By Rick Gregory, APEO Business Operations Support Staff
Ever since Captain Kirk uttered the famous line, “Beam me up, Scotty,” on the popular Star Trek television series, people have been fascinated with the idea of being instantaneously transported to another location.
For U.S. Soldiers, that day will soon be here, at least in the virtual sense.
By early next year, a squad of up to nine Soldiers will be able to enter a nondescript training room, each taking their place on an assigned 10-by-10 foot pad ,and within minutes be virtually transported together to a geospecific combat zone that’s alive with the 3-D sights and 360-degree sounds of the battlefield.
They can then carry out their assigned mission in a totally immersive environment. To add to the realism of battle, the system will be able to estimate and gauge the effects of the injuries sustained in the virtual environment, either from impact munitions such as bullets and grenades or explosive effects from IEDs.
Called the Dismounted Soldier Training System (DSTS) ,the new device consists of a man-wearable immersive system that includes: a helmet complete with a mounted display, an integrated head tracker, stereo speakers and a microphone for voice and radio communications; a computer backpack for processing and display of the 3-D virtual environment; sensors for tracking body positions; and instrumented weapons for optics, sights and scope. The trainees ’weapons will also be equipped with buttons in the foregrip to allow Soldiers to maneuver inside their virtual environment without actually moving.
In addition to all of the other “gee whiz” components, the DSTS will also accurately simulate the movement of ground vehicles, aircraft, dismounted infantry and guided weapons, a swell as conforming visually with the environment by identifying such elements as footprints, disturbed soil, rolling terrain and dense vegetation. As well, Soldier scan train in any virtual environment including nighttime ,daylight, and snow, rain or other weather elements that Mother Nature or, in this case, the trainer can throw at them.
The new technology represents a giant leap when compared to scenarios that could be played out in a virtual environment in 1999, when the need for a DSTS was first looked at in a four-year study conducted by PEO STRI ,the Army Research Institute and the Army Research Laboratory.
Back then, scenarios that could be introduced in the virtual environment were limited to daylight attacks only and Soldiers did not possess their full range of weapons ,like grenades and smoke.
Though the idea of a DSTS has been in the pipeline for quite some time, the immediacy of the deployment of the training system fits well with Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. Martin Dempsey’s stated goal of focusing on squad-level training.
“As an Army, no one can challenge us at corps level, division level, brigade level or battalion level,” he said when he appeared May 17, 2011, before the Senate Appropriations Committee’s defense subcommittee. “I want to ensure we’ve done as much as possible to make sure that the same degree of overmatch exist sat squad level.
“We’ll look at the squad as a collective whole, not nine individual Soldiers, and determine how to enable it from the bottom up to ensure that the squad has the training, leadership, doctrine ,power and energy, protection and lethality to win when we send them into harm’s way,” Dempsey told lawmakers.
John Foster, PEO STRI’s assistant project manager for the Close Combat Tactical Trainer in PM CATT, said the DSTS immersion offers a greater degree of flexibility than live training exercises based on physical mock-ups that can’t replicate the realism of live bullets or artillery explosions.
He was quick to emphasize, though, that “virtual training complements and reinforces live and constructive training; it’s not viewed as an either/or solution. ”He said, however, that “Dismounted Soldier will put the Soldier in a virtual environment with a replica of his weapon in his hands so he can go through all the same motions as in real life.” Another benefit of DSTS is its portability and small space requirement to train Soldiers.
Requiring just 1,500 square feet of space to operate in, which is less than the average square footage of a home in the United States, the DSTS can be used to train Soldiers prior to deployment as well as in forward areas of operations to train deployed Soldiers. While its focus is squad level training, multiple system scan also be networked together to train larger military units.
The rollout of the new system is expected to be launched at Fort Benning, Ga., in March next year, followed by 124 training units being placed throughout the Army.
In celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Army Acquisition Corps (AAC), Access is publishing articles that highlight milestones throughout the history of the AAC. Each article marks a moment in acquisition excellence.
This article was published in Inside PEO STRI, June 2011
