Lewis: modeling & simulation save DoD money, lives

Every day in government and the private sector, surgeons botch surgeries, pilots crash airplanes, troops blow up the wrong locations, and no one pays the price – no one is hurt. Because these crashes, mistakes, and miscalculations happen in training simulations instead of in the real world.

“Modeling and simulation does an immense service for our country,” Rear Admiral Fred Lewis (ret.) told me today. Admiral Lewis is President of the National Training and Simulation Association, and I invited him to tell me about the M&S field because of a House Armed Services Committee hearing at which he testified in July. “The things that we’re most familiar with would be training of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines for combat operations or to perform various tasks in their services. Wherever there’s a man/machine interface, there’s a training challenge, and modeling and simulation can be used to help with that training challenge.”

Most people think flight simulators when they think of those man/machine interactions. But Admiral Lewis painted a more urgent picture of the life-or-death implications of some training opportunities. “Imagine yourself in an operating room. You’re part of an operating team, and before you is an anthropomorphic dummy. It breathes; you can take its pulse, its temperature. It’s hooked up to life-cycle monitor machines that show heart rate, blood pressure, and so forth. Certain symptoms can be simulated within that mannequin to demonstrate to the operating room team that they need to take some kind of action. If they get it wrong, the mannequin dies, but it’s a mannequin. The beauty of it is, they can say, ‘oops! We made a mistake.’ They can back away from that simulation. The whole thing can be replayed, so they can see exactly where it was that someone made a mistake.”

At the hearing, Army Major General Stephen Layfield talked about the coming “synthetic battle space.” Admiral Lewis told me that’s “a virtual world wherein people can immerse themselves, and have whatever sort of environment or landscape that you desire to operate within, populated by avatars.” It’s a technology that’s coming, but isn’t quite ready. “There’s a great deal of activity going on in development of the synthetic battle space, but we’re not there yet.”

Admiral Lewis referenced the original Star Trek TV show, observing that many technological advances predicted in the mid-1960s for use several hundred years in the future are actually in use now, just a few decades later. He also drew a parallel to the 1990s version of the show, describing the simulator on board the Enterprise in terms of what today’s simulation technology aims to produce. “Today we can display virtual worlds to individuals on goggles, like the goggles a pilot might wear, that display to the trainee a virtual world with avatars acting in this particular space. It’s not too much of a stretch to think that if we can do that for goggles today, we ought to be able to move it out slightly ahead of your field of view, and then later to surround an individual with this virtual environment. To get there is a giant leap, but we’re moving in that direction. We’ll go there in about 25 or 30 years.”

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has been touting his plan to put more DoD resources at the tip of the spear, and Admiral Lewis believes modeling and simulation fit well into Gates’s plan. “No matter what the reductions might be – small or large – our personnel in the military still have to train. Our forces are the best-trained men and women found on the globe today, and one of the reasons is we have the technology to deal with that challenge. As resources are reduced, that training needs to continue, because we need to maintain the level of readiness in order to be prepared to conduct whatever the national command authority might ask the services to execute.”

Admiral Lewis’s organization runs what it bills as “the world’s largest modeling, simulation, and training conference,” I/ITSEC 2010.

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