Battle Stations 21
NEW SIMULATOR PROVIDES A GLIMPSE INTO THE FUTURE OF MILITARY TRAINING TECHNOLOGY
At about the same time that these pages are first reaching readers’ hands or screens, the initial group of U.S. Navy recruits will be completing a grueling 12-hour exposure in what is arguably the most realistic military training simulation environment in existence. Dubbed “Battle Stations 21,” the new simulator provides a glimpse into the future of military training technology.
The simulator experience is part of an $82.5 million facility at the Navy’s Recruit Training Command at Great Lakes, Ill., about 30 miles north of Chicago.
Upon entering the 157,000 square foot building, recruits will find themselves walking along “Pier 8,” gazing at the USS Trayer, a 210-foot-long replica of a guidedmissile destroyer. The pier is complete with a façade that replicates an actual pier in Norfolk, Virginia.
Realism is added thanks to special effects lighting, sea and diesel scents, surround audio and 90,000 gallons of water sloshing between the pier and the ship. Although less than half the length of an actual destroyer— the Arleigh Burke class destroyers run just over 500 feet in length—the USS Trayer presents recruits with the feels, smells, sounds and appearance of a real destroyer through the incorporation of the latest in virtual reality, entertainment technology and modern construction techniques.
The simulator is used as the culmination of all training received at the Navy’s Recruit Training Command, the service’s only boot camp. During the 12-hour test that marks the recruits’ final rite of passage, the young soon-to-be sailors will proceed through 17 different shipboard scenarios that will test problem-solving, communications and other essential skills, with realistic consequences for their actions.
DEVELOPMENT
Battle Stations 21 is part of a 10-year, $763 million recapitalization of Recruit Training Command, Great Lakes. The recapitalization began shortly after the Navy closed its recruit training facilities in Orlando, Fla., and San Diego, Calif., consolidating all U.S. Navy recruit training at Recruit Training Command, Great Lakes.
On the service side of the project, Battle Stations 21 reflects the cooperative efforts of Naval Service Training Command, Naval Station Great Lakes, Recruit Training Command, Naval Air Warfare Center of Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR), and Naval Facilities Engineering Command (NAVFAC)- Midwest.
The industry lead is James McHugh Construction Company of Chicago, which was awarded the design-build contract for construction of the simulator on April 21, 2004. McHugh served as the designbuild team leader for more than five-dozen subcontractors in the development and construction of the simulator.
According to Sheila Sheridan, a Senior Project Manager at McHugh who has been involved with Battle Stations 21 from before the bid submission to the current time, the greatest challenges early in the program involved communications between the myriad participating organizations and companies.
“There’s no doubt about it,” she explains. “The biggest challenge in the design phase was the communication between all of the different entities that were involved. By that, I mean that we basically spoke different languages. For instance, what we call a specification, the Navy calls a CDRL. So for a long time we thought we were talking about different things, not knowing that we were talking about the same things. And it was very frustrating. Then, to add another layer onto the process, was the participation of the entertainment industry. And internal to the Navy, NAVAIR had not worked with NAVFAC before. This is the first time. So even internally to the Navy there were communications issues. But once we all finally got that we were talking about the same things the frustration levels died down a lot after that, when we agreed to understand each other.”
“The entertainment industry members were partners with us from the very beginning in bidding this job,” she added. “We had one contractor that held the contracts for all of the entertainment industry—almost like they were a prime contractor. But halfway through the job they left. So McHugh had to negotiate all of the contracts for the six entertainment industry participants that we had, and now McHugh holds all of those contracts. That was kind of hairy.”
Construction of the project began in October 2005. Along with the USS Trayer simulator, a 55,700 square foot portion of the Battle Stations 21 building complex will also house the Navy’s Recruit Training command headquarters and the Recruit Division Commander’s School.
In addition to James McHugh Construction Company, another significant industry contributor was GlobalSim, Inc. Based in Salt Lake City, Utah, GlobalSim applied its experience in manufacturing training simulators for the military, shipping and construction industries to its role as lead integrator for the Battle Stations 21 effort.
Special effects team participants included Scenic View, Inc. (set fabrication), Design Island, Inc. (media and art direction), Advanced Entertainment Technology (action equipment, special effects and the overall system supervisor, which is the main control system for the simulator), Edwards Technologies, Inc. (audio/video), Yeager Design (lighting design), and Kidde Fire Trainers Inc. (fire effects elements).
Other team members ranged from the architectural and engineering firm SmithGroup to Chicago-area Meade Electric Company Inc.
McHugh’s Sheridan notes that the construction phase of Battle Stations 21 came with its own share of surprises.
“We knew, for example, that this had to look, feel and act like a ship,” she says. “And we knew that, on a ship, all of the walls and bulkheads are steel. But that was cost-prohibitive for us, and the weight of the steel welds would have totally impacted our foundation. So we designed plywood walls. But once we started putting the plywood up, and coating it, we realized that you could see the grain through it. So we had to take it all back down and order what’s called ‘super ply,’ this really, really flat plywood. It’s very expensive but it did the trick. And that worked very successfully.”
Construction of Battle Stations 21 was completed in late 2006, with several weeks of program testing leading up to full use by recruits, which is slated to start in February 2007.
RITE OF PASSAGE
Program participants describe Battle Stations 21 as “a process as well as a building,” emphasizing that it represents the culminating event for naval recruits. Upon completion of the event, recruits earn the title of “sailor.”
Once Battle Stations 21 transitions to that full Navy use, four divisions of 88 recruits—352 recruits, along with their facilitators—will be able to move through the facility at once, every night of the year. The simulator is staffed by 67 operators; including 63 facilitators and four staff members.
Recruits begin their experience by descending along a walkway to a below-grade facility entrance (the facility rises to a height of 40 feet above the ground and also extends 14 feet below grade). The initial descent is accompanied by the broadcast sounds of shipyard activity, providing recruits with a feeling of being away from base.
Once aboard the USS Trayer, multiple events can occur in various spaces simultaneously, many of which must be reset several times within a night so that all participants can experience each event.
During the recruits’ 12 hour final rite of passage, they will be participating in 17 different events; ranging from the relatively mundane to the horrific, with scenarios including: mission brief/move aboard, stores on-load/off-load, line handling, main/ auxiliary watch, roving security, bridge watch, lookout, casualty control station, preparation for general quarters, firefighting, flooding, mass casualty, emergency egress, man overboard, compartment check-off list, ship maintenance, and capping ceremony. During the scenarios, recruits are tested for problem solving, communications, and other essential skills. Actions have realistic consequences and facilitators use wireless hand-held PDAs to control the action, monitor recruits and communicate with other parts of the operations team.
The McHugh team credits this use of handheld computers and their ability to control the simulation according to recruits’ actions for the high recruit flow-through rate of 352 at one time.
Controllable elements within the simulator include: realistic scenery; flame effects; water effects; high-definition projection; custom video media; computer animation; animated props; surround ambient audio; point source sound effects; sub woofer vibration; defined ambient lighting; strobes and lighting effects; fog, smoke and air effects; scent machines; ambient temperatures; and hot objects.
According to program descriptions, “Through set design, props, lighting and a variety of special effects, including piped-in aromas, recruits will experience horrifying realism, from mass casualties to a burning ship. Among the touches: with built-in MP3 players triggered by infrared technology, ‘injured’ dummies scream, moan or make faint breathing sounds. Thousands of gallons of water flood ship’s compartments. Flames jet from the firefighting areas. Floors shake to mimic the ship’s movement in the berthing area. With Battle Stations, the Navy has risen to the challenge of a tough audience: it is using the best in 21st century technology to educate recruits who grew up in the multimedia age.”
While some participants are careful to categorize Battle Stations 21 as a “simulator” rather than a “trainer,” senior U.S. Navy representatives are not as quick to make that distinction.
“I’m not hard over on the ‘trainer’ versus ‘simulator’,” noted Rear Admiral Arnold Lotring, Commander, Naval Service Training Command, in late November 2006. “I’ve only been here a couple of weeks but I’ve been in Navy training for eight years. And there will be a certain amount of training going on in any simulation. The point is that this has really been designed as a capstone event so there is really less ‘training’ someone at that point but rather ‘evaluating’ whether the recruits have met all the requirements. But the reality is that any time you go into an environment like that you are going to learn something—so there is training going on.”
MCHUGH TRAINING & SIMULATION DIVISION
Based in large part on the success of the Battle Stations 21 team partnership, on November 30, 2006, James McHugh Construction Company announced the formation of a new division that will specialize in the design and construction of high tech training and simulation facilities. Designated McHugh Training & Simulation, the division was formed in partnership with GlobalSim, Inc.
According to the company announcement, for new clients, McHugh Training & Simulation will provide performance measures similar to those integrated into Battle Stations 21, allowing data to be collected and synthesized into user program curricula to continually enhance those training programs.
“We emphasize objective-based training, so we can work with designers and experts within our clients’ fields to distill training objectives into specific performance measures within the simulations,” observed Clyde M. Stauffer IV, vice president of new business for GlobalSim.
In addition to establishing the foundation for the McHugh Training & Simulation Division, Sheridan said that the Battle Stations 21 experience provided other lessons learned that should be applied to future training simulator programs.
“The biggest lesson that we’re finding now involves bringing all of the systems together into one overall supervisory system and then testing it,” she says. “And I think one of the lessons learned, from our perspective, is that we next time know that we need a longer test period to shake out and ferret out all of the code problems within the programs themselves. So I would say that we would extend our test and adjustment timeline on future projects. We had it 45 days on this one and we brought the Navy in to run facilitators and sailors through to help us with the testing—to try to expedite the testing. And that definitely worked. But it would have been nice to have a lot longer time.”
“Battle Stations 21 generates excitement,” she concluded. “This project generates so much excitement that we’ve already had over 90 tours: The Secretary of the Navy; Chief of Naval Operations; Congressmen; race car drivers; 14 different countries represented coming through here. People are excited and they want to be made aware of this type of technology. And McHugh Training and Simulation is going to do just that.” ♦