Excerpt from article "Driving For Success"
Ground vehicle training essential for a mobile military force. By Cynthia L. Webb, MT2 Correspondent
At the start of the Iraq war, IEDs were killing soldiers in convoys. Fort Hood simulations officers created plywood mockups of HMMWVs and used existing simulation software as a cheap and effective way to train for the hazards, said Georgie McAteer, Fort Hood’s director of mission command training. “We used some of our simulations to create a picture and they were able to drive in a virtual convoy. This allowed them to learn how to communicate. They learned how to use their radios and to pay attention to where they were in formation,” McAteer said. “The Army had always focused on the tracked vehicles and really not any of the wheeled vehicles,” she said. Wartime needs changed that. Since then, 70,000 soldiers have trained on the plywood mockups, bolstered by the Virtual Battlespace 2 battlefield simulation system, McAteer said.
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