Simulation and virtual training are critical to lowering the amount of funding spent on educating soldiers and to preparing soldiers for the complexity of future combat, according to the general in charge of training troops.
Gen. David Perkins, chief of Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), said Nov. 28 that live virtual constructive and synthetic training will reduce the “tyranny” of costly training events at the Army’s national training centers.
Commander Army Training and Doctrine Command
Photo: TRADOC
At those installations, training can be conducted on a large scale with great realism, but bringing large units to such events is costly and not easily repeatable, Perkins said at the National Training and Simulation Association’s annual Interservice/ Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) in Orlando.
“The overhead of training became so large that … unless you could do it to the scale, you wouldn’t do any of it,” he said. “The tyranny of training became so large that it also became infrequent and you didn’t get those reps even at home station.”
Employing virtual training simulators will allow soldiers to become proficient at basic skills at their home stations and enter very large-scale training events at a higher level of proficiency, he said. Synthetic training also is quickly repeatable, scalable and the scenarios can be altered all at a much lower cost than staging real-world training events.
“So, when you get out to those things that are very expensive, have very high overhead, you’re not doing basic kinds of things,” he said. “You’ve been able to do those 10,000 hours of repetition at home station at a much lower level using live virtual constructive training.”
Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. Mark Milley spent a good portion of his annual address to the Association of the U.S. Army annual conference in October calling on industry to improve existing synthetic training systems and develop new technologies that will allow the Army to scale them to large-formations.
“Tens of millions of dollars are spent and invested in training and simulation for an F-35 pilot before they are ever allowed to come near a fifth-generation fighter,” Milley said during the Oct. 10 speech. “Well, we have fifth-generation fighters in our squads and platoons and they are actually fighting every day. So we must do the same thing for them.”
Milley wants to rapidly improve and expand the Army’s synthetic and virtual training capabilities so soldiers can repeatedly practice combat skills at a fraction of the cost of live-fire exercises. Every front-line company in the Army should have access to multiple technologies simulating various combat conditions, he said.
“The technology exists now in order to conduct realistic training in any terrain, in all of the urban areas of the world, in any scenario against any enemy – anything the commander deems necessary,” Milley said. “That is possible today.”
Perkins last week said virtual and synthetic training systems would cause a “revolution” in how the Army prepares for war. They also will be key to practicing the complex skills necessary to operate on future battlefields where multiple domains will be contested at once, he said. Virtual and synthetic training systems can eliminate the need to train specific skill sets and then synchronize them during large-scale exercises.
“We have to have a training strategy that from the beginning you are thinking multiple domains,” Perkins said.