Simulate Now

The use of simulators, including desktop simulations, are helping first responders and CBRN teams prepare and accurately respond.

The developers of Doom, Halo, and other first-person shooter video games likely did not envision that they were making a contribution to national security when they dreamt up games about using lots and lots of ammo to achieve your mission. But the U.S. military, and the National Guard Bureau in particular, have increasingly discovered that they can enhance their readiness to respond to nuclear, biological and chemical threats through the use of training applications that take a page from such video games.

In a first-person shooter video game, the player controls a protagonist from the perspective of facing threats head-on. Military commands like the Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical and Biological Defense (JPEO-CBD) have found that the games have applications that reinforce training that medical response personnel receive to clean up after a chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear attack, according to an official Army spokesperson.

“Simulations such as Ambush! or Marine Doom are effective 3-D applications designed to teach small unit doctrine, tactics and procedures in a dynamic environment. They provide a hands-on feel to the threats to which warfighters might be exposed,” The JPEO-CBD Spokesperson told Military Medical Technology.

But he also cautioned: “While video simulations may be useful for individual or small group CBRN training, they might be less effective for higher-echelon commands and battle staffs that typically use messages, 2-D screen presentations and reports in their training evolutions.”

Still, the Department of Defense uses simulations of CBRN threats to achieve many goals, The JPEO-CBD Spokesperson explained. In addition to training on specific exercises and management tools, these simulations accomplish missions such as:

• Acquisition simulations for the procurement of CBRN defense systems
• Simulations that provide analysis to assist in the determination of performance parameters for CBRN systems
• Evaluations of new product concepts and tactics
• Logistics simulations to estimate the need for specialized equipment and personnel to respond to threats

One critical simulation under development by JPEO-CBD is the Joint Operational Effects Federation (JOEF)

“JOEF is a simulation that will provide military planners and higher echelon commands the ability to determine the anticipated effects of CBRN attacks or incidents on friendly and hostile forces, as well as on civilian populations,” The JPEO-CBD Spokesperson said. “It is envisioned JOEF will be able to exchange data with medical surveillance and information systems such as Joint Medical Workstation and Medical Capabilities Assessment and Status Tool.”

Other initiatives address specific needs of military and civilian personnel dealing with CBRN threats in urban areas or at military installations.

Civil Support Team Trainer

The Civil Support Team Trainer (CSTT), being developed by Engineering and Computer Simulations Inc. of Orlando, Fla., targets the training needs of specialized teams of National Guardsmen spread through out the United States and it's territories. These civil support teams (CSTs) are specially equipped and trained to support civil authorities in responding to and cleaning up after incidents involving weapons of mass destruction.

The 55 teams of National Guardsman rely upon the CSTT to maintain and improve their skill sets, said Brent Smith, vice president of Engineering and Computer Simulations.

“The training tool that we are building for them is based on commercial gaming technology,” Smith told MMT. “But it’s not just a game. It’s integrated with some standards.”

One such set of standards is the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM), specifications developed by DoD’s Advanced Distributed Learning initiative. Following SCORM standards produced highly modular training materials for use over the Internet in distance-learning applications.

CSTT is basically a game that CST members use to reinforce their instructions, Smith noted.

“It’s being used for sustainment training at this point in time. The teams are already highly trained. They go through 2,000 or 3,000 hours of classroom training and live training,” he said. “So this is just another opportunity for them to train, although the goal of the CSTT is for them to train alongside not just their team members but also first responders from geographically different locations.”

CSTT has not yet been widely deployed, but at press time, the application was scheduled for widespread use as early as March, Smith said. One of the simulation scenarios being built into the application would follow a CST member as he collects a sample of an unknown CBRN substance from a congressional office building in Washington, D.C. Trainees are required to follow all DoD instructions for collecting the sample safely in a multiplayer environment.

“If they mess one step up in the sample collection process, the computer can determine where the student was weak,” Smith added. “Was that a trend? Did he forget to decontaminate his hands in between every sample he collected or just this one? You can look and say, well, maybe he should do some refresher courses. So you could fire up a couple of pages of Web-based instruction afterwards as part of an after-action review.”

With CSTT, Engineering and Computer Simulations also has built on its work with an application called the Tactical Combat Casualty Care (TC3) simulation, which has physiology modeling and medical interfaces that lend themselves directly to CSTT.

VBS 1

The Marine Corps uses a photo-realistic battlefield training application called VBS 1 (taken from Virtual Battlefield Systems), which grew from work contracted to Coalescent Technology Corp., based in Orlando, Fla., in 2001.

Coalescent was contracted by the Marine Corps and then by the Office of Naval Research to conduct an analysis of commercial off-the-shelf games to determine their training value for Marines. Coalescent then participated in an exercise where ONR and the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab measured the impact of the games on training for Marines. Some Marines entered a mission rehearsal with some initial training through computer games and others went straight into a military operations and urban terrain environment without any game training.

Marine Corps leaders were impressed with what they saw in those who had taken advanced training with the games, said Dan Finley, vice president of business development at Coalescent Technology.

“It was a subjective determination by the military commanders and their evaluators that those who had the initial training on the computer games did much better,” Finley said. “As a result of that, the Marine commanders wanted the systems right then. They were happy with what they saw and they wanted that one. They wanted the evaluation system.”

The Navy Deployable Virtual Training Environment Program stepped in to fund development on a first-person shooter game that was fielded to the Marine Corps as VBS 1. Instead of developing a solution from scratch, Coalescent relied on its research, which identified a game engine known as Real Virtuality created by Bohemia Interactive Studios as a viable military training solution.

Coalescent has expanded the simulator since then, adding modules for first responders such as police, fire and paramedics, and for nuclear, biological and chemical monitoring and survey teams. The modules work together, enabling shared training and collaboration between civil and military responders.

“It’s designed to work with our military VBS 1 simulation,” Finley said. “Essentially, you can have National Guardsmen training side-by-side with city first responders, police and fire, because in an event like Hurricane Katrina, they will be working side-by-side.”

Coalescent has completed only the first phase of the nuclear, biological and chemical module, deploying monitoring and survey team training to the National Guard and Marines about a year ago. Additions may come with more military funding for the program.

The Marine Corps program manager for nuclear, biological and chemical defense contracted the CBRN training module, but its use has spread to the Department of Homeland Security as well as to other nations, Finley said.

“It’s actually a little bit different of an approach than you see a lot of other people taking now,” he noted. “They are trying to make a game to fit a requirement, which costs a lot more money than what we do, which is finding a game that had the capability and was robust enough to meet the requirements.”

EAI Corp.

The JPEO-CBD Spokesperson at pointed out that simulation exercises alone are not enough for military medical and emergency responders. Live training can be conducted alone or in parallel with simulated events, he said.

“Warfighters are required to don protective Mission-Oriented Protective Posture gear and carry out military operations in response to CBRN threat warnings generated by the simulations systems,” The JPEO-CBD Spokesperson explained. “In addition, material developers often will perform utility assessments of developmental systems while wearing protective clothing or masks to ensure they can be operated effectively by warfighters in a CBRN threat environment.”

EAI Corp., a subsidiary of Science Applications International Corp., Abington, Md., has more than 25 years of experience in bringing such live training to the military. EAI started life in 1980 as a company training government responders to deal with nuclear, biological and chemical threats.

But after the poison gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in 1995, the company branched out from dealing exclusively with the federal government to helping train civil emergency responders as well, explained Gary Eifried, chief technical officer at EAI. “We continue to do a lot of work for emergency responders on military installations, which in large part are civilians,” Eifried added.

The departments of homeland security or defense usually pay for much of the training for civil emergency responders through grant programs.

In the case of work at the Defense Department, EAI usually will work directly as a contractor for Marine Corps headquarters or the Army Guardian program, developed to oversee military installation protection in the United States. An installation can contact EAI directly, Eifried said, but usually the higher authority at the Army or the Marine Corps will pay for and direct the training.

“Generally, we start with an assessment,” he said. “For example, under the program sponsored by Headquarters Marine Corps, we will start with sending a couple of people out to do an assessment of the installation. What are their plans? What equipment do they already have? What capabilities do they already have? From that, we build a needs list,” he added. “They will look at equipment that they need. We will recommend the kinds of equipment that they need. Then we will procure it for them. We will provide new equipment training for them and provide operational training as well for the responders.”

Training can range from tabletop exercises to tactical exercises. Training also can involve the hands-on use of equipment. For example, EAI served as contractor for the development of the Biological Integrated Detection System for the U.S. Army Chemical School and U.S. Army Soldier, Biological and Chemical Command. Not only did that lead EAI to become a leading company in the development of biological detection units, but the company also trains Army personnel on the use of such units as required.

IPS

Live training becomes essential when catastrophe strikes. Military specialists rushing into a situation need to know firsthand what they are about to encounter and how to deal with it. In the case of Hurricane Katrina, the National Guard went in with AC3 Systems communications stations, developed by Information Processing Systems of California Inc. (IPS), based in San Carlos, Calif.

“This unit is designed to get into ground zero or the bottom of the event and immediately to send back intel to the joint operations centers, whether they are at a fixed site or at a staging area,” explained Greg Fessler, IPS communications director. “It can start feeding intel immediately, whether it’s video streaming back or pictures, data reports where you can get sitreps back on the Internet.”
 
Personnel in the AC3 System require input from different agencies on the ground, including medical personnel, police and search and rescue teams, all often using different legacy radio systems, Fessler told MMT. The AC3 System can read the legacy systems and convert them to digital voice packets, effectively forming a patch that enables different radio systems to communicate with one another. That ability becomes critical when forces are entering a hostile environment that could be irradiated with chemical or biological agents.

But while the AC3 System is extremely useful, it is only good to those people who know how to use it, Fessler added.

“That’s just the hardware and technology part of the problem. The other problem is in the training, which is another level of interoperability. That’s the ability for different agencies to be able to communicate with one another,” he said.

“Training is then a big issue. Agencies may have interoperability, but if they are not training with other agencies, they are not training, they are not exercising their protocols, and they are not understanding the technology and how it fits,” Fessler asserted. The training regime developed by IPS focuses on three levels: technical proficiency, tactical proficiency and strategic proficiency.

Technical proficiency entails knowing which buttons to push, while tactical proficiency involves a deeper understanding of using the technology, Fessler explained. “That gets into the task force commanders or the incident commanders. They need to know how to use and deploy the technology, so that it becomes a force multiplier. It maximizes everything they have in the field,” he said.

With strategic training, trainees learn about implementing protocols and prepositioning units. “That involves the incident command systems and the unified command systems and the protocols that they have and how to integrate those and train together with fire, police, medical, FEMA, DHS and all of the different agencies,” Fessler said. ♦

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