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| Major Wayne Gough and Captain Paul Graham
from Combat Training Control, check the location of Australian
soldiers and United States Marines during exercise
Talisman Sabre 07. (Official photo by Corporal Chris
Moore, 1st Joint Public Affairs Unit, Commonwealth of
Australia) |
U.S.
Joint Forces Command supports Exercise Talisman Saber 2007
Working
across oceans, USJFCOM flexed a multinational training
network on the Suffolk, Va.-based Joint Training
and Experimentation Network while linking together
exercise participants in Australia and at U.S. Pacific
Command in Hawaii during Talisman Saber
2007,
one
of Australia's
largest
military training events.
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By MCC(SW/AW) Chris Hoffpauir
USJFCOM Public Affairs
(SUFFOLK,
Va. - July 26, 2007) -- U.S. Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM)
linked training networks for both Australia and
U.S. Pacific Command (USPACOM) as the command supported
Exercise Talisman Saber 2007 (TS07), which wrapped up earlier
this month.
Talisman Saber is a biennial series of training exercises
designed to conduct collective training and exercise interoperability
between the Australian Defence Force (ADF) and U.S. forces
in the Pacific region. It is one of Australia's largest
military training events.
USJFCOM connected the Joint Training and Experimentation
Network (JTEN) and Australia's Defence Training and Experimentation
Network (DTEN), allowing USJFCOM, USPACOM and the ADF to
continue work on the U.S. / Australian bilateral Joint
Combined Training Capability (JCTC).
JTEN, the communications network for Joint
National Training Capability (JNTC), provides a rapidly reconfigurable network
which supports joint training exercises, experimentation,
and the evaluation of new warfighting concepts in support
of the U.S. Department of Defense's Training Transformation
program.
The link allowed U.S. and Australian forces to link simulation
networks so they could train together in a live, virtual
and constructive environment (L-V-C). Live portions of
the exercise took place in various locations in Australia,
including the High Range Training Area in Queensland.
The JTEN/DTEN connection wasn't simply a link between
networks but also all the systems they're made of, which
sometimes presented problems. John Vinett, deputy for the
Joint Warfighting
Center's Joint Training Technologies
Group, said there were both technical and policy challenges
in linking the multiple systems involved.
"We were able to work through those," Vinett
said. "There was some pain, and that's not a bad thing.
It brought to light some policy issues. We developed some
workarounds that got us through Talisman Saber. We have
not worked out the long term approach to this."
Another
challenge the two nations faced was a language barrier.
While both speak English, each uses sometimes
unique terminology, sometimes down to the level of individual
services within their militaries. Vinett said that probably
the most often-heard phrase during the event was "say
again?"
Army Lt. Col. Roger Symons, Australia's liaison officer
at USJFCOM, said discovering those challenges and facing
them in a controlled environment is one of the primary
reasons for TS07.
"You can face those challenges now or you can face
them after you've crossed the line of departure, and it's
far better to face them now," Symons said. "Writing
it out in a manual is just not enough, and we've always
known that.
"You have to practice, preferably with the people
you're going to be deploying with," he continued. "That
level of finesse is on the horizon as a reality when you
link at these kinds of training capabilities to a readiness
schedule for the rotation of units. So it's not just an
AC-130 aircraft you're training with, it is the actual
unit, perhaps even the actual crew you're going to deploy
with."
TS07's organizers used the linked U.S. and Australian
training capabilities to create a training environment
that included live forces on the ground in Australia, forces
participating in a virtual environment (simulators) linked
to the network, and constructive forces created by computers.
All this information was then combined and displayed to
the participating forces.
"What you were looking at on the range is a real
piece of real estate in Queensland called Line Creek Junction," Symons
said. "It's a fully instrumented urban operations
training facility. It looks synthetic, but it is real-time
real estate. It's hot, there's confusion down there, people
have no sort of bird's eye view, so it's very much reality.
It's not just a synthetic environment."
Vinett explained that while the Australian special operations
soldiers initially weren't interested in using the technology,
which fed a virtual view from a Predator unmanned aerial
vehicle (UAV) into their joint operations center (JOC),
they warmed to it as they saw it in action.
"They weren't too keen on this whole approach, the
Predator view," Vinett said. "They relegated
it to a screen tucked away in the corner. Then they started
looking at it, and the next thing you know it's migrated
to the center screen in the JOC. The comment we got from
one of the Australian sergeants major was 'That's how we
execute operations in Afghanistan today.'
"If you've seen footage from a gun camera or a UAV,
it wasn't far off from that. That's the whole idea. You
want them to think they're there in that environment," Vinett
said.
Vinett said that the Australian soldiers on the ground
wore emitters that the range's instruments could detect.
That data was then fed through the JTEN/DTEN link to Suffolk,
where USJFCOM integrated it with all the other data coming
in to create a complete view of the battlespace. That view
was then sent back through the link and fed back into the
exercise. He added that this all occurred in near real-time.
"The commander doesn't know if it's live, virtual
or constructive," Vinett said. "He has to fight
the entire battlespace."
"We don't draw a box around joint training and treat
it as an entity by itself," Symons said. "What
we're looking at here is a conjunction between joint training
and the integration of joint fires.
"So
for an Australian joint terminal attack controller (JTAC),
it doesn't really matter to him whether it's a
U.S. Air Force air power component or an Australian one
- it makes no difference. For that matter, it could be
a U.S. JTAC and we could be providing air support. That's
a result of the fact that we built our JTAC schoolhouse
around accreditation to provide support for U.S. forces,
or receive support from U.S. air power.
Symons said that ADF would like to see a time when joint
command and control and intelligence, surveillance and
reconnaissance are integrated into the joint training environment
as well.
"Integrating the command and control piece is absolutely
critical," Vinett said. "There's nothing better
than actually doing it for gaining an understanding of
the differences in how we command and control forces.
"If
we had our way we'd do everything live. Because that's
expensive, we have to put the technology to use
to allow for the commander to deal with the entire battlespace
without having to put 30,000 troops out there. It's really
about moving the electrons and not the people."
Symons agreed that using a synthetic training environment
had distinct advantages.
"The less time you spend sending our forces across
the Pacific to train with each other, the more time those
soldiers can spend engaged in operations, spending time
with their families, or whatever they've got to do," Symons
said.
Vinett said the next step is to build trust and confidence
within each government and among each nation's military
services - not only that this kind of joint training works,
but that the two nations can share the information they
need to and still secure the sensitive information they
can't share with anyone.
"There are three things we discovered," Vinett
said. "First, the cultural issues are huge, not just
between the United States and Australia, but also among
our services and between different agencies. The second
is policy - we've identified specific things there that
perhaps we need to address. Finally, there's trusting the
technology - that it's going to do what we say it's going
to do. There's a natural mistrust of technology, and we
have to show that it works like we say it's supposed to
work.
"Those
are the things we're looking at as we head toward the
next Talisman Saber - or preferably something
sooner than that - certainly with the Australians. We think
the partnership with Australia has worked very well."
"We've also been extremely happy with the way things
are going," Symons said. "All of the things we've
discussed occur at U.S. Joint Forces Command. If you want
to be with all the U.S. forces, in whatever area of responsibility,
this is the place to do it.
"Right
now we have troops deployed in U.S. Central Command's
and USPACOM's areas of responsibility, and we
have other areas of cooperation with the United States
as well. We know that in the contemporary security environment
those challenges aren't going to go away any time soon,
so now is the time to start developing solutions that are
feasible and effective."
Vinett said that one of the main goals of TS07 was to
prove that the JCTC proof of concept is viable. One way
to do that was through showing the effectiveness of an
L-V-C training environment.
"I feel very positive that we've demonstrated that
this is a viable way ahead, and that we should continue
this," Vinett said. "Based on the initial look,
things look very promising because what we said we would
do I believe we have done. Now it's just a matter of reporting
on that and getting the word out. We're very enthusiastic
about where we're going in the future."
"I'd say from our perspective, the outlook is similar," Symons
said. "We have a great deal of confidence in Exercise
Talisman Saber itself - the simulation component of it.
We hope to further build on the capability that has been
proven.
"The
U.S. is not alone in having cultural hurdles to leap
in addressing joint training. We have some leaps
of faith to make of our own, but we're steadily progressing
and building confidence as we go.
"We're currently conducting an enabling study to quantify
the benefits of having a persistent L-V-C simulation
capability - probably constructed as a federation with
the United States - and as we are able to demonstrate
the effectiveness and efficiency of that system, we believe
it will stand on its own credibility. It will become
quickly evident that it's a capability that we can't
do without. The enabling study will put the case to our
minister for defense on whether a persistent capability
should be pursued and if so, to what extent."
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