‘Pipe Dream’ Becomes Reality as Sub Training Enters Information Age

By ROBERT A. HAMILTON, Special Correspondent

The control room of the USS Virginia would astonish a submariner who retired only a few years ago. Commissioned in October, the Virginia is the first of a new class of attack submarines. For members of the crew, it is a step into the 21st century.

Oversized computer touch screens have replaced dials and switches at the various work stations, the yokes for the planesman and helmsman have been exchanged for joysticks and the periscope is gone, replaced by a television camera atop one of the masts and a few yards of fiberoptic cable.

Capt. Arnold O. Lotring, commander of the Submarine Learning Center in Groton, Conn., said such dramatic changes in the fleet mean the schools that prepare sailors have to transform as well. You cannot use an Industrial Age education system to prepare sailors for the 21st century, he said.

“My mission is to bring submarine training into the Information Age,” Lotring said. He is constructing a model for education that includes more computer simulations and self-paced learning, and an ability to deliver “just-in-time” training to sailors who are getting ready to deploy, or already on deployment.

Lotring’s mantra has become “right training, right time, right place.”

Virginia and the USS Hyman G. Rickover, a Los Angeles-class attack submarine based in Norfolk, Va., will soon become the first submarines to deploy with the Integrated Learning Environment (ILE), a computer network that will be loaded with training software specific to the missions those submarines will conduct. The ILE will deliver high-quality content to the learners, and instant feedback on their progress to on-board mentors or instructors.

“We never had the ability to do that before. It was a pipe dream two years ago, even 18 months ago, but now we’re getting ready to put it on deploying submarines,” Lotring said. “We want to be able to flow learning to the sailor when he wants it and where he needs it.”

The advances in sub training are indicative of a major realignment of training functions within the Navy. All submariners once were trained under the auspices of the Commander, Naval Education and Training (CNET), but the Navy has created 14 learning centers to push control down closer to the fleet operators. Lotring now oversees six submarine schools, 1,400 instructors and 500 other staff, and an annual budget of more than $80 million. The creation of the Submarine Learning Center last year was the first step toward delivering a training system that is rapidly responsive to fleet needs.

With the Learning Center operational, Lotring’s staff told him it would be more effective to modify software used in the big, expensive navigation simulators, which can accommodate only two students at a time, to run in a limited fashion on desktop computers, on a network that can be expanded with a few mouse clicks. Students now master basic skills before they get to the simulator, so the throughput has increased.

“This is going to put training decisions much closer to the instructor,” Lotring said. “I can see the benefits and say, ‘let’s go invest in that,’ much more quickly than if we had to go up through CNET.”

Naval Submarine School, the hub of submarine training, has long used advanced technology to train its students. During the last couple years, for instance, it has constructed a networked submarine navigation trainer.

It started with VESUB, the Virtual Environment Submarine Shiphandling Trainer. Built by RDR of Centreville, Va., it is a virtual reality system in which an officer of the deck under instruction dons a helmet that feeds him a view of a harbor that he must safely navigate, outbound or inbound. An instructor monitors his progress on a large screen that shows what the pilot is seeing, and can change wind, currents, ship traffic patterns and other parameters to make the trip more challenging. That was followed by RDR’s Submarine Piloting and Navigation System, a virtual reality system that re-creates a control room.

But unlike bulky trainers in the past that were dedicated to a specific class of submarine, the new off-the-shelf systems in the trainers can be rapidly reconfigured, by changing a few cables or loading a new CD in an internal drive. The Submarine Multimission Team Trainer, or “Smitty” as it is known at Submarine School, is produced by Lockheed Martin’s Maritime Sensors and Systems unit, and will take that one step further, by running the same tactical software in the combat control systems of different classes of submarines. Changing the trainer will require only a few minutes at a keyboard.

“Every time I see a big, expensive trainer I question whether we need it,” said Cmdr. John J. Gordon, training director at the Submarine Learning Center. “The first thing I ask is, ‘is there a way to do it with less space and at less cost?’”

Gordon said the Learning Center is moving toward the use of large flat-panel screens to re-create large spaces on a submarine, such as engineering spaces or auxiliary machine rooms. One day they might be set up in such a way as to simulate a diesel generator, and the class could do a walk-through and run the same controls on a touch screen that they would on a ship to start it and stop it, as Bose speakers simulate the sounds of the engine. Some key advantages: no environmental impact from exhaust or spilled oil, and no need for a costly and time-consuming rebuild after several years of operation. The next day, the screens could be arranged to simulate an engine room, reducing the need for multiple trainers.

Submarine training is also relying more on powerful web-based, networked simulators that allow sharing of databases between different systems.

“Within the last couple of months, we shot a virtual torpedo from a classroom here in Groton, and ran it on the ocean computer model at Naval Undersea Warfare Center Newport, on high-density supercomputers that I don’t have the space or the money to duplicate here,” Lotring said. “Why reproduce an ocean database that resides on another Navy computer when we can just integrate it into the simulation we’re using? We can probably extend that to acoustical databases for people we’re training in sonar and other simulators.”

The biggest hurdle to such sharing is integrating the databases — essentially getting them to “talk” the same language. But that is becoming less of an obstacle, Lotring said. “If you want to sell your stuff to the Navy, and get it used, it will have to meet certain standards, and vendors are beginning to design to the same standards on their own because they see where things are headed.”

The Submarine Learning Center is also investigating new technologies such as “augmented reality,” that could be particularly useful for shipboard training. A sailor would don a headset that projects an image of a real damage-control situation into the spaces of the ship where he would fight fire or flooding, and would be far more realistic than the scraps of cloth now used to simulate a disaster on a submarine (black for an area that is smoky, green for seawater getting into the “people tank.”).

“Now I can put a helmet on the kid and he sees a fire coming out of the galley. If he does everything right, the computer puts the fire out. If he doesn’t, the fire gets worse,” Lotring said. “It’s not cheap technology, so you’re not going to be saving any money doing it that way, but the long-term result, in terms of the Fleet Response Plan, is that it will keep us ready to rapidly surge for any mission.”

The Learning Center is also changing its focus from producing a proficient individual to turning out an accomplished team. Training 20 electronics technicians (ETs) in the same classroom, for instance, allows the school to send 20 men to 20 boats who know ET systems very well. But on board, radar and sonar are integrated into the combat control and navigation systems.

Recently, the program changed to put ETs, fire-control technicians and sonar technicians in the same classroom at the early stages of their training, where much of their work is done on a computer-based system that allows them to progress at their own pace. The result: most of the enlisted men are finishing within a few days of each other, and two weeks ahead of the previous schedule (the five-week FT “A” school, for instance, is down to three weeks).

Lotring said he would not be surprised if, eventually, officers and enlisted men are training side-by-side in simulators, forging the same kind of team at school that they will have to in the boat. In fact, he envisions as much a need for instructors on a post-executive officer tour who are as experienced in team building as they are on mechanical systems. “We think there’s an opportunity here to start building that team much earlier, and make it work in their minds before they have to make it work on the boats.”