VR becomes an important tool for Marines, maximizing money and time

Hello and welcome to Weapons and Warfare

For Straight Arrow News, I'm your host, Ryan Robertson. Just ahead on this week's episode, I go for a ride in the Parasim

And when you're ready, go ahead and pull that handle. Nice throw

Excellent. It's a setup that would elevate any man cave to legendary status

See how this VR parachute simulator is preparing special forces troops for stand-up jumps and emergency bailout slash ejection training at a fraction of the cost in a completely safe environment

And we check in with the folks from Blue Halo to get the 411 on the Locust laser weapon system

Built with reliability and lethality in mind, it can track, identify, and engage all sorts of targets using high-energy lasers

But we start with our debrief. While we were at this year's modern-day Marine event, we met some Marines from 29 Palms Marine Base who were there to spread the word about some of the training opportunities available at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center

But more than spreading the word, they offered a taste of the experience

So today we going to conduct an unclassified demonstration of the training capability that we are delivering

If you're new to the simulated training environment scene, the setup looks like a gamer's paradise

Interactive simulators offering the type of experience rarely available to the general public

It's part of a larger effort called Project Tripoli, and it combines live, virtual, and

constructive training to prepare Marines for future conflicts. We leverage a lot of different

emerging technologies as well as more traditional training methods to bring people up from the most

basic level of kind of tasks that they need to train to to more complex collective training

tasks where they're coming together. Lieutenant Colonel Jesse Attig is the modeling and simulation

officer for the Marine Air Ground Task Force Training Command. It's the Corps' primary training

facility focused on enhancing the readiness of Marine Air Ground Task Forces. So we're preparing

Marines in simulation before they go out and do it in the live environment so that we can optimize

that time that we have in the live. We're not wasting gas and flight hours and bullets and all

the different things that go into it so that we get the most out of that rep. Colonel Adig says

they think of the training like a team sport where Marines build up their individual skill sets then work in smaller groups building up to going against potential adversaries bringing units to 29 palms throughout the year for different types of training exercises

We will run Marines through some very basic stuff with a laptop type of configuration where they're practicing the process and the communication procedures for how they're going to communicate with one another

So they'll do that in a sterile type of environment. They're looking through a virtual environment

They can see what the enemy is going to look like. They can transmit on different doctrinal radio nets

But then they go out and do it in the live environment. Consisting of 16 components, Project Tripoli creates a complete and modern battlefield training environment

So you'll see elements of live, virtual, and constructive. Each one of those, we use those in different ways to maybe train specific park task capabilities

but then we'll composite them together in a more collective distributed training environment

to really achieve that team effect that we need to for that collective mission set

that we really have to have the Marines prepared to do before they go out and go forward. Among the many reasons why the Marines value the ability to conduct virtual training

it allows units to put in the work out of sight of potential adversaries

possibly using reconnaissance satellites. Like the U it no secret other governments are gathering intelligence and monitoring the activities of America national defense Every time we train out in a live environment while it may be a higher fidelity type of training that we get

there's an aspect of it, though, that we're showing the rest of the world what we're doing. For those that might be thinking virtual training is nice, but it's just a big video game where mistakes don't have any real consequences

Colonel Adig says they thought of that, too. We do penalize appropriately to help drive the point home

So, you know, for an individual Marine, if they get killed, it's not that we just resurrect them right back to life

and they're back in the fight. We actually have an entire process of how they have to go

through a series of different kinds of regeneration. We make the staff deal with the process

of how they would deal with the casualty collection and the processing of all of that

So it adds a little bit more of a realism to it. It's not just a, okay, hey, hit, reset, we do this again

While the roadshow was no doubt of interest to the modern-day Marine attendees

Attic says the long-term goal for Project Tripoli is to improve Marines' warfighting skills by emphasizing realistic scenarios

using advanced tactics with the use of technology, ultimately preparing the next generation of Marines

for whatever combat environments they might face