Army bridging training gaps in vehicle convoy operations.

The U.S. Army's training and simulation branch is trying to address deficiencies in convoy operations--"a very bad weakness," according to a service official.

"Every day, we are losing soldiers during convoy operations, because of our inability to do convoy operations," said Lt. Col. Joseph Giunta, program manager for ground combat tactical trainers at the program executive office for simulation, training, research and instrumentation (PEO STRI).

To counter the problem, Giunta's office is working on developing a common driver-training system, leveraging the concept of the Stryker Light Armored Vehicle already in development. His goal is to integrate all the Army's driver-training requirements into one solution with multiple versions, one of them being the Stryker, Giunta told National Defense in a phone interview.

Ultimately, the trainer would have to provide a similar functionality as the heavily used Engagement Skills Trainer--a marksmanship training device--to test the soldiers' reactions under attack in convoy operations.

PEO STRI is in the initial stage of building that common driver-training program, Giunta said. "We have found an opportunity to leverage this drivers' trainer for our Stryker customer," said Giunta. Tanks and air defense artillery will be incorporated. "Our goal is to integrate all the organic weapons platforms on our vehicle platforms."

The Army has five other requirements for driver trainers, and none of them are integrated, according to Giunta. "So we are going to build five different driver' trainers in five different locations with five different functional capabilities, and none will talk to each other," he said. The solution was to incorporate all the other devices into one common trainer.

"We have guys who have never fired out of a moving vehicle before, and less than 24 hours in the country, he is doing it live, with the bad guys," he said. "There aren't very many mechanics shooting their .50 caliber [machine guns]."

Nevertheless, the databases associated with the current driver trainers are "pretty static," meaning that they do not present any challenges or obstacles. In Baghdad, soldiers routinely are attacked with rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), mines and improvised explosive devices, but are not trained to recognize them, Giunta said.

"We do not put anything dirty in there, so how can a driver of a Humvee identify that at 40 miles an hour on the Baghdad streets," he said. "You have to see that over and over again in training in order to identify that."

Two installations--Fort Hood, Texas, and Fort Lewis, Wash.--already are trying to address these issues for their soldiers before they deploy.

"The field is taking the Engagement skills Trainer and trying to use the EST as a convoy trainer," he said. Soldiers at the two installations train on mockup Humvees with organic weapons stations. Once they get ambushed as part of the training scenario, they have to jump out of the Humvee and get on the EST to learn how to read, said Giunta.

Shoot/Don't Shoot

The EST 2000 is designed to provide initial and sustainment training for marksmanship, static unit collective gunnery, tactical operations and "shoot/don't shoot" scenarios. It supports three modes of training--marksmanship, squad/fire team collective and judgmental use of force.

The EST 2000 models 11 small arms and is deployable with its own system shelter, according to Giunta. The service currently has seven systems in Afghanistan and five in Kuwait. Giunta's office is sending 15 systems to Iraq "with a potential for 100 more sub systems," he said at the conference.

The trainer goes through a total of 423 scenarios, out of which 200 put a squad in any kind of terrain and any kind of weather. His office is working on creating specific scenarios for Afghanistan and Iraq. Most current systems are based on European scenarios. "Our requirements process takes 10 years and another 10 years to build. We are probably not addressing our current mission needs, so we are putting some new scenarios in there to look like, touch like, feel like Baghdad."

The training also has to be adjusted to do checkpoint operations. "The soldiers that are going forward today to Iraq will be geared to the shoot don't shoot scenario, when you have that vehicle approaching that checkpoint," Giunta said.

Unconventional weapons systems for special operations forces also are going to be modeled in the EST 2000, said Giunta. "That is growing rapidly," he said.

The EST 2000 is the only required marksmanship device for the Army, but as a result of mission needs both in Afghanistan and Iraq, the PEO STRI has developed the laser marksmanship training system for individual training.

"The EST is a pretty big system. You can't put it on the back of a soldier to take it down to the Baghdad airport, and do sustainment and stability training," Giunta said. The LMTS was deployed with the support of the Rapid Equipping Force, an Army initiative to expedite needed technologies to the field.

"Through that effort, we worked an operational-need statement, and ... in less than 40 days we developed our program, and we are about to field this device," said Giunta. The program was awaiting funding decision at the end of February.

The training community also needs to focus on integrating live, virtual and constructive training at military operations in urban terrain facilities to make up for the lack of live training.

Key to these simulated environments is rapid terrain generation, he said, but at the same time, that also is a challenge and a cost driver for the training systems.

The Army is building digital imagery databases of urban training centers in the United States. "We are about to model all the [continental U.S.] based MOUT facilities, and we are going to give those facilities the same virtual database that the soldiers fight on live," he said. At first, the soldiers would practice tactics, techniques and procedures on these devices, and then run the exercise live the next day.

The first prototype of this kind of training device is going to be at Fort Campbell, Ky., home of the 101st Airborne Division, just returning from Iraq. This V-IMTS system is going to be based on the one semi-automated force concept and it will have common behaviors with other trainers, Giunta said.

With the virtual environment, soldiers can analyze and recognize the impact of indiscriminate fire in an exercise.

What is important for the community is to have "dynamic" terrain, said Giunta. A dynamic terrain would help soldiers learn how to avoid fratricide when fighting in buildings, for example.

On a desktop trainer, soldiers rehearse scenarios at team level, then move on to squad-level training and in the end to live exercises. "It puts the soldier in an immersive environment," he said. "We had to figure out how to integrate our virtual devices into the live exercise."