REPS AND SETS: Marines Marching Ahead On Virtual Training Program.

• Author: Carberry, Sean

ORLANDO, Florida --In 1805, U.S. Marines battled Bar-bary pirates on the shores of Tripoli.

Today, Marines are engaged in a far more ambitious Tripoli campaign--an effort to build a live, virtual and constructive training environment--that officials say will take years to complete.

After more than a decade of concept development, the Marine Corps launched Project Tripoli in April 2022. It is a live, virtual and constructive training environment, or LVC-TE, that will "provide architecture and integrate, employ and train all of our advanced concepts and capabilities across our force and the joint force," Lt. Gen. Kevin Iiams, commander of the Marine Corps' Training and Education Command, said at the National Training and Simulation Association's annual Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference in Orlando.

"We see a synthetic capability that blends all of our force-on-force training systems, our simulation and our simulators such that... we're not just training our individual Marines in our units, but we're training decision makers with AI to the high-end," he said.

The objective is to train to the Marine Corps' Force Design 2030 modernization plan, he continued. That plan seeks to reorganize, reequip and retrain Marines for the Indo-Pacific theater. Hence, training systems need to evolve, he said, so that "when we do have the next fight, and it is coming, that we're actually going to be ready, relevant and capable for that fight."

Given the present state of the Marine Corps' virtual and simulated training systems, it will be a long march.

Currently, the service has a mix of legacy, non-networked, non-standardized training systems at facilities around the world that allow Marines to get some "reps and sets" in mission activities like convoy driving or small arms training, Lt. Col. Marcus Reynolds, program manager training systems, said in an interview.

"With LVC-TE, we'll have the ability to connect [Marines] into the same environment," he said. "So, you can take the next step for training--for not just getting some reps and sets--but maybe you can start supporting an operation and connect multiple convoy trainers or driver trainers into a convoy and drive supporting a unit that's in Twentynine Palms while they are in other parts of the nation or overseas."

The end goal is a common operating environment and modern simulations that can link forces around the world into real-time exercises the way video games like...