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The U.S. Army is looking to distribute some gaming applications that can be downloaded to PDA devices for use as training tools that soldiers can use wherever and whenever they want.
Gaming is an increasingly important tool for training soldiers across all types of operations, an Army TRADOC chief said today. Speaking at the AUSA 2009 convention, Maj. Gen. Mark Hertling, special assistant to the Training and Doctrine commanding general, said that once a gaming application becomes available, it can be used by lots of people for many different training scenarios at relatively low cost.
"This is how this generation learns," Hertling said. "We can adjust the training to the requirement." Hertling said the Army was about ready to start issuing the PDA devices with games-based training applications so soldiers may continue repetitive practice training even as they are doing something as routine as waiting for a flu shot.
The Army is adjusting how it approaches training in a number of ways. As well as leveraging gaming technology, it is looking to distribute more of its simulator-based training to home stations so that training moves away being from a once-a-year, centralized exercise to an ongoing program that goes where the soldier is located.
Col. Paul Funk, deputy commander, Combined Arms Center-Training, described this as a move toward a "hub-and-spoke" training concept. He gave as an example the Army's new Home Station Instrumentation System, which will be rolled out over the next four years. This training system will sit at a number of designated base sites from where it can be quickly deployed to neighboring "spoke" bases as and when a unit needs to train.
"It's a concept that takes resources and moves them to where the soldiers are, not the other way around," Funk said. The Army is also focused on how best to train soldiers across all types of operations - counterinsurgency, conventional and stability operations - in the best and most efficient way.
The key, said Maj. Gen. James Huggins, director of operations, Readiness and Mobilization, is to train people to be adaptable to their environment.
"It's not efficient to have one force that's just trained in counterinsurgency and one that's just trained in conventional operations. You have to have an adaptive force that can work from the far left to the far right of the spectrum of operations," Huggins said.
The Army has also learned that training in war is markedly different from training in peace time. One issue the Army has met, Hertling said, is that combat-experienced soldiers believe they know more than their trainers.
"We have great people out there who are adaptable leaders who can change as their environment changes, but we have to put some polish on that diamond," Hertling said. That requires the Army to take the combat soldier's experience and institutionalize it and put training standards on it.
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