MOUT Facility
The Marines are building an urban combat center at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms that is probably the largest facility in the world. There will be several complexes of buildings—designed to resemble Iraqi towns and villages—numbering at more than 500 with an ultimate objective of 1,500 total buildings on the sprawling desert base. A series of combined arms training exercises called MOJAVE VIPER—designed to prepare Marines to operate in the cities and villages of Iraq—are conducted near and in these developing MOUT sites. These complexes need an infrastructure to convert the simple buildings into a training area that can add combat realism to the training experience, monitor and control the exercises, and collect the training data for after-action reviews (AARs).

The Marine Corps uses the Defense Department’s foreign comparative test (FCT) program funded by Congress to identify potential weapons and training equipment developed outside of the United States and fielded with foreign armies. A recent acquisition under this program was a deployable instrumented training system (DITS) from Saab Training Systems AB of Sweden in 2004. The DITS had already been fielded with several European armies in Norway, the Netherlands, and Finland. DITS is an instrumentation system that covers all needs from platoon through company level and up to and beyond brigade level. It is modular in design to permit it to be readily tailored to a customer’s requirements. The DITS tested under the FCT program has less than 100 players but has a complete command and control center that can communicate with other instrumentation systems using standard protocols common to joint training exercises. Saab’s DITS instrumentation components were configured to be a modification kit to instrument existing Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement Systems 2000 (MILES 2000) on Marines or vehicles. The modification kit is a processor and radio module. Target lifters can be upgraded to become instrumented reactive targets that can act as an unmanned opposing force. The system simulates both direct and indirect weapons effects, such as artillery or mine fields. The DITS fielding is supported by Saab Training USA of Orlando, FL who provides manufacturing, engineering, field service, and repair services for Saab training products and simulations in the United States.

The U.S. Army has been using four similar DITSs with over 1,000 players in numerous training deployments in eastern Europe since 2001. The system is operated by the 7th Army Training Center of the U.S. Army European Command (USAREur). There were also six DITSs fielded in Iraq in the spring of 2004, 3 months after the contract was awarded to Saab. Two of these DITSs were transferred to Kuwait to support MOUT training with various coalition forces, such as the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit training in the Udairi Range northwest of Kuwait City on the Iraqi border.

The Program Manager, Training Systems (PMTraSys), Marine Corps Systems Command office in Orlando is again looking at training systems and simulations in use by foreign armies as a way to enhance the MOUT training among the extensive urban sites being built. Maj Stuart Muladore, the operational support and logistics division manager, led a team to the Netherlands this June to observe the largest MOUT training site in Europe. The Royal Netherlands Army (RLNA) built an entire training village of Marnehuizen on a flat plain at the edge the North Sea. The 120-building or related structure site is specifically dedicated to MOUT training using mostly laser simulation augmented with several live fire ranges and shoot houses on site. This site is more than twice as large at the U.S. Army MOUT facilities at Fort Lewis, WA or Grafenwoehr, Germany.

Saab has recently fielded MOUT instrumentation in the Netherlands to augment the large $80 million Mobile Combat Training Center instrumentation range already fielded in 2001 for open terrain exercises. Maj Henk Boss of the RLNA is the director of the Marnehuizen MOUT training site. He hosted the visiting Marine evaluation team explaining their common requirements to react rapidly to any mission in any location and often in urban areas. Majs Boss and Muladore agreed to share training experiences and lessons learned on their parallel development cycles for the benefit of the Marines and soldiers.

Maj Boss detailed a busy schedule of training exercises for air-mobile, mechanized, and infantry forces from the Dutch Army as well as visiting forces from other countries. The exercises range from small groups to 2 mechanized companies with 600 instrumented players. The buildings were instrumented with wireless, battery-operated devices that communicated to the soldier’s kit and the central command and control center. The devices could be rapidly installed and moved as the scenario demanded.

The instrumentation system has detailed terrain databases of the MOUT town and surrounding areas of small, medium, and large houses; school; car park; town hall; railway station; bridges; drainage ditch; and sewer system layout to represent an old village center, modern city district, and an industrial area. The global positioning system (GPS) is used to record tactical movements and to provide a common time base for all participating players. This upgrade enables all aspects of AARs. Events, firing pairing, and movements can be wirelessly downloaded. The indoor positioning system provides players with additional data when inside or adjacent to a building, in situations when signals from GPS satellites are unavailable or unreliable. This upgrade also includes the capability to inflict “casualties” on units inside buildings.

In 2005 the PMTraSys solicited input from industry on a MOUT instrumentation system that could:

. . . provide position location in an urban environment with seamless transition between GPS satellite coverage to internal structure position reporting system. Possess rapid urban terrain database and structure modeling capability. Direct and indirect weapons effect simulation against structures and subsequent primary and secondary effects on individuals inside affected structures. Hand grenade and claymore or similar IED [improvised explosive device] simulators. . . . Wireless instrumentation that can move with the host unit to provide instant interactive simulation and immediate after action capability.

PMTraSys submitted an application to the FCT program this year for additional funds for an urban DITS to enhance the systems already fielded. Maj Muladore and his team are already planning for the MOUT upgrade for the Marine DITS although the funding decision will not be made until 2007. Meanwhile the Marines continue to learn from others and to share their knowledge of this unique MOUT training challenge.

Mr. Clydesdale is an Annapolis graduate and a former Marine infantry and flight officer with 30 years of experience in the international training simulation industry.