Cybertroops Keep War Games Real By Dan Orzech Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,68591,00.html
02:00 AM Aug. 24, 2005 PT This month, as they have every summer for 31 years, hundreds of thousands of North Korean soldiers will pour over the border and advance on the South Korean capital of Seoul, while U.S. and South Korean troops scramble to repel them. The invading troops, fortunately, are not real. They're the imaginary opponents in one of the world's largest war games, which the United States and the Republic of Korea hold annually. But even as the allies mobilize thousands of real soldiers for the exercise, thousands more, along with all the aircraft, will be strictly virtual. That's the case in a growing number of defense exercises. With ever-more-sophisticated simulation and modeling technology, the military today can mix and match real tanks, planes and ships with forces that exist only on computers -- and those located in virtual training environments, such as pilots in flight simulators thousands of miles away "We still do a lot of live training, but we can now also create a virtual fight," says Col. Gary Crowder, whose Air Force unit in Florida specializes in advanced training using simulation and modeling. "We'll take F-15C pilots in simulators at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, team them up with pilots in simulators in Florida, put them all under the command of an AWACS crew at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma, and have them fight together against an entirely simulated threat." Increasingly, the military is linking up live training exercises with those virtual fights, and with ones generated by computers. A massive training exercise called Joint Red Flag held this spring at Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas marked the military's largest effort to date to integrate live, virtual and computerized forces, says Crowder. While aircrews at Nellis flew 4,000 live training flights, pilots in simulators on the East Coast flew another 6,500 missions, and computers generated, or "constructed," 18,500 other sorties. All these flights had to be coordinated with live Army Patriot missile batteries, artillery and troops from the 4th Infantry Division at Fort Hood, Texas, as well as units from the Marines and Navy. Aiming to re-create the enormous complexity of a real-life military operation, Joint Red Flag involved more than 10,000 participants at 44 different locations across the country. Making it as real as possible was vital, says Crowder. "What we're trying to do," he says, "is train each of the participants, so when they get off the airplane in Afghanistan or Iraq, they've already experienced just about everything they're going to see when they get over there." That means training not just the pilots and the soldiers on the ground, but their support staff and commanders as well. For the Air Force, that includes the hundreds of officers sitting in the Air Operations Center who control the air war. To adequately train the controllers, a mix of live, virtual and computer-generated simulations is essential. In a real battle, the Air Operations Center would have to track thousands of flights a day, says Crowder. Flying that many sorties just for training, however, is far too expensive. Using simulated sorties lets the military create the same level of realism for the flight controllers as they would experience during actual combat. To controllers, the virtual -- the military calls them "constructive" -- flights are indistinguishable from live ones. The Air Force, however, is careful to track which are which. "If a real fighter needs midair refueling during a training exercise," says Crowder, "we can't dispatch a computer-generated tanker to fill it up." To add to the realism, the constructive simulations are not all flights, but include thorny logistical problems as well. "People don't always think about logistics when they think about airplanes," says Crowder, "but it's critical for us to know how many bombs and how much gas we have at each base. So we'll include challenges for our logistics officers, like finding out that all the fuel at a particular air base is contaminated." Keeping the illusion of combat alive while mixing real, simulated and computer-generated forces poses challenges of its own, says David Perme, managing director at Gestalt, a consulting company that works closely with the military on simulation technology. In a training exercise simulating a bombing mission to Iraq, for example, the aircrew might only be in the simulator for an hour or two, during the critical period when it is delivering its bombs. But to make the exercise realistic for the mission controllers, says Perme, "planes can't just appear in midair." That means feeding the air operations center a computer-generated constructive simulation of the flight for the entire time it would take to fly to the Middle East and back. When it comes time for the aircrew to climb into the simulator and take over, the constructive simulation has to transfer control to the simulator without any break in the flight information that the air operations center is watching. Seamlessly navigating that transfer of control can be tricky, says Perme. Still, these techniques will likely play an even greater role in military training in the future, Perme says. In part that's because of the price tag of live training exercises. In the REFORGER -- REturn of FOrces to GERmany -- exercises of the 1970s and 1980s, he says, "We used to send thousands of troops and weapons across the Atlantic to practice returning to Europe in case of a war there. The cost was enormous." The military can't afford that any more, especially with the cost of running today's high-tech weapons systems. Each F-15 fighter plane sent on a training exercise requires one and a half pilots and a crew of 10 maintenance people -- plus the cost of jet fuel and spare parts, according to the Air Force. Adding virtual and constructive simulations to live exercises allows the military to create training scenarios that approach the complexity of real warfare at roughly one-tenth of the cost of fully live training, says Crowder. It also allows them to provide a wider variety of training situations, says Perme. "You can imagine the military wanting to practice blowing up a building full of insurgents in downtown Baghdad," he says. "That's not something you can easily practice live." End of story You are a subscribed member of the infowarrior list. Visit www.infowarrior.org for list information or to unsubscribe. This message may be redistributed freely in its entirety. Any and all copyrights appearing in list messages are maintained by their respective owners.
