Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
facility for the Army. In June of 1985, I traveled to the French and British engineer schools
and brought back some ideas that we're going to incorporate there. It was a very fortuitous
visit. I found the French had built a tactical training center, a large room with bleachers and
screens that you could project movies or slides or TV.
The significant part of that room was the fact that it had a lot of individual rooms, 14 of
them, set up to look out to these scenes so you could put two students in each of the rooms.
Each one of them would have only their map board and their radio telephone, and then they'd
be able to work problems that way, real terrain problems. There was a central control room
by which instructors could speak to each student module individually so they had
independent work. It was an idea that I thought had great merit because one of the things
we'll not have at Fort Leonard Wood, just as we don't have it here, is the rest of the
combined arms team. We can do engineer things, but we need to replicate the rest. I thought
by coming up with a facility, which we first called the Tactical Training Center but now call
the Battalion Combat Training Center, was something that we ought to build that would
follow that French concept.
I should add that after leaving the French school I went to Chatham, England, to visit the
British school. They had in the center of their tactical training room a model on a terrain
board, and they had built plywood armored personnel carrier modules. They would put their
students in the armored personnel carrier where they would look out at the training board to
do their work. We combined the two into a facility for Fort Leonard Wood that had the
individual cells in which you could isolate two students at a time, hook them up by radio
telephone so they could work and be talked to by an instructor or other students in a task
force tactical operations center.
At the same time, we incorporated the terrain board into the Battlefield Command Training
Center because we're talking about commanders, platoon leaders, company commanders,
battalion commanders, group brigade commanders, and we want to focus on AirLand
battlefield training there.
The idea is that we can bring folks in there, put up something on the training board, still
project real scenes up on the screen if we want, and ask them to work a problem, work
independently from their map board, independent solutions, call in reports, do different kind
of things. We think that this will be valuable in many different respects. We also will put
some elevated benches around the room, and all those benches will be wired for computers.
That will tie in another initiative that I haven't really talked about yet, and that's the Engineer
Command and Control System, which will be a battlefield system. We'll be able to bring that
into the classroom, too, and they'll be able to work that from the other benches throughout
the facility.
Another thing that General Vuono, while at the Combined Arms Center, started was that he
wanted everybody to have a typical command post within their facility. We will fix one of
our rooms up as a typical engineer battalion or brigade command post. People in the tactical
operations center don't see the battlefield, so we'll not give them access and visibility out to
the terrain board. It will be located so that people out seeing the training board--platoon
356
Previous Page
