A Center for Learning Innovation
Written by Maxie McFarland
MT2 2010 Volume: 15 Issue: 4 (July)
Education, training and experience are the cornerstones of developing, sustaining and maturing soldiers, civilians and leaders who are the centerpiece of all military capability. Shaping, arranging and managing these cornerstones, in ways that deliver the right people with the right skills at the right time, is the foundation of our military strength and the critical underpinning of our national security. Unfortunately, a decade of persistent conflict, coupled with an accelerating pace of rapid and often discontinuous change, has added significant complexity to the context of national security. Consequently, we find ourselves re-evaluating our formulas for producing and managing people, skills and time. It is no longer certain that our existing notions of education, training and experience will deliver the leaders we will need to face the complex and uncertain future we foresee. Our studies indicate that previous paradigms for educating, training and developing soldiers have fractured significantly in this rapidly changing operational environment. What once was a fluid, linear process is now an asynchronous set of three isolated components. Yet the technical ability to manage complexity and manipulate it for our own purposes now presents an opportunity to create a nested, singular construct. In essence, we will be able to build a multifaceted training apparatus that synthesizes what a soldier learns with what he practices and what he actually executes. With this in mind, the U.S. Army’s Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), in partnership with the Joint Improvised Explosive Device (IED) Defeat Organization, its sister services and U.S. Joint Forces Command, has created a learning laboratory designed to enable us to look at ways in which we might fundamentally change how we educate, train and mature the force. Using the challenge of IEDs as a starting point, the Joint Training Counter-IED Operations and Integrations Center (JTCOIC) has evolved into a multidimensional learning enterprise that is making a difference in today’s fight and laying a foundation for changing how we prepare leaders of the future. As a learning innovation center, the JTCOIC has built and continued to expand partnerships with experts in industry, academia and other government agencies. It has gained access to an exhaustive collection of databases that encompasses a wide range of operational information reported in theater. Working with its partners, the JTCOIC is fusing operational knowledge with education and training programs to create new learning models. Applying this data to sophisticated modeling and simulation tools, it is creating robust, high-fidelity replications of the operational environments that are being used throughout the force. Furthermore, using a common framework of scenarios focused on critical training objectives, it is now able to enrich learning programs with the realism of what soldiers have seen and can expect to see when they deploy. Continuing to leverage the groundbreaking technologies from various industries outside of the military, the JTCOIC will soon apply scenarios and simulations to a massive, multiplayer online gaming platform. This virtual, immersive operational environment will be federated and scalable to allow users to interact and learn within the complexities of actual operational environments. In this fashion, they will learn and train on critical skills, as well as gain valuable experience in applying them in near real-life situations. Training conditions will be tailorable, accommodating a wide range of organizations and operations, to include soldiers tasked to conduct route clearances, company commanders coordinating with theater-level intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets, platoon leaders engaging with an unfamiliar indigenous population, or a division/brigade staff planning and executing complex operations. People will always be the core of our military. Technology, however, is a key enabler to building and sustaining the versatile continuous learning environments we will need to ensure our leaders have the right skills to meet future challenges. Success in the future will lie in our ability to cross-pollinate, blending operations with education and mashing together technologies for seamlessly connecting real environments to virtual worlds, and virtual worlds to immersive environments. At the JTCOIC, the belief is that innovation does not always occur in proximity to a problem— sometimes it is born in the vicinity of an opportunity. Breakthroughs in gaming systems, high-definition video, computergenerated graphics, holographic designs, augmented reality and artificial intelligence are all being incorporated in some manner into military training and education programs. The growing list of partners from academia, industry and government continue to push the learning envelope. The JTCOIC, as a center for learning innovation, is enabling us to produce the right people, with the right skills, at the right time. ♦
Editor’s Note: Maxie McFarland, SES, is the deputy chief of staff, Intelligence for the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command.
