The Army will begin fielding its new air and ground platform training simulators in fiscal year 2024, which follows a recent $500 million production award to Cole Engineering Services Inc. (CESI) and plans to hold an operational demonstration next February.
Officials showcased the new Reconfigurable Virtual Collective Trainers (RVCT) set up in configurations for an Abrams tank and a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter during a media demonstration at the Pentagon on Monday, and cited the systems’ ability to offer soldiers more robust collective training within the new Synthetic Training Environment (STE).
“What we had before was really based on ‘80s and ‘90s technology. So everything from the augmented reality that we have in the headsets to the ability to transport it and move it and not be stuck in a fixed site facility, it’s really an evolution from the older stuff,” Maj. Thane Keller, the STE Cross-Functional Team’s RVCT lead told reporters, adding the new system is “immensely” less expensive than the more exquisite legacy systems trainers designed for individual platforms.
The Army began the RVCT effort to replace its legacy training simulators with an $81 million prototype award to CESI in June 2019 (Defense Daily, July 1 2019).
CESI then received a production contract for RVCT hardware in April worth up to $500 million, with $139.3 million obligated at the time of award.
“Team CESI continues to take great pride in developing and delivering systems that are easy for our soldiers to use and RVCT has been a tremendous example of working collaboratively with our stakeholders,” Devin Lynders, CESI’s senior vice president for advanced training systems, said in a statement following the award. “We place the soldier at the center of modernization by conducting multiple formal soldier touchpoints and more than 100 informal feedback sessions with the direct platform experts, enabling us to find the sweet spot of fidelity with virtualization, form/fit/function and training realism.”
Col. Nick Kioutas, project manager for synthetic environment in the Army’s Program Executive Office Simulation, Training and Instrumentation (PEO STRI), said initial fielding of RCVTs will begin in FY ‘24 and the first three sites to receive the trainers will be Fort Novosel in Alabama, Fort Moore in Georgia and Fort Cavazos in Texas.
CESI said at the time of the contract award that its production contract will eventually cover delivery of RVCTs to 14 sites over the next three to five years.
RCVT will transition from a Middle Tier Acquisition pathway for rapid fielding to a Major Capability Acquisition program around FY ‘25-’26, Kioutas added, pending the approval of the Army’s acquisition office.
The April award to CESI covers RVCTs in configurations for Abrams tanks, Strykers, Bradleys, Humvees, Joint Light Tactical Vehicles on the ground side, and Apache, Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters as well as drone operation stations on the aviation side.
Officials noted new platforms, such as the Army’s Future Long Range Assault Aircraft, could be added to the RVCT modular architecture once a training requirement is in place for those capabilities.
Maj. Lane Berg, PEO STRI’s integration lead for STE, cited the ability for the ground and air RVCTs to connect, even when spread across different Army sites, as offering soldiers enhanced collective training capabilities moving forward.
“The true power behind this [RVCT] system as a whole is the collective training aspect. It’s the tank being able to talk to the aircraft over there. If we had a Bradley set up, we’d have dismounted soldier laptops that are behind the Bradley [trainer] so a squad can get in the vehicle, conduct the mission with the vehicle movement, just like we would in the real world, dismount the vehicle, get on a helicopter going on an air assault, come back and they’re all within the same environment operating through the TMT,” Berg told reporters.
The RVCT in the Abrams configuration on display Monday consisted of four individual stations: a driver station, a gunner station, a tank commander station and the loader station.
“Combined, you have this reconfigurable tank training capability that really allows a crew to do those reps and sets [that are] necessary before they get on a real tank or go to a real range,” Keller said.
Maj. Brandon Dotson, PEO STRI’s RVCT assistant product manager, told reporters the RVCTs for training to operate UAS platforms currently covers Gray Eagle and Shadow drones.
“That’s huge. This last soldier touchpoint that we did in the February/March timeframe, as an Apache guy, that was the first time I’d ever seen a flight lead sitting down with the UAS operator and figuring out how they’re going to fight this battle together,” Dotson said. “To be able to do that in a virtual world and to do it multiple times on [the system] that you’re actually intending to operate on is like a huge game changer.”
The requirement for RVCT was to have it set up within 30 minutes and be able to reconfigure from one platform to another within 30 minutes, officials noted.
“It could be an Abrams this morning and a Bradley in the afternoon. So you have the base kit, which is essentially this one box and then there’s a kit. So you have an Abrams kit, a Stryker kit and a Bradley kit and they’re reconfigurable,” Berg said. “Within a day, the [RVCT] can be multiple different things.”
Berg added the Army has conducted over 60 soldier touchpoints and subject matter expert reviews for RVCT to date.
“When you go out to the field, clearing airspace, having a dedicated unit and pilots that you can talk to, it doesn’t happen a lot. So those platoon leaders said they got some of the best training they had from their time in the Army just being able to talk to pilots because you don’t get to do that very often,” Berg said of feedback gathered from the soldier engagements on the new trainers.
Keller noted the Army is continuing to work on the stability of the software for RVCT, as it continues to work on the development of the system heading into the production phase.
“Because this is a prototype and we’re continually adding new software to it, [the stability] is probably what we’d like to see come out more of it and that’s coming and every month we get better,” Keller said.
CESI was awarded a $179 million OTA agreement in June 2021 to serve as the “core software enabler” for the STE’s training simulation software and the Training Management Tool.