Taking a Shot
MT2 2008 Volume: 13 Issue: 6 (November/December)
Virtual Marksmanship Training is a Safe,
Economical Way to Prepare Soldiers for the
Realities of Battle Before They are Actually in Harm's Way.
by Kenya McCullum
MT2 Correspondent
Like many other applications of the virtual environment, virtual marksmanship training—which gives service men and women the opportunity to hone their weapons skills through computer simulated exercises—is an effective tool being used to prepare soldiers for all the realities of the battlefield. Through the use of actual weapons that are integrated into a virtual scenario, airmen, soldiers, sailors and Marines experience the look and feel of battle in a controlled environment that prepares them for real-world warfare.
“Virtual marksmanship training provides another tool for the leader to train soldiers by providing the opportunity for the soldier to see ‘what right looks like,’ make mistakes, and learn from them,” said Major Thomas H. Nguyen, assistant product manager for Engagement Skills Trainer 2000 and Laser Marksmanship Training System, PEO STRI and Fred Roberts, training specialist, Systems Division G3 U.S. Army Infantry School, Fort Benning. “It also provides a way for the leader to measure performance—then work at those areas that need focus—and a way to train specific tasks that would require extensive logistical requirements to execute. Virtual training allows a soldier to conduct reparative training.”
And this type of virtual training increases an individual’s training readiness. According to Nguyen and Roberts, when virtual marksmanship programs have been used to train service men and women—as well as civilian law enforcement personnel— the trainees’ performance is greatly enhanced when they actually do shoot at a live range, often qualifying their first time using real weapons. In addition, because these simulated weapons do not use actual ammunition, there is a tremendous amount of money saved on resources. Since implementing virtual marksmanship training, the Army has saved $32 million annually on ammunition alone.
Industry partners that have teamed with the military to provide realistic simulated weapons training include Cubic Defense Applications, InterAction Laboratories, InterSense Inc. and Meggitt Training Systems Inc.
EST 2000
Since 2000, Cubic Defense Applications has been selling the Engagement Skills Trainer 2000 (EST 2000), which is a versatile system that can train soldiers on a number of weapons they will use and scenarios they will encounter on the battlefield. The product has three basic modes of training: marksmanship (which contains all of the courses of fire for a wide variety of weapons); collective (a setting that allows a unit to do small squad training and rehearse exercises in a virtual environment); and “shoot-don’t shoot” (a mode where a user’s judgment is measured when they navigate scenarios to learn appropriate behaviors—such as whether or not to fire a gun under certain conditions). In addition, users can upgrade the EST 2000 system to include a fourth mode of training— EST Plus Warrior Skills Training—which allows users to walk through a virtual environment, where they will experience all of the realities of combat including enemies. In this mode, trainees are surrounded by screens and they have to navigate their way through any obstacle that is thrown at them.
The EST 2000 system is a favorite among U.S. military personnel and many international warriors-in-arms. One of the reasons that the system is so widely used is because of the quality of the weapons that are used in the simulation.
“The heart of the system is that our weapon models have ballistic accuracy. When you fire an M16 in our range, you are getting the exact ballistic characteristic that you get when you fire a bullet on the live range,” said Mark Saturno, Cubic’s Simulation Systems Division’s director of business development. “And what that has resulted in for the Army is that the EST 2000 is specifically identified in both Army and Air Force regulations. Now that the soldiers can qualify in the virtual environment and do continuation training in a virtual environment, and for Army basic training, they have to qualify on our system before they go out to fire on the live range.”
FILLING A VOID
Maryland-based InterAction Laboratories began making virtual marksmanship training products for the military to fill a void in the products that were available on the market. As the company’s CEO Greg Merril explained, “One of the big challenges for military simulation training has been trying to figure out how to get the warriors to participate in the virtual environment training, particularly guys who are not driving vehicles. Obviously, the military’s had tremendous success in developing simulators for flying aircraft or for driving vehicles, but most of the people in the military aren’t driving vehicles. Most of them are on their feet, so tens of millions of dollars has been spent in developing concepts for this dismounted warrior.”
In response to that need, InterAction introduced the Leg Joystick—a practical interface where users can practice handling their weapons while walking and running. This provides a physiological realism to simulation training that was needed, particularly for military users. Merril said that previous virtual marksmanship products only attached a small joystick to a weapon, which made the soldier hold it incorrectly and didn’t allow for a realistic response from the body or an appropriate range of motion.
“You could walk 100 miles by pushing your thumb forward, and you don’t have to be tired at all,” he said. “That’s not realistic; if you actually had to walk 100 miles, you’d be exhausted. It’s important to provide realistic training, and the interface for walking should require the same metabolic amount of work as doing the walking in the real world.”
The Leg Joystick marries virtual reality with the reality of walking into battle by allowing trainees to move their legs and apply a realistic amount of force and metabolic effort as they move around the simulated environment. This is made possible by the use of sensors that monitor the contractions of a user’s leg muscles as they walk or run during a training exercise. And the realism has been measured in the research done on the product—it burns up to 350 calories per hour and increases the user’s metabolic rate five times more than it is when they are at rest. As a result, soldiers can literally feel what they can expect to feel while they are on the battlefield.
360-DEGREE PERSPECTIVE
Since 1996, InterSense Inc. has provided inertial-based tracking systems to the military for simulation training applications, including fixed wing and rotary flight simulators, ground vehicle trainers, wireless weapons trainers and dismounted infantry simulation. Among the virtual marksmanship products in the InterSense catalog is the ExpeditionDI— based on technology provided by Quantum3D— which includes orientation sensors that can be mounted on helmets, on the soldiers’ bodies or on weapons.
“This complete system gives the soldier the ability to look around with the head-mounted display 360 degrees in a virtual environment,” said Brian Calus, InterSense’s sales manager for the United States, Mexico and Canada. “This system also tracks where their body position is and we’ve integrated very closely with Quantum for different body postures to provide different feedback for the soldiers—so the system will know if the soldiers are lying down, standing, or kneeling, and it will put that information into the virtual environment or into the soldiers’ interaction with the virtual environment.
That’s a little bit more realistic training, whereas with some of the orientation sensors, users can still hold the weapon incorrectly, and they can fire off their rounds. But with this system, the instructors would know if they’re holding the weapon properly because they can track where that weapon is. Also, they can track where the soldier is—so the soldier can actually walk around in a virtual environment.” These systems can be used with M16s, M4s and M29s to help the soldier become familiar with different types of weapons while navigating their way through realistic virtual environments.
HIGH-FIDELITY TRAINING WEAPONS
Meggitt Training Systems Inc.—formerly FATS (Firearms Training Systems)—makes judgmental, tactical and combined arms training simulations that are realistic and includes over 250 system-controlled weapons. These products give soldiers the preparation they need to handle themselves in real-life scenarios and allow them to quickly learn how to handle different weapons.
“The weapons that we produce feel like the real weapon, they act like the real weapon, they weigh the same as the real weapon, and they have the same balance as the real weapon. That’s one of the biggest strengths of our system. It gets soldiers used to handling a weapon and gets them over that fear factor prior to going to the live range and firing live rounds,” said Steve Hersman, Meggitt’s director of international sales.
While using the system, the trainee will stand in front of a projection screen with the simulated weapon and respond to different types of scenarios that are displayed. As the service man or woman shoots at their targets their performance is recorded and saved so their instructor can observe the firing patterns of trainees and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses— such as whether they are holding the gun too tight or jerking the trigger. In addition, the bullets that they use are made to behave like actual ammunition, even calculating factors such as the distance from the simulated target and the wind effects.
As a result of these features, the performance of trainees when they go on to shoot at a live firing range for the first time has improved exponentially. For example, when the Australian Army integrated Meggitt’s systems into its training, the soldiers saw a large increase in the amount of trainees that qualified during their first real-life range experience. Prior to adopting the company’s products, the failure rate was about 40 percent when soldiers went to the live range. However, after trainees began participating in the simulated exercises, that number dropped significantly. Now there is only a one percent failure rate.
In addition to helping soldiers learn how to use their weapons correctly, Meggitt’s simulation system includes a judgmental training mode—a video-based trainer with a number of scenarios that each have multiple outcomes. These scenarios teach the trainee how to appropriately react in a given situation— such as interacting with the public, guard checkpoint etiquette, and whether or not to use a weapon. ♦