Nevertheless, simulation, whether using the Army’s new Engagement Skills Trainer (EST) or its nascent “dismounted soldier training system,” will play an increasing part in infantry/squad training as budget imperatives shift the emphasis in solving tactical problems arising in WAS/PM environments from materiel solutions to better tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). Peterson said that simulation can both improve capabilities and prepare soldiers for a battlefield that is not “empty” in a way live exercises cannot.

“Simulation doesn’t replace live training, but it can augment and give you some capabilities. I’ve been in the Army for 24 years. I’ve always trained on an ‘empty battlefield.’ There was me and maybe another unit that was acting as the opposing force. We didn’t have all the things actually out there – people moving, people going to work, people shopping, kids playing.

“We had a little bit of that at JMRC [Joint Multinational Readiness Center, Hohenfels, Germany]. They hire [local] civilians out of the rotational budget and put them on the battlefield to give it some of that [complexity]. With simulation, I can max out [non-combatants] or I can tone it down. I can simulate the environment at night during Ramadan, where [local people] are out on the streets. The sun has set, fasting time is over. They’re out eating, enjoying fellowship with their neighbors. Doing that at JMRC or JRTC [Joint Readiness Training Center, Fort Polk, La.], putting civilian role-players out on the battlefield at night, is very, very expensive. An immersive trainer, the EST [Engagement Skills Trainer], or the Dismounted Soldier Training System allow you to do that.

“Immersive training takes away that empty battlefield [condition]. When a unit goes out to do live training, the battlefield may still be empty but now you’re training the physical part. Can a soldier endure? It’s the heat, the cold, the wet, the bugs, the wait. You can recall how you [trained] in the immersive trainer and visualize that battlefield out in front of you. It allows you to validate the TTPs that you rehearsed.”

Whatever the training balance, Braun stressed that in the face of more sophisticated weapons, the Army must refresh skill sets that have atrophied in recent times, specifically in combined arms scenarios where there is synchronized joint fighting against integrated battlefield systems.

“That is something that many of our mid-grade leaders, the senior captains and junior majors, the E5s/E6s [sergeants/staff sergeants] of the Army, have never seen because we’ve been fighting a different fight for 10 years.”

Such harmonized training is important for both the squad and command staffs. Braun looks back to his own operational experience in the 101st Airborne Division in the 1980s, an era in which monthly field training exercises and quarterly deployments in brigade-sized formations were the norm.

“The large-scale exercises, the Reforgers [Return of Forces to Germany], the Team Spirits have long since been overcome by budget constraints. Even before we got into 10 years of war, we weren’t doing those large-scale exercises. We were substituting the training required to orchestrate large combined arms operations through simulation.”

While simulations like the Battlefield Combined Training Program at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., which exercises division and brigade staffs, are valuable, Braun agreed, they can’t reliably reproduce the real-world problems that live exercises, and combat itself, present.

“You can do that with icons on a screen to train the staff, but to train the capability, you have to do it, and we haven’t done it in a long time.”