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Col. Robert "Pat" White is the new deputy commander of the U.S. Army's Combined Arms Center-Training (CAC-T) at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. White formerly served as an armor officer, commander of the 2nd Brigade, 1st Armored Division, Baumholder, Germany, and as executive officer to the commanding general at the U.S. Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), under Gen. Martin Dempsey and Gen. Robert Cone. White spoke with TSJ about the future of Army training.
What did you learn as executive officer to the commanding general at TRADOC that you can bring to CAC-T?
The main lesson I learned was that senior leaders have to be thinking four or five lines out. General Dempsey translated this into the Army of 2020 vision. How I'm going to translate that at my level, two or three echelons lower, is we have to understand the audience we are delivering training to. And we have to understand that we will never catch up with technology. That doesn't mean that we can't look into the future and stay abreast of technology, but we are not set up and built as an institution to take something that is yet to be developed, and incorporate it into our training systems. We have doctrine that does that for us. Doctrine looks forward. We have concepts that do that for us. Concepts drive requirements. Then, we turn them over to the S&T [science and technology] community. To paraphrase General Dempsey, keep one foot in reality and the other foot out the front door, but not so far that you fall off the cliff.
What do soldiers and commanders in the field want?
It's ease of use. Commanders with all the requirements they have, to have a proficient, trained unit prior to deploying, or just to go in the trained and ready pool, are looking for the Army to deliver something to them they can shape and use the way they want to. It sounds simplistic, but it's not as easy as we think it is. Not because of bureaucracy or the acquisition process, but just because there is a generational gap between Pat White, brigade commander, and Captain Smith, company commander. That captain has grown up in the iPhone age. It's a challenge to keep them stimulated, and beyond stimulated, allow them to learn, and then allow them to teach others with that technology. And PowerPoint is not technology. This is not about entertainment. It's about stimulating and challenging them, so they feel like they are contributing. If we don't do that with what we provide them, we are going to lose them.
What will CAC-T do to bridge that gap?
Certainly in the next two years, there will be a focus to give us those enablers and training devices that will set the conditions for us to do cross-domain solutions. The first testing and fielding of the Live Virtual Constructive Integrated Training Environment will occur, we believe, at Fort Hood [Texas] next summer. This will allow a commander to formulate a training plan across three of the four domains: the live, virtual and constructive [but not gaming]. Commanders can immerse their units in those domains in a consistent and persistent manner. But the gaming is where we're really going. We really haven't dove into that quite hard enough yet. We are looking at massive multiplayer online games that link to those live-virtual-constructive domains. There is also the Dismounted Soldier [Training System], which kind of gets at what we need to do to keep a soldier engaged, immersed and stimulated. He takes his own rifle, with his own equipment, and trains in the gaming and virtual environment with that ensemble. This is our first attempt at giving the soldier something that he trains with, and stays with him across two domains, the virtual and the gaming. There is also an initiative to give each soldier an avatar. Based on your physical attributes, your eyesight, all those attributes are assigned to your avatar. Your avatar reflects who you really are.
If the avatars are realistic physical depictions, might that undermine a soldier's confidence?
If you have a soldier who is overweight, and he is in a squad with an Audie Murphy squad leader, we would have to take that into consideration. But it's just another way for leadership to come back to the soldier and say, "This is why we do PT every morning; this is why we want you to eat well." This is another dimension we can use to have the soldier believe in himself.
How is CAC-T responding to leaner defense budgets?
Our senior leadership has stated that training is something we are going to have to lean as we get out of the two conflicts we are currently in. Where will the mass of our Army be? Back in home station. The problem is that live training is expensive, even though it is the best validator. Are we going to meet the fiscal realities of the next 10 years? If we don't, we are going to end up with an Army that relegates itself to a lot of constructive training, very little live training because it's too expensive, and virtual systems that aren't quite stimulating for the new generation of soldiers and leaders.
What do you predict for the future of gaming within the Army?
We have to be able to integrate gaming, as an enabler, with our other domains. If we don't, and it stays a stovepiped domain, then we're probably not hitting the mark. We are looking at that with VBS2 [Virtual Battlespace 2]. We know it is an immersive trainer. We know that it is great for individual decision-making and small-unit tasks. But what we need is to raise the bar on VBS2, and maybe son of VBS2, to allow us to pull that into the rest of our virtual world. Our problem is that we don't have a singular, semiautomated force that is across all of those, so that everything from a CCTT [Close Combat Tactical Trainer] module to Warsim has one semiautomated force. We have to be careful that we don't take the gaming world in a different direction than our virtual and constructive. Gaming has such potential, but I don't think, as of now, we have a good feel for what that potential is. We have got to get TCM-Gaming [TRADOC Capability Manager-Gaming], which has been a separate entity that is a part of CAC-T but on its own, under NSC [National Simulation Center] and integrated into the LVCG [live-virtual-constructive-gaming] family. We tend to fall back on what we know best but not communicate laterally.
What else do you see a need for in the future?
What I really see a need for, and we'll get there someday, is that when we build a piece of equipment, we build into that equipment a training capability. So we don't to have a CCTT. So that piece of equipment, as it sits, can train and go to war. That's going to be the Army of 2020. Less instrumentation. It's embedded into the system itself, so you stick a black box into plug A, and now you have the ability to link 14 tanks together and have an exercise while you're in the motor pool. If you have that, and you have the [computer] cloud somewhere out there, then not only are you saving money on contractors telling you how to use the equipment they have developed and sold to the Army, but you are now relying on NCOs and officers to plan for and conduct their own training.
As the U.S. withdraws from Afghanistan and Iraq and enters the post-counterinsurgency era, will training change?
How we manage and conduct training will have to change. There will be less in some areas of operation-specific training and more getting back to the basics and mastering the fundamentals of your specific craft. A great example is our artillery and engineers. But the real adjustment will be revitalizing how we conduct training management, and empowering commanders to plan, prepare, execute and assess their training differently than what we have experienced, which has been top-down directed training for a specific mission.
