Training
& Sim
Global exercise to test US Navy’s live, virtual and
constructive training environment
1 day ago
Fire Controlman 2nd Class Carlos Jaimez, left, and Fire Controlman 2nd
Class Hector Wimmer control a close-in weapons system during a tracking-and-firing
exercise aboard the Wasp-class amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge (LHD 3)
Aug. 8, 2021. Kearsarge is underway to support Large-Scale Exercise 2021 (LSE
2021). LSE 2021 demonstrates the Navy's ability to employ precise, lethal, and
overwhelming force globally across three naval component commands, five
numbered fleets, and 17 time zones. LSE 2021 merges live and synthetic training
capabilities to create an intense, robust training environment. It will connect
high-fidelity training and real-world operations, to build knowledge and skills
needed in today's complex, multi-domain, and contested environment. MC3 Jesse
Schwab/US Navy.
The LSE 21 exercise,
which kicked off Aug. 3, includes 25,000 participants across 17 time
zones — some at the tactical level on 25 ships at sea or at the pier, some at
the headquarters level in Navy maritime operations centers or Marine Corps
combat operations centers ashore and some in the middle at task groups and
strike groups scattered around the world.
For the first
time ever, these echelons are coming together in a single training event that,
in real time, pushes the individual sailor in a combat information center just
as hard as it pushes the four-star admiral trying to maneuver multiple battle
groups. It’s enabled by the Navy Continuous Training Environment web of
technologies.
The LVC
exercise scenario originates from the Navy Center for Advanced Modeling and
Simulation, located at the Navy Warfare Development Command headquarters here
at Naval Station Norfolk. The participants will be linked together as the
two-week exercise unfolds.
Though Navy leaders declined to discuss the details of the scenario, it will
include a buildup of tensions into a crisis and the eruption of war, in such a
way that forces in the Atlantic, Pacific and Europe all have to sense their
environments, track potential threats and communicate to the four-star
commander about how they are seeing the crisis unfold from their vantage
points. The admirals can then use the assets in their theaters to conduct the
war fight — the best sensors and the best shooters, under the distributed
maritime operations concept — within the LVC setup.
The Navy has
spent the last several years moving from an outdated and stovepiped simulator
training construct that focused on single platforms — a flight simulator for
just one type of airplane, or an Aegis Combat System trainer for one or two
warfare areas on a surface combatant — to a comprehensive network of ships,
simulators and laboratories that can play together in complex training
scenarios.
For LVC to
be successful and cost-effective, all the pieces must come together: 130
surface ships and 11 training ranges are now outfitted for LVC training as the
live piece; more than 70 aircraft simulators allow real people in fake
airplanes to play in the scenario as the virtual piece; and 14 simulation sites
and battle labs can insert constructive, or computer-generated, forces into the
scenario to add complexity.
Vice Adm.
Jim Kilby, the deputy commander of U.S. Fleet Forces Command, told reporters
training events earlier in his career would rely on Learjets with pods that
would make them appear as incoming missiles on a ship’s radar, for example. If
a shipboard operator didn’t respond correctly, if the pod malfunctioned or if
the jet needed to refuel, a whole day’s worth of training could be ruined.
Multiply that by the 25 ships that are participating in LSE 21 globally, and
it’s hard to imagine doing an exercise of this scale in a live-only manner.
With LVC,
though, dozens or hundreds of incoming missiles can be simulated without the
cost or logistics of flying the Learjets.
“That’s the
technology piece that we’re building up that has been really limited, limited
in my lifetime,” Kilby said. “Certainly in the last five years, it’s grown to
allow us to stimulate those conditions that we think we need to because of what
we think the adversary will do. That would be very expensive for us to do in a
live manner, so to me, all this connectivity” is the only way the Navy can
accurately rehearse distributed maritime operations.
Ron Keter,
who serves as the technical director for Large Scale Exercise 2021, told
reporters the Navy chose to create a single LVC training environment for
tactical training — preparing ships and units to deploy — as well as
operational-level exercises to train fleet headquarters staffs.
By having
this single LVC environment, he said, participants at all levels can be put
through their paces during LSE 21.
Headquarters staff training
Staff training exercises run the risk of being over-scripted at times: tabletop
events often precede live exercises, with the staffs being tested and certified
first and then the ships and planes conducting the live exercise somewhat
separately.
In that way,
Large Scale Exercise 2021 will put more pressure on the admirals than a typical
exercise. Rather than following a script, they’ll have to adjust to what
subordinate commands decide to do during the live drills and even to mistakes
that individual sailors make.
A sailor on
a cruiser who misreads a potential air target, leading to the ship shooting
down a plane that poses no threat, for example, or not shooting down a target
that goes on to take out a U.S. aircraft carrier, could change the trajectory
of the whole event. The four-star admirals at U.S. Fleet Forces Command, U.S.
Pacific Fleet and U.S. Naval Forces Europe, along with their staffs, will have
to roll with the punches in this LVC exercise in a way they might not be used
to.
Rear Adm.
Doug Beal, the vice commander of Fleet Forces who is serving as the exercise
director, said having 25,000 live players makes the exercise “tremendously
complex” for the decision-makers at the top, who must make strategic decisions
based on what’s being reported up the echelons by sailors in real time.
LSE 21 also
includes a group of retired flag and general officers who will be playing the
roles of combatant commanders and Pentagon leadership, Beal said, forcing the
admirals to practice communicating with joint staff and civilian leadership in
the heat of war.
Kilby said this type of training event is well matched to how he expects the
Navy to fight in the future under distributed maritime operations.
Fleet
commanders will have to control the carrier strike groups, expeditionary strike
groups, surface action groups and others in their area of operations,
leveraging sensors and weapons across these strike groups to be most effective.
They’ll also have to be careful that the adversary can’t exploit seams between
the numbered fleets, meaning the admirals will have to talk to each other, too,
during this global event.
“This is
complex. Integrated fires, which is what we’re talking about, in distributed
maritime operations, which is where the adversary is going, requires varsity-level
execution,” Kilby said.
Strike group training
The Carl
Vinson Carrier Strike Group, which
deployed on Aug. 2, is among the strike groups participating live in
LSE 21. Strike group commander Rear Adm. Dan Martin told Defense News in a
phone interview that strike groups used to conduct fleet battle problems, which
were high-end events but left the strike group commander as the ultimate
authority making decisions about the war fight.
“The fleet
battle problem really focused on the strike group commander … so that he or she
alone could employ their strike group as they saw fit,” Martin said. “Now what
we have to do is demonstrate the fact that we have assured command-and-control
because we need that to get after the real problem here, [which] is integrating
all the sensors that we have across these brand-new ships and brand-new
aircraft, and we can make them all sync up to get the best information possible
and synchronize the war fight.”
“The way I
look at it is that we have shifted focus from the individual carrier strike
group to a larger fleet-centered approach. So we’re changing fleet commanders’
abilities to make decisions at a faster speed, better accuracy that outpaces
our adversaries,” Martin continued. “It’s leveraging the integrated fighting
power of multiple naval forces to share their sensors, their weapons, their platforms
across all the domains in a contested environment.”
With the
Vinson strike group conducting LSE 21 as its very first mission on deployment,
Martin said he’s confident he has a well trained carrier strike group. The
focus of their participation can be falling into the larger fleet construct
that is new under distributed maritime operations, he said.
Deckplate training
At the ship
level, participating in LSE 21 allows for “reps and sets” against sophisticated
targets, said Capt. Chris Marvin, the commanding officer of cruiser San
Jacinto.
With his
cruiser tied to the pier and undergoing maintenance ahead of an upcoming
deployment with the Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group, that’s not something
his sailors would be receiving without LSE 21 and the LVC underpinnings.
Additionally,
and perhaps more importantly in the long run, it’s helping his sailors see the
bigger picture in an environment where no one can get hurt. During operations
at sea, a strike group commander could go to the cruiser and ask for
information about a potential air threat. In the old construct, the cruiser can
either identify the object with its sensors or it can’t; the determination
affects the course of action the strike group commander takes.
But under
distributed maritime operations, Marvin said, there may be a third option —
that the ship crew thinks they understand what the object is, but they request
the fleet commander give them access to additional information from a sensor on
another ship in the theater or from a joint or national asset like a satellite.
“If I don’t
know what those tools are, I can’t use them effectively,” he added. “This
allows me to interface with those tools” and learn to consider them in a
training environment.
If the goal
is to cut through the fog of war and create more fog for the adversary, then
LSE 21 will go a long way in helping individual ships learn what and how to
communicate up the chain of command to create the clearest operating picture,
Marvin said. This exercise and its fleet-level focus will help each ship learn
what information is needed higher up, how to communicate it, and what to do if
the adversary knocks out a preferred method of communication.
“The ability
to do that seamlessly and quickly to keep the fog at bay is what wins the
fight.”
Future LVC investments
Since 2012,
the Navy has brought its Fleet Synthetic Training capability from a
pierside-only tool to offering afloat training opportunities for ships on
deployment or in pre-deployment workups. In this way, trainers ashore can send
virtual and constructive threats to the ship’s combat systems via the Navy
Enterprise Tactical Training Network, allowing them to face off against more
complex threats than the Navy could field for a typical training event.
While naval
aviation can play in the LVC training today in a limited manner — jets in the
air can be made to resemble adversary planes on a ship’s radar or they can be
augmented by constructive planes to create a bigger formation for a ship to
contend with — there’s still work to do to fully incorporate them in the Navy
Continuous Training Environment. Virtual and constructive actors can’t be piped
into the cockpit today so while a Navy pilot can be a part of a more complex
training scenario for the ship, that pilot isn’t receiving a more complex
picture to respond to.
Keter said
the ability to stimulate an aircraft’s sensors and pipe virtual and
constructive forces into the cockpit’s displays will be the focus of
investments in fiscal 2022 through 2027. Additionally, the Navy wants to
integrate the information warfare domain into its LVC network through
investments in this five-year period.
John Hefti,
the director of fleet and joint training at Fleet Forces, told reporters one of
the benefits of this exercise would be “taking a position fix on where we are
with LVC because that’s going to inform our future investments. … So we are
testing our training architecture while we’re doing this exercise.”
Previously,
Hefti said, the Navy conducted LVC training events with forces stateside and in
Europe, for example, or at home and in the Western Pacific. But this is the
first time forces around the entire globe are being pulled into the same
scenario in real time, in a test of the network’s bandwidth.
Keter also
said LSE 21 pushes the limits of the Navy’s ability to support LVC training for
ships in the open ocean, rather than in instrumented training ranges close to
home. Lessons learned by straining the LVC training environment — as well as
experimenting with a few cockpit technologies that could meet the Navy’s
near-term needs — will inform investment plans in the next few budget cycles.
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