Breathtaking technology advancements are compressing and merging the training readiness loop—comprising heretofore three distinct events: training, mission rehearsal and mission execution. This trend is particularly evident in DoD’s UAS community.
A recent industry gathering in Washington, D.C., again illustrated that innovations in technology are keeping pace with, and in many cases surpassing, the UAS community’s requirements. One industry vendor demonstrated a real-time network service that provides a UAS team with a complete view of the battlefield that would not be available through the vehicle’s limited field-of-view sensors—and permits other team members to concurrently train or rehearse for missions.
This and other training systems for DoD’s burgeoning fleet of UASs are being developed, pardon the expression, “on the fly,” often without standards and a joint perspective. Innovative vendors meeting the warfighters’ insatiable appetite for these vehicles are migrating best practices and sub-systems from legacy UASs into follow-on models to meet urgent operational needs. And therein is the challenge for the department: to establish standards and policy to prevent service-centric and other stovepipes from developing within these rapidly expanding training programs.
Shifting course, the buildup of U.S. forces in Afghanistan is creating an urgency to embrace training for irregular warfare. The road to supporting IW missions is revealing huge gaps in existing DoD training doctrine and capabilities. Some of the pronounced shortfalls are in M&S—in particular, how to effectively insert human behavior into models and their supported simulations.
The department’s leadership has been mainly silent about bolstering the services’ training readiness for IW missions. MT2 hopes that the forthcoming 2009 QDR will be the first of many policy and supporting documents to address how U.S. forces will maintain their superiority in both regular warfare and IW—through world-class training.
I look forward to your comments.
|
|
 |
