Posted on 05/24/2007 3:15:30 AM PDT by leadpenny
Soldiers training to get the enemy and miss the innocents
To shoot or not to shoot.
That is the question for soldiers entering a room where someone has a cell phone rigged to explosives or encountering a roadside protest.
The answer is a matter of life and death--theirs and civilians.
Now soldiers have a new training simulator at Fort A.P. Hill in Caroline County to help them prepare for those high-stress scenarios.
"It's a simulation device that can put five soldiers in scenarios that they might encounter in Iraq or Afghanistan," A.P. Hill's senior training officer, Henry Hanrahan, said yesterday.
Though the simulator allows for realistic training, there's one big upside.
"You can do it without getting killed," 2nd Lt. Steven Jenkins said. He was one of the soldiers from Fort Eustis, Newport News, training on the simulator yesterday.
The Engagement Skills Trainer, or EST 2000, is a system that projects various scenarios onto a wall-size screen. Soldiers decide when--and who--to shoot.
Amid shouting, crying, gun shots and explosions, soldiers scan the screen looking for possible threats and ruling out innocents. Each scenario is over within minutes.
At A.P. Hill, the system has five shooter lanes set up with laser-rigged M-4 and M-16 weapons. The system records how many shots were fired and where each shot went. Soldiers get instant feedback on their performance.
"Sometimes, when you go out to the ranges, you don't really know who's shooting what," 2nd Lt. Austin Luher said.
Next year, two rooms with 10 shooter lanes each will be ready for use.
In addition to being precise and speedy, the simulator saves money. Since it uses lasers, soldiers use none of the ammunition they would on the rifle ranges.
"It allows for repetition. You can get more training in with this than live fire," 2nd Lt. Patrick Sanford said. "If you screw up, it's real easy to go back and do it again and again."
Jenn Rowell: 540/374-5418 Email: jrowell@freelancestar.com
A "maggie's drawers" computer icon?
A choice has just been taken away from on-the-ground combat soldiers.
And rue the day when a soldier takes out tangos and "innocents," who always get in the way because they are being used as human shields, by Islamofascists who see such "training" as a weakness.( They are right.)
Excellent.
I pray it saves many lives on our side.
I can safely say I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t routinely get my ass handed to me in the simulators. It was during the age of Pong, but the simulation was realistic enough that you felt bad when you got everybody killed.
My experience with simulation has been mostly in aviation. You can do so much more. Other than the instructors, I know of no one who looks forward to getting in the box.
Changes have been made since my training at A.P. Hill 45 years ago. It was more fun firing blanks in the war games and live ammo on the ranges, especially at night with tracers.
Forty five years ago? Was A.P. Hill the post commander? ;)
I was in Munich then. Supposedly “Big Red” on the Strasse had ‘met’ Patton. Good story anyway.
Excellent. You were drafted and served in the Old Guard? Did you stay for just two years?
I was trained as a tank crewman but stayed out of the beasts. I served in a tank battalion and my first job was as a driver for the Bn. Commo Officer. When I arrived in Munich in Feb 62, the draftees were serving out a six month extension, thanks to JFK and the Berlin Crisis.
“I can safely say I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t routinely get my ass handed to me in the simulators. It was during the age of Pong, but the simulation was realistic enough that you felt bad when you got everybody killed.”
I remember learning how to call in artillery fire. The whole thing was run by a Commodore 64.
A location was projected on the wall, as though the viewpoint was that of hiding on a hill, looking down into valley where a white silhouette target was sitting. We were given a topo map and we were to call in grid coordinates and vectors and the type of round to use.
It was a lot of fun to be the only one nailing the target with the right ammo each time...watching the projected artillery round cross the ceiling and fall on target, followed by a boom and a mushroom cloud on the target.
Then it got boring, so I started calling in fire on our location...again hitting every time....Firing for effect on the first shot.
First time...”Oops. Sorry Sarge.”
Second time...”NOT AGAIN!”
Third time...”Cut it out, private,” Sarge warned in that bulldog growl.
I'm glad to hear that. It doesn't surprise me because the draftees I served with in the 60s pretty much expressed the same sentiment as you. In a way I sort of envied you guys. While many draftees were natural leaders who did their jobs, they could also 'stick it in the eye' of the Army. We enlistees, on the other hand, got what we asked for.
You were RA in 1 I.D.?
If you mean the 1st Inf Div, no. I was with the 24th ID. It was headquartered in Augsburg, but most of the maneuver units were in the Munich area. When I got there the story of MG Edwin A. Walker being relieve as the CG 10 months earlier was still big news. The Cuban Missile Crisis got everyone a little excited but for the most part, Germany was just good old beer drinking time with some field duty mixed in.
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