The international training and simulation community convenes Nov. 30-Dec. 3 at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Fla., for its most important annual networking event, the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC.)

New this year is an innovation showcase, in Hall B1, where companies and government agencies will give 30-minute presentations of new and future technologies they are pursuing. Also new this year is a hospitality night on the exhibit floor on Dec. 1. from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. This social event is designed to maximize networking across the some 550 booths.

The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps are this year’s lead services. Keynote speakers will be Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis, supreme allied commander for transformation and commander of U.S. Joint Forces Command; and John “Mike” McConnell, senior vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton.

This year’s theme, “Train to fight, fight to win,” reflects the importance of matching the right training to today’s irregular war operations.

“Intense training efforts have resulted in more of the defense efforts in Iraq being turned over to the Iraqi military and police forces. At the same time, more effort and personnel are being devoted to the war in Afghanistan. With much different terrain, culture and history, a huge training effort will be needed to train to fight ... fight to win,” program chairman Michael Genetti, principal business development manager for Rockwell Collins Simulation & Training, said in his I/ITSEC 2009 attendee welcome.

Afghanistan and counterinsurgency operations will also dominate many technologies on display at the exhibit booths and conference hall debates, where some 25 tutorials and 160 papers will be presented. Many companies are showcasing irregular warfare and small combat unit training technologies and simulations that teach how to locate, identify and defeat improvised electronic devices, or IEDs.

“The requirement for small combat unit immersive training in relatively new and irregular warfare scenarios is being driven very much by General Mattis. We have a Joint Capability Technology Development called the Future Immersive Training Environment — or FITE — that is aimed at doing just that,” said Dan Gardner, director, U.S. Office of the Secretary of Defense for Readiness and Training, Policy and Programs.

“Our forces in Afghanistan are distributed in just this fashion — in small units. How do we train to be creative, adaptive and agile in decision-making in that environment? This is an education as well as a training challenge,” Gardner said.

Service delegations will be scouting the exhibit floor for training innovations that step up to this challenge. “What we need is an immersive environment for training the ground troops — Army and Marine Corps. We need more realistic training than is currently being provided at the MOUT sites and we need to answer the question how to inject the necessary levels of realism into small unit level training,” said Brian Kummer, project manager training systems at U.S. Marine Corps Systems Command.

Among those exhibits highlighting systems aimed at Afghanistan and counterinsurgency operations will be MetaVR’s Virtual Reality Scene Generator (VRSG), featuring a new Afghanistan 3-D geospecific terrain covering 9,600 square kilometers of the province of Kabul. This virtual terrain, featuring a high-resolution village with more than 500 buildings, is available in round- and flat-earth formats for use with VRSG in simulation and training, with emphasis on identifying and defeating IEDs.

CAE will also demonstrate its Synthetic Environment Core (SE Core) Afghanistan database developed for the U.S. Army.

Cubic Corp.’s booth has the theme “prepare for the unconventional” and includes CombatRedi, the company’s entry into virtual reality training. The company will also highlight a simulator for Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles that is has developed with Thales and a suite of new safety and security management products, aimed at the public safety and law enforcement market that could be applied to training the Afghan National Police. SAIC will also feature a Common Driver Trainer MRAP Variant virtual simulator.

Thales will also give a force protection demonstration on its booth, using an Afghan airport as the scenario basis.

Saab Training Systems’ deployable instrumented training systems have been procured this year by the U.S. Marine Corps and the British Army. The company will highlight its live training facilities for units down to platoon and company level and will also unveil a helicopter door gun trainer.

COUNTERING IEDS

IEDs are the largest single cause of casualties in Afghanistan. “You might consider this a subset of the small-unit training emphasis we’re going to see this year, and you will see a significant emphasis especially in the service booths this year,” said retired Rear Adm. Fred Lewis, president of the National Training & Simulation Association, which organizes I/ITSEC.

A-T Solutions, which has been awarded a $198.9 million contract to provide counter-IED training courses to the U.S. Army’s Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO), will be among the companies showing counter-IED training technologies.

“We have the most talented industrial base in the world, but we’re not bringing enough attention to bear on the problem that is causing 75 percent of our casualties,” said John Coster, executive vice president for business development at A-T Solutions.

Another company showing technologies in this field is Alion Science and Technology, which provides support to the Joint Training Counter IED Operations Integration Center Systems Integration Modeling and Simulation program, which rapidly recreates recent asymmetric threat events for use in collective and institutional training.

Raytheon has developed an integrated approach to defeating IEDs in a system it describes as “virtual reality in a box.” JIEDDO credits pre-deployment training as a major factor in reducing casualty incidents in Iraq, and Raytheon has developed an integrated approach to small-unit and counter-IED training that it will highlight in Orlando. “We believe that there’s a gap in the training, that we aren’t capturing the lessons learned and aren’t able to incorporate them quickly enough before new war fighters are going into battle,” said Steve Teel, head of Raytheon’s Global Training Solutions and Technical Services company. “Wouldn’t it be neat if we came up with a training solution that, almost in real time, we could introduce new threats and get it to the war fighter just before they went to war?”

Any changes to soldiers’ training still have to go through an approval process within the Army, but Teel said he sees the system cutting the time to integrate insurgent tactics into training from months to weeks.

VIRTUAL FLIGHT

Not all training systems will be focused on the ground; there will be plenty of aircraft and flight system simulators at the show. CAE, for example, will have an M-346 Master ground-based training system demonstrator at its booth. CAE is the preferred simulator provider for the Alenia Aermacchi M-346 jet trainer, which has been selected by the United Arab Emirates and is competing to be the next-generation jet trainer for air forces around the world. CAE will also show its Medallion-6000 image generator combined with 3D Perception’s integrated 180 degree by 45 degree three-channel dome display system as part of the M-346 demonstrator. The company will also show its tactical aircrew training solutions being used to support the Canadian Forces and now contracted to support the U.K. Military Flight Training program.

Turkish simulator manufacturer Havelsan will highlight recent contract awards for a Cougar helicopter full mission simulator and KT-1T and T-38 turnkey simulator training centers for the Turkish Air Force, as well as four F-16 Mission Training Centers.

Boeing will highlight its training devices for Distributed Missions Operations, an F/A-18 Mobile Crew Station and a P-8A Mobile Console for the U.S. Navy’s newest maritime aircraft. On the helicopter front, Boeing will demonstrate its Apache Multi-Role Trainer for individual and crew training on the attack helicopter’s sensor, weapons, navigation, communication and survivability equipment tasks. The company will also show an Apache/Chinook Virtual Maintenance Trainer.

IP Video will feature its Enhanced Mission Record and Review Systems, deployed by the U.S. Air Force at Tinker Air Force Base, Okla.; Elmendorf Air Force Base, Alaska; and Kadena Air Force Base, Japan. The company will also demonstrate integrated solutions for airborne warning and control aircraft operator training.

Bihrle Applied Research will show an in-house developed Apache flight model and will demonstrate its in-flight ice-accumulation effects math-modeling capability for flight simulation and vehicle health-monitoring systems.

ON THE ROAD

Back on the ground, there will be a host of combat vehicle driver training simulators and soldier weapons trainers. BAE Systems Insyte, for instance, will highlight its partnership with FAAC and VT Group to provide driver training to the British armed forces. And Forth Dimension Displays will demonstrate the high resolution and crisp image characteristics of its WXGA microdisplay, which has a 1280x768 pixel count. It will also provide a preview of the R5 interface for microdisplays, developed to provide weight and space saving for applications such as tank gunnery sights and helmet mounted displays.

FAAC will also demonstrate its Buffalo MRAP full-motion dual-cab vehicle crew trainer, an extension of its Operator Driving Simulator. Kongsberg Defence and Aerospace will demonstrate its Protector family of training systems for the Protector Remote Weapon Station as well as computer-based training systems and an interactive maintenance library for individual vehicle or small-unit crew training.

A number of technologies will emphasize the application of commercial products, or commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) systems. VT MAK will show its suite of COTS solutions for terrain generation, for example. The company’s VR-Vantage product supports what MAK calls “terrain agility,” which incorporates whatever data source the customer has into a scenario-specific terrain database and allows the customer to generate new terrain “on the fly,” without the need to build large databases in advance. AAI Corp. will show its Man-Portable Aircraft Survivability Equipment (MAST), an optical simulator using COTS components that can simulate aircraft threat-warning receivers in use with the majority of U.S. and allied aircraft. And Presagis will unveil its STAGE 6.0 simulation software tool at Orlando, demonstrating how to leverage integrated COTS components to streamline simulation workflow, minimize technology investments, ease development timelines and reduce project risk.

GAMING THE SYSTEM

Leveraging gaming technologies is another theme. “One of the significant advances industry has made is in being much more embracing of gaming technologies — it’s much more engaged than it was 10 years ago,” Genetti said.

Linked to the gaming world is the growing use of immersive virtual world technologies. “You can expect to see lots of ‘virtual world’ technology emerging into the live, virtual, constructive mix. Enhanced capability through the use of avatars is becoming much more accepted as time goes on,” Gardner said.

Alion Science and Technology will show its Delta 3D gaming engine, an open source product used for 3-D visualization and games. It will also highlight its electronic Collaboration Capabilities (e2C) a Web-based, mobile collaborative training system that provides new ways to support 24/7 learning.

Among debut technologies on the exhibit floor will be L-3 Link Simulation & Training’s consequence management system that can be used to improve the skills of light utility helicopter pilots during disaster relief, search and rescue and medevac missions. Link will demonstrate its MUM-T concept for manned/unmanned team training. Link will also demonstrate its Blue Box HD capabilities, an extension of its HD World system that is packaged in a container for battlefield deployment.

SAIC will demonstrate cutting-edge live-virtual-constructive simulation technologies, including Advanced One Semi-Automated and SE Core capabilities that can be applied to cyberwarfare, large-scale logistics modeling and integration between constructive and virtual architectures.

And Rockwell Collins will launch two new high-resolution helmet-mounted displays, the SimEye SX45 and SimEye SX60, which use organic light-emitting diode (OLED) micro technology and weigh less than 1 pound each.

Medical training systems will also be demonstrated. “Medical simulation demands more than just sustained practice to achieve competency — it requires a framework for achievement of overall goals,” said David Ramsay of B-Line Medical. The company will show its SimBridge and SimCapture products, which capture, handle and integrate data from multiple medical simulations.

MONEY MATTERS

Even though the training and simulation industry is on a growth path, it’s increasingly competitive, and defense budget processes and acquisition will be a hot issue, many believe. “There is renewed emphasis on reining in acquisition program overruns,” said Capt. Harry Robinson, commanding officer at the U.S. Naval Air Warfare Center’s Training Systems Division.

“Schedules often drive these overruns and there is fresh evidence that this could lead to program cancellation in some cases. We have analyzed our own processes and genuinely believe — by using Lean 6 Sigma and our own Project Acquisition Acceleration — that we can deliver very significant savings in schedules — up to 50 percent in some cases. We need to look to our industry partners to help us meet this challenge,” he said.

Genetti agrees. “Everybody is watching the budget evolution — uncertainty regarding the future of our forces and therefore the future requirements to support them is a major issue right now,” he said.

Recruitment challenges are another industry issue. “We have a highly skilled workforce at the intern, journeyman and master’s levels, but government faces a shortage of acquisition specialists, for example,” Robinson said. “Here in the Orlando area there are multiple government agencies seeking to recruit — largely from industry — for a variety of roles, and that creates something of a vacuum that we find in the training area.”

That’s part of the reason that I/ITSEC features a so-called STEM pavilion that promotes and supports efforts in science, technology, engineering and math.

“Remember the word education appears in the event’s title,” Lewis said. “We place great emphasis on the education piece — especially in science, technology, engineering and math. We aim to stimulate, promote and reach out — this is an essential part of the ‘whole of nation’ effort to respond to the challenges we face today.”