THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 31, 1996 TAG: 9603310174
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A6 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY PAUL CLANCY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: SUFFOLK LENGTH: Long : 103 lines
On a balmy November night off the coast of a North African nation, a contingent of U.S. Marines approaches on cushioned landing crafts. The situation is desperate: A radical sect has seized power and threatened the lives of more than 2,000 Americans.
Army paratroopers are nearing their drop zone. Special forces are moving toward communications headquarters. Air Force tankers are preparing to refuel Navy jets.
Then everything goes wrong, from a torrential storm to a ship engine-room fire.
And high-ranking military officers, reacting to images on computer and video screens, intelligence reports, newscasts, and every other other bit of information that can be crammed into giant computers, must find a way to contain the opposition and rescue the threatened civilians.
The scene is a high-tech war games room at the Joint Training, Analysis and Simulation Center, tucked away at the Suffolk end of the Monitor-Merrimac Memorial Brige-Tunnel.
Here, the future of modern warfare - joint military operations - is being rehearsed by the people who may be called upon to carry it out.
In an era of shrinking forces and tight budgets, the major service branches are learning to work together more closely than ever.
They're putting their money and their best minds into high-power, high-speed communications systems that link their forces and forge them into a lean-but-mean fighting machine.
``We don't have the force structure to go out and do single-service operations anymore,'' Army Col. John Schmader, camouflage-clad chief of Joint Task Force training, said after a tour of the building, which bristles with $30 million in high-tech, high-speed equipment.
``We think we can only maximize our capability by working jointly among the services,'' he said.
The center is designed to lend such realism to training exercises - just as aircraft flight simulators do - that commanders may forget they're in an office park in Suffolk instead of on the bridge of an aircraft carrier.
``There's no place else short of actual combat where they can get the level of pressure they can get at this facility,'' Schmader said.
The pressure is applied not to students of war-fighting, but to top commanders.
``The folks we bring in are not the ones who have nothing else to do,'' said Eugene Newman, the center's civilian acting director. ``We bring the actual people who are touching the battlefield.''
This year, the U.S. Atlantic Command is spending more than $40 million on operations and training. Three large-scale exercises per year, plus a half-dozen smaller simulations, will begin this summer.
In last November's exercise, more than 1,000 military and civilian personnel crowded into one of the building's two floors.
All of this may be expensive, but it is a small fraction of the cost of real training exercises. The savings are the driving force behind the center's rapid expansion. Next year, the center expects to make its big technology leap.
Instead of two-dimensional icons lobbing flat-trajectory shells at each other, the screens will look like real battlefields. Elements of weather, terrain, light and dust can be punched in.
In a demonstration, a tank rumbles into a town and proceeds to fire on suspected strongholds, blowing them into heaps of rubble. Fires rage and black smoke billows in the wind.
The joint training center was established to carry out the Defense Department's mandate to increase simulated joint training.
It landed in Suffolk by chance: The compound was built as the Naval Undersea Warfare Center for submarine research, then was orphaned when the 1993 Base Closure and Realignment Commission had the sub center moved to Newport, R.I.
The Atlantic Command lost little time in taking over the 220,000-square-foot facility two years ago.
At the same time, local and state business and education leaders launched ambitious plans to use the center as a catalyst for private high-technology growth.
The center duplicates the real war room at Norfolk's Atlantic Command - and could be used in place of the real thing if need be.
In the meantime, trainees may have trouble telling the difference. ILLUSTRATION: Photos
JOHN H. SHEALLY II/The Virginian-Pilot
Navy Capt. Ralph K. Zia, right, the chief of staff at the Joint
Training, Analysis and Simulation Center, and Army Col. John
Schmader, chief of training, work with high-ranking officers at the
Suffolk facility to rehearse the future of warfare.
Computers are critical to the center's simulations; the newer models
can represent battlefield variables such as weather, light and
dust.
by CNB