — the next iter­a­tion will be a light– attack air­craft of some sort, prob­a­bly a propeller-​​driven kind of light-​​attack air­craft that can take care of their most imme­di­ate need, and that is to deal with the insur­gency that’s tak­ing place inside their own bor­ders.
From there, then, it will migrate to being able to develop an air defense capa­bil­ity to pro­tect their bor­ders from out­side influ­ence. And then, from there, you know, who knows? At some point in time I sus­pect that they will ulti­mately migrate to becom­ing a fully inte­grated part of the world community.

Thinking back to the air order of bat­tle that existed in Iraq 17 years ago, those days are far in the future. Currently any exter­nal threat that may require a robust air defense capa­bil­ity can and will be han­dled by coali­tion air­craft that remain in the­ater or are oper­at­ing off­shore from car­rier strike groups. Same goes for Close Air Support (CAS), either on-​​call from a CAS-​​stack or some form of alert launch, in sup­port of ground oper­a­tions. Self-​​determination from a mil­i­tary avi­a­tion per­spec­tive is in in the cards, but not for a while.
COL Wobbema has a num­ber of other fas­ci­nat­ing things to pass on in this inter­view and you can read the arti­cle from DefenseLink News here or read the tran­script of the round­table here.
Above photo shows mem­bers of 52nd Flying Training Squadron stand­ing in for­ma­tion as the first stu­dents arrive to the Iraqi air force fly­ing train­ing school at Kirkuk Air Base, Iraq. This flight was offi­cially the first sor­tie flown by the school as the four Iraqi air force stu­dents took con­trol of the air­craft for a few min­utes in tran­sit to see what it is they are work­ing toward. The school will instruct the stu­dents in both fixed– and rotary-​​wing pilot­ing. Photo by Senior Airman Jeremy McGuffin, USAF
–Pinch Paisley

The mad sci­en­tists at the Office of Naval Research have just signed a con­tract to build two high-​​tech bat­tle sim­u­la­tors for Marines to prac­tice their lethal trade in a vir­tual environment.

Chief of Naval Research Rear Admiral William E. Landay III has announced the fund­ing of a $1.3-million “Tech Solutions” project to deliver advanced infantry immer­sive train­ing to Marines. This project will field two sys­tems by the fall of 2007. The first sys­tem will be installed in the I MEF Battle Simulation Center at Camp Pendleton, California, and the sec­ond will be installed in the new Marine Expeditionary Rifle Integration Facility open­ing this sum­mer near Quantico, Virginia.

The Infantry Immersive Trainer (IIT) is one of sev­eral vir­tual envi­ron­ment train­ing projects that recently emerged out of a decade’s worth of Office of Naval Research (ONR) sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy invest­ment. IIT will focus on treat­ing Marines and Sailors and their sup­port­ing equip­ment (e.g., weaponry and infor­ma­tion sys­tems) as an inte­grated sys­tem to enable Naval war­riors to win and sur­vive in battle

The require­ment for infantry immer­sive train­ing was ini­ti­ated in the spring of 2006 by Lieutenant General James Mattis, the cur­rent I MEF com­mand­ing gen­eral, while he was com­mand­ing gen­eral of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command. The U.S. Marine Corps Training and Education Command has incor­po­rated this require­ment into the Squad Immersive Training Environment Urgent Needs Statement.

Both the Army and Marine Corps have taken increas­ing advan­tage of real­is­tic sim­u­la­tors that help infantry­men and other troops deal with the stresses of com­bat and the kind of shoot-​​no-​​shoot sit­u­a­tions that often crop up in urban com­bat envi­ron­ments and counterinsurgencies.

For a while now, the Corps has been using FATS train­ers for their troops and has migrated into using them for con­voy prac­tice, close air sup­port train­ing and artillery coor­di­na­tion. Range space is at a pre­mium these days and with ammo resources devoted increas­ingly to the war, troops have fewer and fewer oppor­tu­ni­ties to train with the real thing.

The value of sim­u­lated train­ing for ground forces is cer­tainly debat­able, but you cant ignore the impact air­craft sim­u­la­tors have had on keep­ing avi­a­tors cur­rent and bet­ter pre­pared for in-​​flight emer­gen­cies. Ive seen Marines and Soldiers use sim­u­la­tors like these for sev­eral years state­side and at prep bases in Kuwait and they seem to get real value out of them.

Officers and NCOs are big fans of the sim­u­la­tors because they allow Soldiers and Marines to make mis­takes in a non-​​kinetic envi­ron­ment, so when they do get a few hours on the live-​​fire range, they can really con­cen­trate on their TTPs rather than have to rehash basic rifle­man skills.

– Christian

For a cou­ple years now, Iraq-​​bound sol­diers and Marines have ben­e­fited from real­is­tic train­ing fea­tur­ing Arabic-​​speaking role­play­ers, Hollywood spe­cial effects and “insur­gents” por­trayed by highly trained U.S. troops. Now their com­man­ders can get in on the sim-​​Iraq action with a new dig­i­tal com­mand and con­trol (C2) archi­tec­ture at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, La., as I described in a recent National Defense arti­cle:

Arguably the most impor­tant tech­nol­ogy lever­aged by deploy­ing units are the dig­i­tal Army bat­tle com­mand sys­tems that pro­vide lead­ers at all lev­els real-​​time sit­u­a­tional aware­ness on the loca­tion of their units to squad level, Brig. Gen. Michael Barbero, Fort Polk com­man­der, said in an inter­view.
Accordingly, JRTC sim­u­lates the com­plex command-​​and-​​control setup that under­pins oper­a­tions in Iraq. Patrols sor­tie from sim­u­lated for­ward oper­at­ing bases that boast tac­ti­cal oper­a­tions cen­ters fea­tur­ing all the same sys­tems com­man­ders might employ in Iraq.
The Army bat­tle com­mand sys­tems are made up of sev­eral soft­ware pack­ages, each designed for par­tic­u­lar missions.

These include, among others:

The maneu­ver con­trol sys­tem, [which] col­lects real-​​time bat­tle­field infor­ma­tion and dis­plays it graph­i­cally. It inter­faces with the blue-​​force track­ing sys­tem which plots the loca­tions of indi­vid­ual vehi­cles on a dig­i­tal map.
[And] the bat­tle com­mand and sus­tain­ment sup­port sys­tem [that] processes logis­ti­cal, per­son­nel and med­ical infor­ma­tion, gen­er­ates near real-​​time reports and updates a com­bat ser­vice sup­port data­base every three hours. It fuses data from satel­lites, radio fre­quency iden­ti­fi­ca­tion tags, inter­roga­tors and transpon­ders to track and dis­play the loca­tions of vehi­cles and cargo.

The C2 archi­tec­ture facil­i­tates real-​​time com­mand of forces in the JRTC box. The dig­i­tal archi­tec­ture enables Fort Polk train­ing staff to pass down intel­li­gence and orders from sim­u­lated divi­sion and joint task force head­quar­ters. It also helps sim­u­late oper­a­tions that cant be con­ducted live because of range and air­space lim­i­ta­tions, as well as short­ages of avail­able sys­tems such as bombers and aer­ial drones.
The bet­ter your train­ing, the bet­ter your results in com­bat. Now if there were only a sim­u­la­tion for the kinds of cul­tural encoun­ters that make all the dif­fer­ence in Iraq. Oh wait — there is!
–David Axe

I’ve been mean­ing to plug a ter­rific new site, World Politics Watch, and today gives me the per­fect oppor­tu­nity — a story from DefenseTech con­trib­u­tor David Axe, titled “Military Training Goes Hollywood.“

To bet­ter pre­pare its troops for tough coun­terin­sur­gency war­fare, the U.S. mil­i­tary is invest­ing in super-​​realistic exer­cises that com­bine tra­di­tional live-​​fire train­ing with sophis­ti­cated cul­tural instruc­tion and Hollywood-​​style spe­cial effects that blur the lines between train­ing and com­bat.
At the start of the so-​​called Global War on Terrorism, the military’s com­bat train­ing infra­struc­ture reflected an entrenched Cold War men­tal­ity.…
That was then. Five years later, NTC and JRTC have trans­formed into high-​​fidelity sim­u­la­tions of Iraq and Afghanistan, com­plete with mock towns, Iraqi expa­tri­ates por­tray­ing restive natives, “insur­gents” played by highly trained sol­diers and sophis­ti­cated script­ing and assess­ment that ensures U.S. troops are pre­pared for the lat­est chal­lenges in evolv­ing con­flicts. The Marines, with a much smaller train­ing estab­lish­ment and less money, have launched their own small-​​scale real­is­tic exer­cise while also send­ing units to the Army’s events.

World Politics Watch, by the way, is the brain­child of Hampton Stephens, a for­mer Inside the Air Force edi­tor and col­league of mine who’s cre­ated a unique news ser­vice cov­er­ing for­eign pol­icy, national secu­rity and inter­na­tional affairs. Bookmark it.
– Dan Dupont

The Army’s reor­ga­ni­za­tion into lighter brigade com­bat teams with less artillery has forced it to rely more on close air sup­port. At the same time, close-​​quarters urban bat­tles have made air sup­port a trick­ier and more urgent affair than in pre­vi­ous con­flicts. But dif­fer­ent lan­guages and incom­pat­i­ble ways of doing things have kept the Army and Air Force from work­ing closely together.
The Joint Air-​​Ground Operations Group at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas aims to change that.
The group’s four squadrons teach six courses for as many as 5,000 stu­dents per year. On the Army side, JAGOG instructs com­mand staff, for­ward observers and fire sup­port offi­cers in how to talk to the Air Force and best inte­grate its air­craft into their oper­a­tions. On the Air Force side, the group instructs ground-​​based and air­borne con­trollers in the lan­guage of ground forces and meth­ods for sup­port­ing them from the air.
One of the neato tools at JAGOG’s dis­posal is a new 360-​​degree dome sim­u­la­tor (see pic) that drops stu­dent for­ward air con­trollers into an Iraq-​​esque sce­nario fea­tur­ing tough mov­ing tar­gets and itchy Air Force jet jock­eys loop­ing over­head. The con­troller must spot the tar­get and talk in attack­ing pilots.
Right now the sim is at the Air Force lab in Mesa, Arizona. But soon it should make its way to Nellis and daily use by JAGOG train­ers. Where can I buy a ticket?
–David Axe

Ft. Irwin, California — It’s 110 degrees here on the south­ern edge of Death Valley when Alpha Company storms Medina Jabal. On July 27, twelve days into their two-​​week exer­cise at the National Training Center, the Soldiers of Alpha Company are resigned to the heat, if not accus­tomed to it. After just a few min­utes exposed to the blaz­ing sun, sweat soaks their gray and tan com­bat uni­forms and leaves salty white deposits on their 25-​​pound armor vests. They drink water reli­giously and, when­ever there’s a lull in oper­a­tions, seek the near­est shade.
Alpha’s tribu­la­tions at NTC are shared by all the 10 5,000-soldier brigades annu­ally that train here before deploy­ing to Iraq. Their tri­als are part of a accel­er­at­ing trend across the U.S. mil­i­tary ser­vices of pro­vid­ing ultra-​​realistic train­ing to its troops.
For Alpha, right now there’s no time for rest. The com­man­der of the 2nd Infantry Division’s 2nd Brigade, Col. Jeffrey Bannister, has ordered Alpha — from the 1st bat­tal­ion of the 9th Infantry — to secure Medina Jabal in advance of his July 28 meet­ing with the regional gov­er­nor. All over the Rhode Island-​​size desert range, 2nd Brigade units are engaged in mock com­bat with “insur­gents” from the res­i­dent 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, but the most impor­tant fight is here at this tiny, sham­bling vil­lage of con­crete and ply­wood build­ings. Victory in this sim­u­lated Iraq, just like in the real Iraq, hinges on hearts and minds. If Bannister is going to win over the local pop­u­lace, it’s going to hap­pen here when he stands up with the gov­er­nor (por­trayed by a Kurdish Iraqi national) and promises a bet­ter future for the res­i­dents of Medina Jabal (played by Iraqi nation­als and local actors).
But the insur­gents know that, and they will focus all their efforts on wreck­ing Bannister’s care­fully orches­trated event. Down at the 11th ACR’s oper­a­tions cen­ter in the heart of Ft. Irwin, staff offi­cers plot 2nd Brigade’s move­ments on a map and con­sider their options. With Alpha mov­ing into Medina Jabal, it’s going to be hard to slip in fight­ers. Someone pro­poses an Improvised Explosive Device smug­gled in a truck. Another pitches mor­tar bar­rages. Snipers are an option too. And if Alpha inter­dicts all these efforts, then the 11th ACR — the so-​​called “Opposing Force,” or Opfor — can send teams to harass the brigade’s Forward Operating Bases, includ­ing its vul­ner­a­ble heli­copter base at FOB Miami, in an effort to draw Bannister’s atten­tion away from Medina Jabal.
But Alpha seems to know exactly what the Opfor is up to.
Read the excit­ing con­clu­sion at Military​.com. And check out my NTC photo-​​essay at Flickr.
–David Axe

AP: “Teens look­ing to hook up with a friend on the pop­u­lar web com­mu­nity MySpace may bump into an unex­pected buddy: the U.S. Marine Corps.“
So far, over 12,000 web surfers have signed on as friends of the Corps in response to the lat­est mil­i­tary recruit­ing tac­tic…
The Marine Corps MySpace pro­file… featur[es] stream­ing video of bark­ing drill sergeants, fresh recruits endur­ing boot camp and Marines storm­ing beaches…
So far over 430 peo­ple have asked to con­tact a Marine recruiter through the site in the five months since the page went up, includ­ing some 170 who are con­sid­ered “leads” or prospec­tive Marine recruits.

The small orga­ni­za­tion tasked with mak­ing sure the Army learns from its expe­ri­ences is grow­ing to keep up with oper­a­tions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Center for Army Lessons Learned, or CALL, based at Ft. Leavenworth in rural Kansas, has grown from 30 to 130 peo­ple since 2003 and has dou­bled the num­ber of teams it sends out to com­bat zones.
“CALL cap­tures con­tem­po­rary, cur­rent, near-​​real-​​time obser­va­tions, insights and lessons from the Global War on Terror,” says Col. Larry Saul, a Vietnam vet­eran and CALL direc­tor.
CALL’s col­lec­tion “mech­a­nism”, Saul says, is three­fold:

* It has eight deployed liai­son offi­cers serv­ing six-​​month tours that report back lessons from the front: two in Afghanistan and six in Iraq. Saul says he’s look­ing to add another two to Iraq as well as two to Kuwait.
* Collections and Analysis Teams con­sist­ing of as many as a dozen offi­cers deploy for six weeks to study par­tic­u­lar prob­lems — “say, Improvised Explosive Devices or avi­a­tion oper­a­tions or man­age­ment of a com­mand post,” Saul says. CALL can sup­port four teams at a time and is bud­geted for around 20 deploy­ments per year.
* Finally, Army units send their After-​​Action Reports to CALL for analy­sis and dis­sem­i­na­tion, “par­tic­u­larly after a sig­nif­i­cant oper­a­tion,” Saul says.

“After col­lec­tion, ini­tially we do a hasty analy­sis look­ing at those things that might pro­vide solu­tions to a life-​​threatening sit­u­a­tion, look­ing for a gold nugget. Then we develop and deter­mine the best proac­tice [to address the prob­lem]. Later on, we do a more delib­er­ate analy­sis of the prob­lem.“
Read more at Military​.com. And visit my Flickr to see pics of one Army orga­ni­za­tion that relies heav­ily on CALL: The Joint Readiness Training Center in Louisiana.
– David Axe

Realistic train­ing for Iraq-​​bound units is in high demand these days. And despite the pro­lif­er­a­tion of high-​​fidelity sim­u­la­tions — at Fort Polk’s Army Joint Readiness Training Center, Fort Irwin’s Army National Training Center and the Marine Corps’ Mojave Viper at Twentynine Palms — there still isn’t enough capac­ity to train up all of the approx­i­mately 20 com­bat brigades at a time that deploy to Iraq.
So the big­wigs at Fort Polk have come up with a plan to take JRTC on the road. The idea is to pack­age up the basic ele­ments of JRTC’s Iraq sim, includ­ing pyrotech­nics experts, combat-​​vet observer-​​controllers, an oppos­ing force trained in insur­gent tac­tics and some of the sim­u­la­tion gear (includ­ing the new-​​generation MILES II laser-​​tag) and deploy it to brigades’ home sta­tions, where the JRTC “road show” will take over some local train­ing ranges and run a com­pressed, bare-​​bones pre-​​deployment exer­cise.
It won’t be cheap, con­sid­er­ing that Fort Polk JRTC rota­tions cost around $10 mil­lion apiece and don’t include the Road Show’s trans­porta­tion costs. But, as JRTC spokesman Maj. Eric Baus says, “What cost is too much” when it comes to prepar­ing troops for Iraq?
Right now the JRTC Road Show is just an idea. But with the mil­i­tary train­ing com­mu­nity bet­ter resourced and more moti­vated than ever after three years of war, expect it to become a real­ity very soon.
See my Flickr for JRTC pics. Read more at Military​.com and The Washington Times. And check out my graphic novel WAR FIX.
–David Axe