ARMY AL&T
Whether we’re out of Iraq, in or out of Afghanistan, or engaged in any other place in the world, this cornucopia of mis- sions and mission skills and the burden it places on our Soldiers will continue.
Counterinsurgency-type operations are not going to go away. We have not done that very well, in terms of what we have given our Soldiers. We’ve got good equipment out there, but in the process, we have increased both the cognitive and physical loads on our Soldiers significantly.
Stability operations are going to con- tinue. So our challenge is to look at this and understand other types of war- fare where the biggest gaps are and will continue to be, the kinds of environ- ments where Soldiers and small combat teams have to perform operations that change very rapidly. These are the mis- sions where one minute a Soldier is in a vehicle getting all kinds of informa- tion—maybe engaging with the enemy or looking for IEDs—then the next minute is on foot engaging with the local population, having to adapt to multiple roles that may include being a friend, teacher, negotiator, diplomat, or a warfighter engaging the enemy.
Part of what our scientists in the “softer sciences” understand is that when you train a warfighter to be a warfighter, you’re developing a certain set of skills. The softer sciences include cognition and cognitive training, part of which includes how we process information. Information is coming so fast and from so many directions, and many decisions have to be close to instantaneous. Soldiers will have to deal with this, and S&T can help ameliorate this burden, which by the way is another example of turning things upside down. The skills, knowledge, and attributes you need to do other noncombat parts of the mission are what the human dimension is all about. We are working very closely with TRADOC to achieve a better understanding of the human dimension.
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We were very materiel-focused in the past. We had the Corps of Engineers, the medics, Army Research Institute, and training folks doing great research, but it was not integrated into a unified effort. The new approach is to focus on these big challenges and problems and not just the materiel things, encouraging the bigger community to work together to make a real capability impact.
This brings me to the war-gaming aspect. You have to understand what Soldiers are doing. We send a lot of sci- entists and engineers to both training installations and to theater, but we can’t send everyone. So one of the things we have had to do was create opportunities and venues for people to get together, focus around a problem or a mission, and, with Soldiers in the same venue, understand what they’re thinking, how they’re operating, and what their con- cerns are in a mission environment. That’s what the war-gaming activities do. That’s what a well-designed experi- mental venue will do.
For example, let’s look at the battle at Wanat. What went wrong? The military has analyzed it, and the S&T community needs to understand the problem. In this scenario, we have
a small combat team that needs to establish a remote Forward Operating Base. We needed to understand the things they had to do, what they were thinking: What did they need, what did they take with them, and what can we give them to make them successful?
If we play this war game with Soldiers, scientists, and technologists in the room along with people from TRADOC who have to write new requirements and folks from industry who know how to transform ideas into materiel, we can start understanding what Soldiers think and how they equip to do their job. We get a baseline for what they’re already doing and how their training and experiences influence their actions.
Then we say, OK, let’s give you a new capability, for example, maybe an Exoskeleton or an equipment-carrying robot to improve your ability to carry or offload equipment. Or maybe I give you a lot more information that you didn’t have before and then ask you, how would you execute your mission now? If we observe and interact with this process, we begin to understand the possibilities and potential impacts of technology on the warfighter and their mission. Context is important and is
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