Training Readiness Center

Written by Peter Buxbaum

 

That is the idea behind the creation of a live, virtual, constructive (LVC) training environment. Live training refers to “real people operating real systems,” according to a U.S. Air Force training presentation. Virtual “involv[es] real people operating simulated systems,” while the constructive domain involves machine-tomachine interactions. The combination of training components from each of these domains enables the training experience to emulate real operational conditions.

The U.S. military has been conducting LVC training for some time, but it has been done on an ad hoc basis. In other words, commanders would set up LVC training for a specific exercise at a specific location, then tear it down when the exercise was finished. If a similar exercise were scheduled at a different installation, the same LVC environment would have to be reconstructed from the ground up.

But DoD is now taking LVC to a new higher level of development. The U.S. Joint Forces Command has developed an LVC federation that enables various training venues to be linked together. The Army and, more recently, the Air Force, are seeking to develop an LVC architecture that would promote interoperability among systems and allow training components from the various domains to be integrated together on a plug-and-play basis.

“What LVC ultimately gives you is the ability to combine capabilities to create a more realistic training experience,” said Dan Gardner, director of readiness and training policies and programs in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

The LVC vision began to take form in the late 1990s, Gardner noted, when DoD began linking live training venues together. “As we got more into it,” he said, “we realized we could link everybody with everybody in live, virtual or constructive training or some combination of the three.”

The trick is to achieve a balance that maximizes the effectiveness and mitigates the costs of training. “As virtual capabilities become better, we are willing to trade some live training for virtual,” said Gardner. “Diversity is what it is really all about. What can we bring to the table, and what can we put into that environment?”

Integrating new capabilities into an LVC environment remains a continuing challenge. “We are still dealing with a lot of legacy systems, and that challenge will not go away for some time,” said Gardner. “Minimizing the costs of putting on an LVC environment is also not an inconsequential issue.”

“An LVC environment is built from a diverse range of existing and new systems built on top of a common simulation architecture,” explained Shawn Parr, chief executive officer of Calytrix, a company based in Perth Australia and providing training simulations to global customers. “Key to delivering an LVC environment is to select and seamlessly integrate the right tools to support and improve the training outcome.”

LVC does not necessarily provide an answer to all training needs. “Not all training is meant to be conducted in a collective manner,” noted Devin Lyders, the project director for the LVC integration architecture (LVC-IA) at PEO STRI.

But the current emphasis on ground operations and its pervasive complexities make the integration of capabilities that LVC can provide all the more important. “Live training is getting more and more expensive,” said Christopher Chambers, president of Laser Shot, a provider of firearms training solutions based in Stafford, Texas. “Anything that will make training more efficient and cost-effective is going to help.”

Many diverse live, virtual and constructive assets can be integrated into a single common operating picture to ensure situational awareness by all training participants. “A virtual UAV feed showing highly realistic simulated views can be wrapped with live entities into a larger constructive environment consisting of tens of thousands of simulated force elements, thus allowing very complex training to occur,” said Parr.

LVC has also enabled exercises in which live and virtual aircraft deploy simulated weapons into a live range, allowing instrumented soldiers on the ground to interact with friendly and enemy air assets. “All of these pieces can be interwoven to create a complex training solution,” said Parr. “LVC’s overarching objective is to deliver the most realistic synthetic wrap-around that enhances the training experience, providing simulated assets that would not otherwise be available for the warfighter to train with due to manpower constraints, availability or cost.”

Calytrix has developed major LVC programs, including the Australian Defence Forces (ADF) Joint Combined Training Capability (JCTC). For the JCTC, Calytrix integrates live soldiers and aircraft, communication systems, and constructive simulators, as well as unique exercise planning and assessment systems.

Laser Shot has been involved in LVC training in Fort Hood, Texas, according to Chambers, in which soldiers experienced gunnery training on live systems, surrounded by 360 degrees of virtual environment. “The constructive element was the integration of mission planning and mapping systems,” he said. Laser Shot also has been involved with analogous LVC boat gunnery exercises for the U.S. Navy.

To help the U.S. Army enhance training, improve effectiveness and manage costs, General Dynamics Information Technology (IT) provides Military Operations on Urban Terrain (MOUT) systems that are fully instrumented physical structures that closely replicate the urban battlefield environment. MOUT facilities provide soldiers a realistic training environment through integrated instrumentation. All components are integrated and managed from a central operations center that monitors and controls all of the audio, video, special effects and target technology.

General Dynamics IT recently completed instrumentation of a MOUT site at the King Abdullah II Special Operations Training Center (KASOTC) under a contract awarded by PEO STRI. The KASOTC is a 500-acre state-of-the-art training center that is the world’s first and largest special forces training facility of its kind, specializing in counterterrorism and internal security missions. “Applying LVC enables the military to provide realistic, immersive and highquality training, maximizing combat readiness,” said Zannie Smith, senior vice president of General Dynamics IT’s Army Solutions Division.

The nature of LVC is that it is constantly evolving, but one shortterm indication of maturity, for Parr, will be for “LVC environments to be maintained as a persistent online capability that can be called upon as and when required. Once persistence has been achieved, we can view and use simulation as a readily available and cost-effective service.”

THE FOURTH DOMAIN IN LVC

The latest U.S. Army field training manual includes gaming as a fourth domain that will eventually be integrated into an advanced simulated training environment.

Industry is also focused on integrating gaming into the LVC environment. “The incorporation of gaming technology promises to improve the virtual component,” said GDIT’s Smith. “Enhancements, such as rich scene content and depiction of geo-specific environments, will increase effectiveness. And due to its scalable architecture, training can happen anywhere and anytime, offering flexibility that is needed in today’s military environment.” The key is the ability to enhance the effectiveness of the tools commanders presently have in their tool boxes. One solution does not fit all requirements so the focus must be on systems that will integrate existing training tools (simulations) into future game-based solutions as well as working toward standardized interoperable solutions.

“The vision is that LVC, with the potential addition of gaming, will be seamlessly integrated so that a training user at an installation doesn’t have to spend a huge amount of money and effort to put on a training event,” said Lyders. “I’m not saying it has to be LVC all the time, but the LVC architecture will be one tool in commanders’ tool boxes to use as they see fit.”

LVC ARCHITECTURE

One effort to achieve the persistence Parr described has been undertaken by the U.S. Joint Forces command in the creation of the Joint Training and Experimentation Network (JTEN). JTEN connects 43 training locations in the U.S. and overseas, allowing personnel at divergent locations to take part in the same training exercise while being plugged into a real operational network.

“You can put an air wing in the air without ever leaving the ground,” said Gardner. “The Navy can use the same approach for fleet training. The real beauty is that system can also be used to conduct joint exercises with allies and coalition partners.”

Another such effort is currently ongoing in the Army, spearheaded by PEO STRI. “Currently, the Army and the other services do LVC events on an ad hoc basis and without a guiding architecture to abide by,” said Lyders. “The LVC integration architecture will put in place a persistent interoperable architecture among a subset of Army training systems.”

The program is slated to be developed incrementally beginning in fiscal year 2010. A request for proposal for LVC-IA was scheduled to be issued as this article went to press. The plan calls for development during fiscal years 2010 and 2011 and initial production and deployment in 2012.

The initial effort will be at identifying standards, protocols, components and capabilities that need to be developed for the LVC-IA. The initial focus of the program will be on an Army home station use. The training systems to be included as part of the first LVC-IA increment are as follows:

Live:

Homestation Instrumentation Training System (HITS);

Virtual:

Aviation Combined Arms Tactical Training (AVCATT), Close Combat Tactical Training (CCTT) and Call For Fire Trainer (CFFT);

Constructive:

Joint Land Component Constructive Training Capability Entity Resolution Federation (JLCCTC (ERF)) and One Semi-Automated Forces (OneSAF); and

Two command and control components:

Army Battle Command Systems (ABCS) and Global Command and Control System (GCCS).

“LVC-IA will build these capabilities into a core system,” said Lyders. “When those systems are integrated in proximity to each other, they will be more LVC-capable and will require less of a contractor support footprint, which will save money.”

“The primary task of the LVC-IA award winner will be to work with the government to develop a standards-based solution to interoperability of currently disparate training components,” said Bryan Cole, president of Cole Engineering Services Inc., an Orlando-based firm that will be bidding on the contract.

Cole anticipates that the LVC-IA will capitalize on the work already done by JFCOM. “Both have a common interest in interoperability, and it makes sense to learn from what others have done,” he said.

Developing a standards-based architecture will involve examining existing standards for their relevance to the LVC-IA enterprise. The key currently used criteria are the High Level Architecture (HLA) and the Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) standards, both of which govern simulation middleware and are common across many military systems.

“These are time-proven standards that may or may not be relevant to LVC-IA,” said Cole. “There are others, such as service-oriented architectures, which are Web-based. These standards for interoperability in the commercial and military domains exist, but they have to be resolved. That means that we need to look at the requirements and see what existing standards or updates to existing standards can meet those requirements.”
Other anticipated elements to the architecture include data control and semantics, according to Cole. “You have to make sure each of the domains uses a common lexicon,” he said.

Another challenge for the LVC-IA architect will be to develop a stable structure even as training technologies continue to evolve. “As component capability is advancing, it is incumbent that the architecture is sufficiently robust to accommodate changes in components without having to change the architecture itself,” said Cole. “Otherwise it almost defeats the purpose of the architecture because it will be difficult for the components to be interoperable with each other.”

In addition to developing the architecture, PEO STRI will also be granting money to the developers of the initial LVC-IA systems “to make changes in their developmental baselines,” said Lyders. “That is how you get at persistence. It’s not inventing a new set of gateways, translators and glue that holds it together. What we are doing is resourcing a certain amount of baseline change to make the components more LVC-capable.”

Lyders added that as LVC-IA matures, more training systems will be added. The LVC-IA contract will be let for two years and will include three option years, during which time the architecture will be fielded to 12 training locations around the world.

“The ultimate goal of LVC is to train the way we operate in advance of having to operate,” said Gardner. “You don’t want to find out how to do something in theater but in a controlled training environment made as realistic as possible.”

“I think it will be a great thing,” said Cole, referring to the LVC-IA. “When warfighters have a persistent LVC capability, they will be at an even greater advantage over our adversaries. It will provide a realistic, immersive environment in which soldiers can train for both kinetic and non-kinetic operations.”

But Calytrix’ Parr cautions that the ultimate LVC nirvana is not here yet. “While many technical aspects of integration have been substantially solved, integration and support of LVC systems still require” a good deal of further engineering and development, he said. “While the ultimate goal would be a truly plug-and-play environment where different simulations can simply be dropped into an LVC environment and work seamlessly, this vision is still some way off.” ♦

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