MOUT Training

Written by Peter Buxbaum

MT2 2011 Volume: 16 Issue: 1 (February)

Preparing for the urban fight.

The involvement of the United States in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan has demonstrated the importance of training personnel to fight and conduct other operations in urban environments. The U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Army have invested in physical facilities and virtual systems that prepare warfighters for military operations on urban terrain (MOUT) in highly realistic settings before they are deployed to theater.

The physical facilities are built to look like the environments were warfighters will eventually deploy. Most are instrumented with video equipment that allows for detailed after action reviews. Virtual systems develop MOUT skills on computer-based platforms. Sometimes the physical and virtual are combined with the projection of images on walls of the physical locations.

The Marine Corps has spent more than $300 million in building or acquiring three kinds of urban training venues: 36 MOUT facilities, two home station training lanes (HSTL) and three infantry immersion trainers (IITs). The MOUTs range from facilities designed to emulate larger urban areas with over 1,200 structures to those used to simulate a small village or neighborhood environments with less than 10 structures.

“The HSTLs are constructed to include pedestrian and vehicle lanes and structures used to replicate urban environments experienced during route clearance and IED defeat missions,” said Colonel David Smith, the Marine Corps’ program manager for training systems. “The IITs consist of urban structures finished and decorated to replicate geospecific locations, currently Afghanistan, paired with integrated direct fire training systems, virtual simulation screens and windows, and video instrumentation for after action review.”

The Army’s Program Executive Office Simulation, Training and Instrumentation (PEO STRI) also strives to replicate situations and locations that soldiers could face when operating in urban areas. “Right now we have three basic types of training systems: the urban assault course [UAC], the live fire shoot house, and the Combined Armed Collective Training Facility [CACTF],” said Dave Stewart, the project director for integrated MOUT training system.

Each of these facilities teach soldiers urban operations skills at different levels. The UAC and live fire shoot house are designed to teach soldiers how to enter and clear a room, the latter with the use of live fire. “We think of the UAC as more for individual or squad type of training,” said Lieutenant Colonel Craig Ravenell, the Army’s product manager for digitized training. “CACTFs are normally used for a larger group of soldiers up to the battalion level who must enter and control multiple buildings.”

“The CACTF and shoot house are both instrumented so that video records can be kept for an after action review,” said Stewart.

For the Marine Corps, the specific skills being developed at its various facilities depend on the size and the type of MOUT. “In the larger of the MOUTs, a Marine Expeditionary Brigade can train in a realistic environment on a variety of tasks relating to deployment and maneuvers in an urban setting,” said Smith. “The smaller MOUTs can replicate close quarter urban environments commonly encountered within the theater. The HSTLs are designed to provide counter improvised explosive device [IED] scenarios which provide real world training challenges. The IITs provide a small unit decision and rehearsal training environment for squad training and evaluation” in advance of deployment.

Two of the Army MOUT facilities are located at Indiana National Guard bases, Camp Atterbury and the Muscatatuck Urban Training Complex (MUTC).

“We train not only Indiana National Guard personnel,” said Lieutenant Colonel Ed Collins, director of plans, training and mobilization at both facilities, “but also soldiers mobilizing to various areas of the world including Iraq, Afghanistan, Sinai, the Horn of Africa and Kosovo.”

Muscatatuck is a facility encompassing more than 1,000 acres hosting more tha 100 buildings. The Army took that included a former hospital campus with 68 buildings, explained Collins, and has since added to them. “Muscatatuck contains many different types of buildings including a power plant, schools and housing,” said Collins. “We’ve roughed it up so that it looks like something out of a third world nation. We call it controlled chaos.”

Camp Atterbury, a much smaller facility sitting on 33 acres, includes structures that emulate 11 small villages. Structures at MOUT facilities are often fabricated using international shipping containers, which provide the advantage of being easily transportable to other training venues.

“We put realistic facades on the outside of the containers to make the structure look like a third world village,” said Collins.

One way to apply realistic facades to shipping containers is through the use of a product supplied by a company called Military Wraps. A patented wallpaperlike product is applied to the container to emulate the desired environment, explained Trevor Kräcker, the company’s president. Military Wraps provides turnkey solutions at more than 25 U.S. military bases by supplying ready-to-go training environments constructed from the shipping containers, together with the facades and any other necessary props.

“We provide immersive training scenarios from A to Z,” said Kräcker. “These environments can include everything from marketplaces, carts, gas pumps and everything else that is required. We have thousands of site-specific imagery that we print on our material and apply to the exterior of the container. The facades make the containers look like anything from an urban street scene to a mud hut. The facades are also easily changeable if you want to change the training scenario. The containers are also easy to transport.”

A company called Strategic Operations also provides mobile MOUT training solutions that can easily be constructed to suit specific training needs and transformed to emulate different training environments. The environments can be constructed using simple tools and at a rate of .01 man hours per square foot, said Kit Lavell, the company’s executive vice president. The company has been involved in providing training to more than 400,000 U.S. warfighters.

“In addition to providing exteriors and atmospherics, we have also been contracted to provide realistic interiors to buildings,” said Lavell. “We have decorated training structures to look like school houses, clinics hospitals, jails, animal pens, houses, mosques and butcher shops.” Strategic Operations also integrates virtual training systems into the simulated environments it creates through the use of projection technologies. “The projection systems provide avatars on walls which could portray the movement of civilians or insurgents,” said Lavell. “These help train warfighters in making shoot/don’t shoot judgments. The system also provides feedback on the decision-making as well as on the accuracy of the shooting.”

The company is also involved in the training itself by providing role players to characters that warfighters may encounter as part of their operations, such as village elders, religious leaders, government officials and opposing forces.

“We were the first company to use role players who know the language and culture of the geography being trained for,” said Lavell. “It is all part of making the training environment what we call hyperrealistic.” The company also borrows technology from the television and movie industries to provide realistic effects for weapons fire and blasts that warfighters may encounter during the course of operations.

The Marine Corps incorporated a number of technologies in its MOUT training facilities. The Instrumented Tactical Engagement Simulation System (I-TESS) instruments individual Marines and tracks them in MOUT. The Tactical Video Capture System (TVCS) “provides real-time visualization, situational awareness, and after action review capabilities,” said Smith. “The Battlefield Effects Simulators provide safe, real-time pyrotechnic and non-pyrotechnic threat simulation. The T-CREW surrogate devices are used to provide mission-critical training to employ counter radio electronic warfare jamming equipment to counter the threat of IEDs. The Special Effects Small Arms Marking System (SESAMS) is a user-installed weapons modification kit that allows the individual Marine to fire, at short range, low velocity marking round similar to paint balls. SESAMS provides instantaneous visual feedback and a sting to the skin upon impact during force-on-force close quarter battle scenarios.”

The Marine Corps is also actively involved in integrating live and simulated MOUT training. “Marines today are trained to meet mental, physical, moral and ethical challenges, and to be culturally aware of the consequences of their decisions and actions,” said Smith. “Our approach is to integrate live and simulation systems together in new ways to produce hybrid training arenas, call mixed reality, which are both immersive and realistic. We believe this strategy, successful for the HSTL and IITs, is transferable across many of our training systems.”

The Marine Corps looks for simulated training systems that “look, feel, sound and smell real,” said Smith. “They should be reconfigurable to support a variety of scenarios across the range of military operations consistent with the current operating environment and they should provide the capability to conduct effective after action reviews to support remediation.”

Camp Atterbury has a 5,000 square foot battle simulation center which is in the process of being upgraded to include such systems as Virtual Battle Space 2.

Virtual MOUT environments can be built with tools provided by Presagis, a Montreal-based provider of modeling and simulation software. The company’s customers include large systems integrators that build virtual training environments for military organizations.

Presagis’ tools fall into four categories, said Nick Giannias, the company’s vice president for research and technology. The first set of tools provides for content creation and allows for the generation of threedimensional environments that range in scope from a few square blocks to entire continents. The second category is simulation tools that populate the virtual environments with everything from people to buildings to vehicles. Visualization tools allow users to move through the virtual environment, whether that means patrolling a street or clearing a building. Artificial intelligence tools allow users to model behaviors of friends and foes alike that will be encountered in an exercise.

“Once you have the environment at the level of desired detail,” said Giannias, “you can create simulations around it and run different scenarios. It can be used, for example, for exercises to stop insurgent activity or to pick insurgents out of a crowd of civilians. The tools can also be used to allow users to view events from different perspectives and to analyze what is happening or what has happened.”

Giannias sees Presagis’ tools improving in the future to greatly speed the automatic virtualization of large swaths of terrain, such as entire cities and to more realistically model the nuances of human behavior.

At Military Wraps, Kräcker foresees improved abilities to change training scenarios from one environment to another. “Right now everything is Afghanistan,” he said. “We are looking to be able to change scenarios to an urban environment within a couple of hours. We believe this capability will be very well received.”

For the Marine Corps, new programs, some starting as early as fiscal year 2012, will enhance the MOUT training experience for warfighters. The Squad Immersive Training Environment “is anticipated to target and increase the ability of a number of live, virtual and constructive training systems to provide or add richness and realism to our immersive training environments,” said Smith. “Another is the Automatic Evaluation and Lessons Learned program. It will use video feed to trace the Marines’ positions throughout the MOUT.”

At Camp Lejeune, the Marine Corps will field the first Ship on Land (SOL). “It is designed to replicate a ship at sea and will provide a live fire, joint training platform,” said Smith. “A key addition to the instrumentation family will be the Marine Corps-Instrumentation Training System. This system is capable of monitoring real-time live, constructive and virtual simulation exercises for the purposes of data collection, analysis and review.”

Smith wants future simulated systems to “closely replicate conditions and effects on the battlefield to create intense, stressful, challenging training scenarios that accelerate the small unit leader’s decision-making cycle and force actions that actively respond to scenario events.” He would also like to see systems that use live operational tools for navigation, command and control, and target location and designation systems. They should also be interoperable with other USMC and joint simulations and simulators.

At Camp Atterbury and the Muscatatuck Urban Training Complex, Collins expects training environments to become ever more complex and detailed, providing soldiers with the look and feel of the actual environments in which they will be operating. This includes the interior of buildings, which will better simulate how rooms and hallways look in the real environment.

Perhaps more significantly, Collins sees cultural and judgment training enhanced. “This is a huge issue,” he said. “When working with local populations, it is important to gain their trust. This involves figuring out what they want from their association with U.S. forces, and that takes knowledge of culture, language, geography and the local environment.” ♦

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