Pipe Dream' Becomes Reality as Sub Training Enters Information Age

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-theshelf 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.