THE FUTURE OF TRAINING AND SIMULATION: Preparing warfighters for tomorrow's battlefields.

• Author: Machi, Vivienne

* Over the next 20 years, the face of global military conflict will rapidly change. U.S. troops will fight simultaneous battles on the ground, in the air, at sea, in space and in the cyber realm, against adversaries that may be human or, increasingly, machine.

In order to adequately train for this new reality, the Defense Department will leverage advancements in robotics, cognitive science and mixed reality systems. Many of these tools may still appear more science fiction than real life, but their influence is expected to grow swiftly over the next few decades, experts and industry leaders said.

National Defense asked experts to look five, 10 and 20 years into the future to see what trends may help prepare tomorrow's warfighters for the complex scenarios they may face.

TRAINING AND SIMULATION 2022

James Canton, CEO and chairman of the Institute for Global Futures in San Francisco, said gaming technologies will continue to become fairly ubiquitous within the next five years. The popular game "Pokemon Go"--where players use their phone's GPS to track nearby Pokemon that are superimposed over the camera's imagery--heralds the future training scenario, he said.

The U.S. military has been investing in live, virtual and constructive technologies--such as the Army's synthetic training environment initiative (see story page 38). However, those technologies will become "a lot more dynamic and kinetic," Canton said.

Military leaders are already incorporating more mixed reality technologies in training sites, such as the infantry immersion trainer at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in California.

Mixed--or blended--reality is the result of combining elements of the physical world with the digital world. A recent book by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel titled The Fourth Transformation: How Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence Change Everything, predicts how advances in augmented reality and artificial intelligence will lead to so-called "smartglasses" replacing smartphones. Enhanced lenses would mix the real world with computer-generated images, which may appear so natural that they are barely distinguishable from reality.

The training facility at Camp Pendleton includes an indoor and outdoor complex spanning nearly 150,000 square feet of mock villages for training uses, with several areas that are capable of supporting mixed reality technologies, according to the Marine Corps.

Greg Welch, a professor and Florida Hospital endowed chair in healthcare simulation at the University of Central Florida, said the service has begun experimenting with computer-generated humans to address a significant training issue.

Typically, the services employ role players to act as adversaries during training scenarios, but under law, they cannot employ child actors, he noted.

Welch, who is also a professor of computer science and co-director of the Synthetic Reality Laboratory at the Institute for Simulation and Training at UCF said: "Children are important from a military perspective, because if you're on patrol and you walk into a village and all of the kids are missing...