Page 46 - Australian Defence Magazine September 2019

LAND FORCES
RANGES
Enhanced
targets and ranges
all systems go
EWEN LEVICK | SYDNEY
The ADF, in partnership with the US and Singapore, is looking to significantly upgrade Australia’s military training ranges and approaches to answer the needs presented by a true 5th generation military.
AT ADM’s Northern Australia Defence Summit last October, Brigadier Mark Brewer, Director-General US Force Posture Initiative, asked a pointed question.
“I think we need to ask ourselves whether our traditional approach of heading out into the bush or flying over it and training on areas that have fixed and field firing ranges with a few containers stacked on each other is actually now fit for purpose,” BRIG Brew- er said. “Surely there is more to it.”
Well, there is, and Lieutenant Colonel Dan Harrison of the Enhanced Target Sys- tems and Ranges team is the man charged with delivering the ‘more’ BRIG Brewer
is looking for. Alongside CASG and DST Group, LTCOL Harrison’s team is draw- ing on technologies and methods pioneered by Special Operations Command (SO- COMD) to revolutionise the way Army prepares its soldiers for combat.
“SOCOMD came up with a new train- ing methodology because they were having high failure rates on one of their more diffi- cult courses,” LTCOL Harrison told ADM. “What they found is that by adopting these new training techniques and combining those with enhanced targets and ranges, they were able not only to reduce the time it took to get people to the required standard, but they also significantly reduced their failure rates.
“Big Army started to have a look at this and said we’d like to see more. So we ran a risk reduction activity out at Majura. We had DST Group do some analysis of lethal- ity and self-reported combat efficacy – how well-prepared soldiers feel for combat – and what we found is that a five-day course caused a 350 per cent increase in lethality.
“Then we looked at feedback. Soldiers consistently said they learnt more in five days training than in the last five years, which is extraordinary.”
The key to this success is mimicking a bat- tlefield as closely as possible using a combina- tion of robotic targets, new training rounds, munitions, blended reality, and much more. Instead of lying on a concrete pad, breathing steadily and aiming at a bit of plywood a few hundred metres down a clear grass strip, sol- diers are now moving behind cover amongst controlled explosions, noise and smoke, aim- ing at intelligent robotic targets that react to bullets and soldiers as a human would.
“There’s a lot of science behind it, and all of it is trying to achieve a particular pur- pose,” LTCOL Harrison told ADM. “That purpose is the realistic replication of the op- erational environment. That is a significant engineering challenge.
“There’s no point in having a target if there’s no feedback, if the thing doesn’t fall over. There’s no closed learning loop.”
46 | September 2019 | www.australiandefence.com.au
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