Even though Navy budget cuts mean nondeployed sailors can expect to spend about a third less time at sea this year, that doesn’t mean they’ll spend less time at their duty stations aboard ships. In fact, they could spend more.
Commanders are trying to make up for that lost sea time — and a lack of available ships to play the “bad guys” — by relying more on “synthetic” training, in which sailors practice using their equipment aboard their ships in port.
Big Navy is so confident about synthetic training that commanders on the East Coast plan to deploy about one of every three carrier strike groups without them having completed a joint task force exercise, which traditionally has been the capstone to pre-deployment work-ups. Instead, those ships will do it virtually.
“Today we have limited live opposing forces we can bring to it,” said Adm. Jonathan Greenert, head of Fleet Forces Command, in a May 4 presentation near Washington, D.C. “It’s not just an issue of Navy forces — remember, it’s a joint task force — but a limit of total joint forces we have available. We need an efficient and effective alternative to make sure we have these forces ready.”
That alternative, Greenert said, is to simulate many of the things that sailors have traditionally practiced at sea. Although he and other Navy officials concede that some things still must be learned at sea, Greenert said synthetic training can be as good as, or better than, traditional time underway.
The Navy’s first big experiment with that principle is taking place now: In February, the Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group became the first flotilla to run an entirely synthetic JTFEX, having trained earlier at sea in a traditional composite training unit exercise. So far, Ike’s deployment to the Middle East has been routine.
However, skeptics worry that depending too much on synthetic training will backfire. Sailors without real experience operating their ships and systems in such intensive and realistic “final exam” scenarios could have more mishaps, they say. More broadly, the skills of sailors whose jobs can’t easily be artificially replicated — engineers and boatswain’s mates, for example — could atrophy.
Officials haven’t decided yet how much more synthetic training sailors will get to make up for the time they would have spent at sea, but the Navy should have no problem scaling up the practice time, said Eric Seeland, Fleet Forces Command’s top synthetic training manager.
“We will support whatever the numbered fleet commanders and strike group commanders desire for training,” Seeland said. “We can [dial] up and down different warfare areas, different levels of difficulties; we can tailor to different strike groups to make sure each one gets what they want.”
Rear Adm. Garry White, commander of Strike Force Training Atlantic, said strike groups will go with a combination of synthetic and real training, depending on what works for that specific group.
“Whether a JTFEX or a [fleet synthetic training-joint] is conducted as the certifying event will be dependent on a number of factors including experience, proficiency, type and level of training needed, and whether live or synthetic will be the most effective at accomplishing that training,” he said. “Tailoring the training for the specific strike group could lead us to an FST-J, a JTFEX, or possibly a hybrid that includes a modified combination of both.”
When it comes time to train, Navy computers can integrate the instruments aboard surface ships, aircraft, shore stations and submarines so that sailors thousands of miles apart can work together as a virtual strike group.
For example, a P-3 Orion air crewman sitting at a console on the West Coast might call a fire controlman in a destroyer in Norfolk, Va., to tell him about a new contact picked up by his sonobuoy. The destroyer and the airplane would work together to hunt a submarine in the virtual training world, even though the sailors are thousands of miles apart.
Seeland said synthetic training is best used to practice high-level command and control decision-making.
“You’re looking at the tactical link picture, you’re going forward and making command decisions on who to engage and who not to engage,” he said.
From the perspective of the sailors at their consoles in a combat information center, everything about the scenario would be the same as it would be if the ship were at sea, only with no motion of the deck. Synthetic training also works well to integrate international allies into U.S. exercises. Fleet Forces Command has brought together American sailors in Yokosuka, Japan; Royal Navy sailors at their base in Great Britain; and German pilots and sailors at their bases in Germany.
The Ike strike group’s synthetic version of its JTFEX included the command staffs from the Eisenhower, the Enterprise and the French carrier Charles de Gaulle, according to 2nd Fleet officials. Eisenhower’s command staff dialed into the Navy’s training network from their ship at the pier. Enterprise was in the shipyard at the time, so its staff joined from a simulator at Tactical Training Group Atlantic at Naval Surface Warfare Center Dam Neck, Va. And de Gaulle’s staff trained from a simulator in Toulon, France.
Doing the drills synthetically meant Big E and de Gaulle could keep their shipyard work on schedule and save French and U.S. taxpayers $25 million worth of steaming days, White said. The synthetic version of the exercise cost $500,000.
“The cost difference is obviously significant, and in these fiscal times that’s a consideration,” White said. “We’re not going to let any fiscal driver impact on our readiness, but we’re going to maintain the same level of readiness while conserving energy, if you will.”
He also said one strike group would not be “more ready” than another because it did the physical JTFEX.
“We assess and evaluate to the same standard whether the certifying event is live or synthetic,” White said. “The combination of live and synthetic training provides the best possible training because each venue has distinct advantages that may be unobtainable with the exclusive use of one or the other.”
The cost and time savings aren’t just things that admirals and bean counters can appreciate: Aviation Boatswain’s Mate (Fuels) 2nd Class (AW/SW) Pablo Rodriguez, a fuel depot supervisor at Naval Station Mayport, Fla., told Navy Times he liked the individual focus in the shift to more synthetic training.
“Instead of paying someone or using someone’s time to come and train us as a group of people, [it] can be avoided by using virtual training. We can be self-trained with an automated system that lets us know all our personal training requirements,” he said.
For as much potential as top Navy officials credit to synthetic training, skeptics see just as much to be concerned about. Greenert, Seeland and other officials are quick to acknowledge that sailors still need to spend time at sea learning to do underway replenishments, taking off and landing, and generally being stressed and challenged.
“There’s never really a substitute for being underway for six or seven days, knowing you’re going to be underway for several more days, and this is your fourth mid-watch, and you got two hours of sleep the night before, and seaman Johnny has an issue, and you’ve got to work on your own personal qualifications, and you’ve got to write a message for the captain — and, oh by the way, you have to go stand watch,” Seeland said.
“All of those things going on in the back of your head,” he said. “We can simulate that a little bit, and that’s not a huge factor in the area of training, but is there a one-to-one correlation? No, not completely. We still need that underway flavor.”
And it can go even deeper than that. Sailors in ships at the pier can get so inured to synthetic scenarios that they start to tune out drills that have life-or-death consequences on deployment.
“It’s hard to pretend you’re tracking aircraft or surface contacts when you have regular daily 1MC calls blaring in the background,” said Cryptologic Technician (Collection) 1st Class (SW) Andrew Dunn, who recalled virtual training in the combat information center of a docked ship. “The realism factor is lost pretty quickly. One minute you have a contact inbound and the next minute you hear ‘mail call’ over the 1MC.”
Expand that phenomenon to an entire ship’s company, and even routine jobs could become dangerous, said two retired commanding officers. Both, a retired submarine commander and a retired cruiser commander, have experience with synthetic training but asked not to be named because they still work closely with the Navy. They agreed that unless crews can take their training seriously, they may not be ready for the real thing.
What’s more, the retired sub commander said synthetic training takes away trainers’ ability to see a ship fight “hurt,” if its gear breaks, weather interferes or other unpredictable events crop up during an exercise. Scripted exercises can lock ships into performing to the script, he said, even though they’re easier to grade.
Seeland said engineers in particular benefit from the experience of running the propulsion plant of a ship that’s underway on the ocean because it can also include experiences that can’t be replicated in a schoolhouse.
“Having been an engineer, there is nothing more embarrassing than being that guy on watch, walking into the wardroom after you lost power and the ship went cold and dark out at sea, and knowing everybody was looking at you,” he said. “You don’t really quite get that same feel, when it’s just an ‘oops’ in the trainer.”
By Philip Ewing – navytimes.com
