Gaining an Asymetric Advantage
MT2 2010 Volume: 15 Issue: 1 (February)
INDUSTRY TEAM PROVIDES THE U.S.
MILITARY WITH TRAINING DEVICES AND
TECHNIQUES THAT SUPPORT WARFIGHTERS IN
THEIR EFFORTS TO STAY UP TO DATE WITH
THE SHIFTING TACTICS OF THEIR ENEMIES.
U.S. armed forces fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan confront adaptive and agile enemies who rely upon unconventional warfare methods. The opposing forces strike at American warfighters with improvised explosive devices (IEDs), suicide bombers, familiar munitions rewired to detonate in different ways, and other asymmetric weapons.
The industry team provides the U.S. military with training devices and techniques that support warfighters in their efforts to stay up to date with the shifting tactics of their enemies.
Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), for example, has developed an adaptable trainer based on its One Semiautomated Forces (OneSAF) engine. The company’s Analysis, Simulations, Systems, Engineering and Training Business Unit, based in Orlando, uses its highly flexible Common Driver Trainer (CDT) systems to produce new training scenarios for U.S. military forces based on what they experience in the field, explained Josh Jackson, vice president and division manager of the unit’s Concepts, Doctrine and Training Division.
“One of the innovative or novel dimensions is the lessons learned methodology that we can use to incorporate near realtime feedback and pull lessons from the ongoing fight into the training they are receiving at the training center,” Jackson told MT2.
For instance, SAIC has provided three or four CDT systems to the Battle Command Training Center in support of Army Stryker Brigades at Fort Lewis. The brigades use the systems to train for deployment into Iraq and Afghanistan. Soldiers learn how to drive their Strykers under complex scenarios and in difficult environments, noted David Rees, SAIC senior vice president and director of special projects.
“The key thing there is that your solutions have to give options to the user,” Rees told MT2.
“You can’t predict everything that is going to happen. If a new kind of threat emerges very quickly in the battlespace, there is going to be a time lag between understanding what that is and implementing that model and delivering it back into the training environment. We have that as quickly as we can. It’s a pretty closed loop. It varies based on the kind of situation,” Rees continued.
“If you have a system that gives flexibility to the operators so they can combine components and create a solution they can deliver to the trainer, that’s the key. You don’t have to model the threat in high-level detail. You can create the effect of the threat using existing capabilities in the system and then let the software and system development cycle catch up once that situation is better understood,” he added.
Rees credited SAIC’s flexibility in meeting the training demands to an architectural approach that allows for composable solutions where operators can quickly create models, environments, and scenarios required to replicate the battlespace conditions.
Despite asymmetric tactics deployed by the enemies of U.S. forces, commanders must still follow a decision process, examining the situation, determining intent, and countering that intent— much as they would in conventional warfare. The technical agility offered by SAIC’s OneSAF technology provided the means to shift training from Cold War thinking on traditional battlefields to modern warfare in urban settings, Rees remarked.
“We develop particular representations of suicide bombers and urban market environments such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan. But we are trying to help commanders understand the cognitive experience they are going to have when they go into the fight. With solutions that are architecturally agile, we find a good model for a suicide bomber, incorporate that into the training solution, and then apply it to deliver that experience for the commander and staff groups that receive the training,” he commented.
Jackson also noted that an understanding of language and culture is also an important factor in meeting the challenge.
TACTICAL LEVEL
Many things that warfighters learn, such as firing various weapons, often involve the same basic skills whether they are engaged in conventional or unconventional warfare scenarios, noted Lamar Tooke, vice president of International Training Inc. (ITI)-Virginia.
“An infantryman on the front has to apply [his] skills regardless of whether the overall strategy or the operational level is asymmetric or not. He still must apply the skills he knows,” Tooke elaborated.
“Even if you are applying an asymmetric solution at the operational or strategic level, at the level an operator conducts his business—how he shoots, how he drives, or how he protects someone—that won’t particularly change just because we have an asymmetric solution that we are applying,” he added.
So ITI offers much of the same training in basic firearms, advanced firearms, aggressive driving, security operations, and protective details for unconventional scenarios as it would conventional scenarios, because those techniques are applicable at the tactical level in various situations.
“A good example would be today, we shifted away from the main combat effort to basically securing towns and cities and providing security to the ordinary citizens of Iraq and now Afghanistan,” Tooke said.
“While that is a different solution to the problems of combat—maybe it’s asymmetric, maybe it’s not—the individual on the ground who has to deliver fire, stand a post to guard something, go on patrol and so forth, those skills don’t particularly change just because we are applying an asymmetric solution at a higher level,” he added.
While most of the biggest changes occur at the strategic or operational levels of combat, training companies sometimes must adjust their training based on how changes in warfare affect troops on the tactical level. For example, Tooke acknowledged, over time infantrymen have changed the distance at which they zero their weapons. Years ago, ITI would train a soldier to zero his weapon at 250 yards.
“Today, because most of the engagements are occurring inside of 100 yards, we are zeroing those weapons at 100 yards,” Tooke observed. “That takes advantage of the shorter range we are now faced with. One of the reasons for that, especially for special operators, is that there is more emphasis on a one-shot kill to put these people out of action, and more emphasis on the marksmanship to do that because of the force that is there.”
ITI also adjusts training for specific tactics based on changes in deployments for U.S. troops. With more troops going to Afghanistan than Iraq in recent months, ITI has made certain to provide training that would be useful in Afghanistan.
“We have developed a driving course with a surface that matches the driving conditions in Afghanistan better than what we had before in Iraq,” Tooke revealed. “It’s more of gravel and loose sand to hard surface and back to gravel and sand. It’s a very changing surface.”
STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURES
“Things that will help you in Iraq will get you killed in Afghanistan,” warned Gordon Potter, special operations project manager at Strategic Operations Inc., based in San Diego.
“That’s one of the biggest training hurdles the Marine Corps pushed out last February,” he continued. “There are differences. There are differences in every aspect of their tactical movement. It’s a completely different spin on unconventional warfare. You have cell activity where you have bombmakers. They don’t have airplanes but they have munitions they can detonate in key intersections. They have all of the time in the world to observe your SOPs [standard operating procedures], which is why you must change your SOPs now and then.”
Strategic Operations provides realistic training to commanders with opportunities to test and evaluate their SOPs to ensure that everyone is on the same page. The company uses pyrotechnics and roleplayers to create scenarios that represent what warfighters would encounter in battle, Potter said. Commanders can use those scenarios to observe deficiencies in their SOPs and test their troops’ ability to react in terms of timing as well as effectiveness.
So warfighters might enter a Strategic Operations scenario at Fort Irwin to train on trauma relief of an IED interdiction. They will encounter a preset combat village that looks like a village they would encounter in Iraq or Afghanistan—complete with roleplayers representing villagers going about their daily activities.
But suddenly an IED will explode! The warfighters must respond via their operating procedures while the commander evaluates their response.
“We don’t get involved in the technical aspects of the training. We lend solutions to the military, but the military really trains itself. We provide a test bed with hyper-realistic scenarios for commanders to evaluate their troops on the ground,” Potter stated. The realistic scenarios come complete with wounded warfighters and civilians who have had limbs blown off from the IED. A prosthetic simulates a shredded leg, for example, while a pump splatters blood from the victim.
“Medics will roll up on someone like that and absolutely freeze up because they have never seen anything like that,” Potter described. That sort of stress inoculation gives warfighters an opportunity to deal with those scenarios in a realistic setting instead of seeing it for the first time in the real setting.
Due to the high cost that creating that sort of realism involves, Strategic Operations brings its scenarios into military training during the last 30 days of the deployment certification exercises for troops.
“It does help them in that type of warfare setting where you have to be ready for anything at any given moment, because there is no safe place in asymmetrical warfare. There are no frontlines and no conventional army to fight,” Potter commented.
A true testament to the effectiveness of the training has been its increased use by special operators at Fort Bragg and other places, he added.
IED REPLICAS
Before warfighters encounter IEDs in the field, they would like to know what they look like, how they work, and how to stop them from working.
Enter Inert Products LLC of Scranton, Pa., which manufactures replicas of ordnance the U.S. military finds in combat. Inert Products provides a complete customized capability in fashioning IED training aids, president Robert Rozzi told MT2.
“When they call us up and tell us they have encountered a new gizmo, we can pretty much immediately produce devices based on their intel, based directly on what is being seen from day to day,” Rozzi said.
The company uses a hard material similar to rubber—capable of being dropped, shot or jarred without breaking—to create its replicas. The training aids can be technically accurate, complete with wires and parts, or simply visual dummies. Many of the replicas duplicate modified ordnance such as rockets, RPGs and projectiles.
“Most of the IED training lanes or IED ‘petting zoos’ involve ordnance-based IEDs,” Rozzi explained. “A big draw with our replicas is that we have a really good material to cast these products from.”
Previous replicas were brittle, cracking or crumbling if dropped. But while the production of the replicas has changed, the replicated item often remains the same subject. In Afghanistan, for example, much of the ordnance involves items that were left there from the former Soviet Union’s invasion of the country more than 20 years ago. Enemy forces in Afghanistan simply find new ways to blow up the ordnance in combination, such as using a landmine to set off a daisy chain of explosives, Rozzi commented.
Training with the replicas typically starts with familiarization with the devices in a classroom setting. Warfighters might handle the replicas or watch videos of different items in theater, such as when soldiers discover a cache of munitions.
Warfighters then might enter scenariobased training where they have to carry out a mission and encounter IEDs in route and deal with them firsthand, Rozzi said. Inert Products learns from its clients in the U.S. Army and Marine Corps how the enemy tactics for deploying ordnance change in Afghanistan and Iraq, and then the company adjusts accordingly.
“The tactics change. When our technology gets a little better, they figure out a way to get around that. That’s been the road we have been going down this whole time,” Rozzi commented.
To duplicate the tactics of enemy forces in training settings, Inert Products introduced in December its Jihadi Bomb Kit, which contains common ordnance found among enemy combatants. A future variant, the Rockets Kit, will offer rockets and RPGs. Inert Products also plans to roll out a Domestic IED Kit, which would represent the equipment someone building bombs in a basement would likely possess. ♦