Future Force simulation office up and running.

• Author: Tiron, Roxana

The U.S. Army's training and simulation arm has stood up a program office assigned almost exclusively to support the Future Combat Systems.

In addition to developing embedded training devices for the FCS, this office will focus on the integration of live training with virtual and constructive simulations.

Brig. Gen. Stephen Seay, the Army's program executive officer for simulation, training, research and instrumentation (PEO STRI), has established the Future Force (Simulation) program, tasked with providing a framework for every training-related project in the Army, said Jeff Simons, deputy program manager.

"It is our job to orchestrate the activities within the other PMs. They still own their systems," Simons told National Defense. "They still own the responsibility to field those systems. We provide the content for them to develop doctrine. We collaborate with them, so that--as these systems are developed--they achieve higher and higher degrees of interoperability."

Opportunities are starting to shape up in creating a single training environment where the live, virtual and constructive inter-operate, and "it becomes transparent to the war fighter training," he said.

The technology has reached a point where the difference between those three domains has started to blur, he added.

The Future Force office is starting out with 35 people, but it is expected to grow to 60 in the coming months.

"We are looking for a small growth," Simons said. "We do not want to get too heavy too quickly, which would cause confusion."

The organization is structured around four cells: a group that focuses solely on the development of the FCS embedded training capability, the SMART cell, the common components group and the unit-of-action cell, which works on systems architecture, explained Simons.

Future Combat Systems

The FCS "is a significant area of our responsibility," said Simons. "The embedded training that we are looking to accomplish within FCS is really unprecedented." He said that the Army has achieved some limited levels of embedded training, but nothing close to what would be required for FCS. In FCS, the training becomes organic to the operational system, he said.

"It will ... use the operational systems' capabilities, so that there is no training unique function," he said.

"Unprecedented is the fact that it [embedded training] is a key performance parameter."

In the past, he noted, training was considered a logistics function that not always received...