On April 27th, 2018 The Synthetic Training Environment Cross Functional Team hosted the Director, Army Office of Business Transformation, Lieutenant General Edward Cardon. Major General Gervais, the Director, STE/CFT, and Deputy Commanding General, Combined Arms Center-Training (CAC-T), as well as a team of CFT Subject Matter Experts updated LTG Cardon on the STE-CFT's initial capability development efforts.
During his visit, Cardon was provided with hands on demonstrations of STE prototypes like One World Terrain (OWT), and the Soldier/Squad Virtual Trainer (S/SVT). Demonstrations provided MG Gervais the opportunity to highlight key evolving technologies that the team is experimenting with to inform ongoing capability development efforts.
Cardon spoke of the training revolution realized with the creation of the Army's Combat Training Centers (CTC) and the need now for a second revolution in training that will be provided by the STE. Cardon also spoke of two kinds of innovation, incremental, and disruptive, he said. "For years, the Army has incrementally improved upon its existing equipment [and training systems] with upgrades." And that the Army's current upgrades approach has come up against the law of diminishing returns. What the Army needs now, he said, is a shot of disruptive innovation. And that is especially true in the case of providing state of the art training for the Army and Marine infantry squads.
But what is disruptive innovation you may ask? It is a completely different way of thinking about something. For instance Cardon explained, "a 10-times rifle [with] 10 times the stopping power, 10 times the range, 10 times the ammunition [as opposed to current rifle performance characteristics]. Or imagine he said, "the firepower of an attack helicopter wielded by an infantry Soldier." How does this apply to training?
The Army's CTCs are the premiere training environments and provide the best training experience possible. The STE will compliment CTCs, home station and other live training, in part by providing our Soldiers and Units the repetitions necessary to enter the live environment at a higher level of proficiency in preparation for a CTC rotation or deployment. According to MG Gervais, "the STE will help to maximize those live training opportunities to create veterans of 25+ bloodless [virtual] battles who upon encountering problem sets in a live environment-have seen them before."
The STE will offer other complimentary advantages to live training like, providing units the ability to train in tasks that are too expensive, too dangerous, or otherwise too difficult or even impossible to train in a live environment as well. According to MG Gervais, "we want our Soldiers to enter into a Synthetic Training Environment that immerses them in diverse, complex operational environments that replicate where they will fight, with whom they will fight with, against adversaries they will fight, and on the terrain they will fight. The STE will provide the warfighter the repetitions necessary to rapidly acquire and master the individual through BCT collective skills necessary to train [and] win in multi-domain battle."
Cardon stated that he was both impressed and supportive of the STE/CFT efforts, urging the team to continue to push forward with their innovation, to break the [acquisition] paradigm. In his closing remarks Cardon said, "You are [STE/CFT] on the forward edge of this [modernization initiative] don't take your foot off the gas."
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