Setting the Training Conditions to Win in a Complex World

Setting the Training Conditions to Win in a Complex World

David E. Violand

If you are looking to execute tough, realistic training in preparation for a Combined Training Center rotation or Warfighter exercise, then pay attention!  This article is designed to broaden your knowledge on the Decisive Action Training Environment, helping you understand what it is, what it isn’t, and how it serves Soldiers and leaders to build a baseline of training on a common set of challenging and realistic conditions.  It also introduces ways the Army is leveraging technology to assist that effort; enabling exercise designers to cut costs and save time through the use of capabilities like the Exercise Design Tool and the Information Operations Network.  “But why can’t we just train against conditions for the most likely threat we will face?  Why create a made-up set of conditions in the first place?”  The answer to this most-commonly offered argument is well answered in the preface of the U.S. Army Operating Concept.

“Our future is unknown and unknowable”[i]. This fact sits at the crossroads of the AOC and drives the mandate to develop leaders capable of rapidly adapting to an increasingly complex set of conditions.  Complexity, defined by the unknown and ever-changing environment, is an impetus for elevating training to new heights.  In order to win in a complex world, the Army must train against a complex and dynamic set of Operational Environment (OE) conditions—conditions that capture both the continuities of war and the unfolding changes to the character of war.  These changes include disruptive technologies that are only just emerging on the threshold of impacting that world. 

As the U.S. Army hones its core competencies[ii] over the coming years it cannot afford to build a baseline of learning, nor develop the next generation of Army leaders, against the backdrop of a training scenario focused solely on one particular threat.  The days of practicing air-land battle against a structured “Krasnovian” threat, modelled on well-studied Soviet doctrine and formations, are gone.  Against the span of competing and regional powers, transnational terrorist and criminal organizations that may comprise a threat to U.S. national interests in our unknown future, we cannot simply opt for training against the “threat du jour” and hedge our bets.  We can’t go back to the past, we have to move forward into the future. 

This reality is what drove the creation of the Decisive Action Training Environment, more commonly known as “DATE”.  The DATE is the U.S. Army’s response to the clear need for a set of conditions that can deliver necessary complexity in training.  But DATE is also more; as a composite model of conditions that exist within the real-world environment, DATE offers a breadth of complexities that a single real-world threat actor like the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) could never provide.  Army training focuses on tasks, conditions and standards.  DATE reinforces this model by capturing all the conditions needed to realistically and effectively challenge any Army task, and cross-walks these conditions with the Mission Essential Task List (METL). 

In professional football parlance, a National Football Conference team might assume that the New England Patriots were the American Football Conference team to beat in the upcoming Super Bowl.  But at the beginning of the season, or even at the outset of the playoffs, that team couldn’t afford to focus solely on preparing to deal with those features that make the New England Patriots what they are.  There are other teams who could upend that strategy.  And while the regular season brings a known, weekly opponent that can and will drive specific preparation and training, superior teams apply this focused training onto a bedrock of basic blocking and tackling that is built up during the preseason. 

So it is with Army training.  In mastering the basic blocking and tackling of our profession, our core METL tasks, it is necessary to have a composite set of conditions that account for the likely environments (away games) and most dangerous aspects of ALL the opponents we might face in the future.  And unlike gridiron-bound football teams, Army units must prepare for future threats that take the field and operate in vastly different and complex formations.  A future conflict need not feature Russian or Chinese state forces to present opponents wielding Russian or Chinese technologies and arms.

By centering on a single region providing a range of geographical features and conditions that provide representative capabilities from current threats and project the evolution of those capabilities into the future, DATE is able to present a full range of potential threat capabilities - truly making the scrimmage harder than the game.  The conditions and actors are based on current conditions and threats.[iii]  Fictitious names and a fictitious scenario-base allow unclassified training that challenges a wide range of tasks.  The DATE already includes the characteristics of the future OE we see emerging in the world around us.  From the increased velocity and momentum of human interaction, to a hybrid threat operating amongst urban populations and capable of achieving technological overmatch and employing weapons of mass destruction, DATE provides capacity to account for what the AOC calls these “harbingers of future conflict.”[iv]

Flexibility of design is a key to this product.  While DATE provides a common foundation of environmental and threat factors, trainers can modify each aspect to tailor training conditions to their commander’s specific training objectives. Think of DATE as the sandwich bar in a delicatessen.  All the necessary ingredients are laid out in full display, but it is up to the customer to create the sandwich that fits their particular appetite.  This flexibility allows units to employ DATE as the basis of scenario development in both institutional and operational training.  From the classroom to the simulation center for a unit warfighting exercise, DATE provides a common baseline of conditions across echelon.

In an increasingly complex world, this delivers a much-needed measure of simplicity and continuity in training.  This continuity is driving many of our Allied partners to consider adopting DATE.  They recognize the benefits of aligning training conditions towards achieving interoperability that reaches beyond ammo and equipment.[v]  And the plausibility of the environment is evident.  As training units cycle through the Army’s Combat Training Centers, where the DATE has been driving training since 2012, the environment they experience is modern and relevant; it could be pulled from front page descriptions of the conflict in Ukraine. 

This plausibility is no fluke.  The U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) G2 is charged with ensuring that both the DATE and the Opposing Force (OPFOR) elements that replicate the hybrid threat within its context represent the continuities of war that we observe across the globe.  Through the sustained rapid infusion of lessons learned, tactics and techniques from emerging conflicts are acknowledged and if not already accounted for, incorporated into annual revisions.  Equally important for our regionally aligned forces, TRADOC G2 has created Regional Aligned Forces Threat Environments (RAFTE) that modify the DATE to account for regionally-specific conditions found in the Africa or Pacific areas of operation.  Also routinely published are Threat Tactics Reports that focus on areas of burgeoning crisis (e.g.- ISIS, Ukraine) which highlight for exercise developers and trainers where within the DATE those observed conditions can be found. 

DATE is well founded on the bedrock of doctrinal Training Circulars and publications that are available for download and use by exercise designers via the Army’s Training Network[vi].  The TC 7-100 series remains core for exercise design and the hybrid threat, but the Army also recognizes the need to leverage digital tools and emerging technology – living doctrine – to both reach its technologically-savvy junior leaders and to acknowledge the reality of diminishing fiscal resources for training.  The OE Training Support Center is TRADOC G2’s answer to this challenge, adapting rapidly to emerging challenges as they arise and return “ownership of training to commanders by harnessing technology to train faster, better, and more efficiently.”[vii]

The OE Training Support Center serves as the TRADOC G2 operational arm, delivering integrated OE data, products, ISR, social media and cyber-attack emulation in support of unit exercises at all echelons.  The centerpiece of this effort is the Exercise Design Tool (EDT).  The EDT presents planners a living doctrine (automated) tool for designing exercises.  It reduces the time-consuming process of searching for data from past training exercises to develop new training events by making use of a centralized repository of scenarios, orders, graphics and products that are doctrinally correct and easily manipulated.  Among the features facilitated by the EDT are start-of-exercise data, mapping and graphics, storyline synchronization, higher headquarters order production, role player development, and (most importantly) data reuse to facilitate multi-year exercise refinement.  

Another emerging technology that the OE Training Support Center is developing is the Information Operations Network or “ION”.  ION replicates a social media and digital domain environment for use in training.  Since it is housed on closed intra-nets that are unique to each unit exercise and accessed via the web, ION allows the training audience access to a social media environment specifically developed to support their scenario.  While still expanding in terms of capability, ION currently replicates websites, blogs, Twitter, and YouTube content, with Facebook being added in October 2015.

It is being evaluated for integration into the Joint Readiness Training Center’s Leader Training Program as a potential train-up tool for units at home station and will be featured within the replicated environment at October’s Army Warfighting Assessment.[viii]

As noted by the TRADOC Commander in the January-February 2015 issue of Military Review, the EDT is an open source and web-based tool that “enables trainers to build their own exercises to meet specific training objectives without a team of script writers.”[ix]  It provides commanders and staffs with an unprecedented ability to find, reuse, and tailor exercises and training information to reflect the desired operational environment and address unit training objectives.  Readily available via the web to any government member with a Common Access Card[x], the EDT offers game-changing technology that intuitively becomes the primary delivery vehicle for the DATE.  And as with the DATE, the EDT will continue to advance with the pace of technology to ensure that evolutions meet user demand and recognize emerging conditions across the globe.

The future that our Army faces is indeed complex.  The pace of operations continues to create competition for increasingly scarce resources, and drives the need to innovate in how we create, share and reuse conditions against those realities.  The Army cannot afford to create units with differing levels of training accomplishment-we lack the depth to allow for such inconsistencies.  As the future unfolds, the Decisive Action Training Environment, delivered by adaptive technology solutions, such as the Exercise Design Tool, provides the best means of achieving cost-effective, complex and dynamic training that meets the overarching demand of our nation and our Army – to Win in a Complex World.

End Notes