By Geoff Fein
While the submarine program continues to rapidly insert commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) technologies to modernize the fleet, officials are also making sure the schoolhouses not only have the latest versions of equipment, but are providing the most up-to-date training to sailors.
The Submarine Learning Center has turned to a model based on the Acoustic Rapid COTS Insertion (ARCI) program to provide training on modernized equipment to operators in real time as they are getting the systems, Capt. Kenneth Swan, commanding officer of the Submarine Learning Center, told Defense Daily recently.
The center is located in Groton, Conn.
What has developed is a partnership among the system commands (SYSCOM), type commands (TYCOM) and the schoolhouses, so that the learning center can provide the fleet tailored training to their updated systems, Swan said.
“The partnership we created in the past two years with the SYSCOMs and TYCOMs, that partnership is the key to effectively delivering training to the individual sailor on an individual boat,” Randy Craig, Submarine Learning Center modernization team training director, told Defense Daily.
The SYSCOM provides subject matter experts who work under Craig. “The guy has one foot in the program office, as the system is being developed, and in fact the curriculum gets developed as the system gets developed, and then he also has a foot in the training camp because those guys provide training to train the trainer,” Craig said.
“They spend time at the factory learning the new systems as they are getting developed. They also create the training for the new systems as those systems are being developed, he added.
And they are linked to Submarine Development Squadron (DevRon) 12, to the personnel responsible for developing doctrine. That doctrine development is folded into the training that is delivered to the fleet, Craig added.
The other thing that the partnership with the SYSCOMs and TYCOMs do is when a new advanced processor build (APB) comes out, course development is underway, he said. For example, the Navy is getting ready to put APB 09 on more submarines. It is on one boat now, Craig noted. “It’s going to go out here in the next six to eight moths on a number of ships. That curriculum development is taking place.”
At the Trident training facilities in Kings Bay, Ga., and Bangor, Maine, the Naval Submarine School in Groton, the schoolhouses in San Diego and Norfolk, Va., that do training for SSNs, and the schools in Hawaii with its detachment in Guam that do training for SSNs, there is a core of personnel provided by that schoolhouse, typically a lieutenant, a couple of sonar technicians, a couple of fire control technicians, and a couple of electronics technicians, Craig said.
“The SYSCOM will pay to bring those guys to the factory and we will do a ‘train the trainer’ event,” he said. “So between the guys who work with me here in the office and the subject matter experts at each of the contractors that develop both ARCI and BYG-1…we will go through all the curriculum they are going to teach and we will certify them to go teach it.”
The contractors also have systems the Navy can use to run demonstrations on to train the trainers, Craig added.
“At Lockheed Martin, for example, they actually have a submarine multi-mission team trainer there, the same trainer we have in our schoolhouses,” he said. “At the end of the classroom portion of the ‘train the trainer’ event, we will take the guys into a live system that they have running, or into the multi-mission trainer, and we will run through scenarios.”
The sailors who have gone through the “train the trainer” event, go back to their fleet concentration area, they go back to their schoolhouses, and when a submarine comes to get modernized, the crew comes up to the schoolhouse for their training by uniformed instructors, not contractors, Craig said.
“Typically, when it’s a first of a kind in a concentration area, we will send some of our subject matter experts to sit in the back of the room and make sure that what we are delivering is what we intended to deliver,” he added. “The key to that is, if a boat is getting modernized in Pearl Harbor or in Groton, those two crews get the exact same training. The training is standard across the fleet for each APB.”
Swan said the Navy is committed to making the investment to ensure it spends that time requisite to use the capability that’s being delivered to the fleet.
When acquisition of a big system is on the horizon, for example the Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine replacement program, the service begins the Navy Training System Plans, Swan added.
The Virginia-class program has a NTSP, he said.
“We are working what our training will be now for those big future systems because they are far enough ahead, we can work that out far enough in advance,” Swan said. “But, for an APB cycle, it has a turn radius inside the NTSP normal programmatic cycle. The APB cycle is a four-phase process. We are in at the ground floor, at phase one. Because we are partnered with the SYSCOMs, the subject matter experts are looking at phase one and phase two even when it is with [Integrated Warfare Systems].”
And the Submarine Learning Center has a foot in the door as to how big that training tail is going to be with that development, Swan added.
“Then we figure out how to do the immediate training, train the crew that [has] it now, as well as to go back into the regular pipeline and train the crews that are going to go to those [other] ships,” he said.
In the past, when a new piece of equipment came down, the SYSCOM was responsible for training the sailors on that new gear, Swan said.
A contractor usually conducted the training, but the problem was that if a sailor wasn’t at the training that day or week, they’d have to track the trainer down. “There are some problems with that.”
A modernization training team brought all the pieces together, Swan said. Now the SYSCOMs are paying the salaries of the subject matter experts who work for Randy Craig. “We have a MoU that they will pay for the employee and they will work under my guy.”
“We are training on the box with the sailor as part of the team, all together collectively, at the same time because we are trying to get the transition from this new capability to readiness, and we found out just doing it piecemeal just didn’t work,” Swan said. “We broke a lot of standard Navy models with this partnership.”
The new training program has worked out very well, he added.
“It really uses the same ARCI model of ‘let’s put the guy who is doing the training in with the developer, early and often, just like we did with the operator. We used that same ARCI model and we are seeing some very good results,” Swan said.