US Troops Need Training to Battle in Future Megacities, Marine General Warns
US land forces will eventually find themselves locked in fights within huge, dense urban environments where skyscrapers tower over enormous shanty towns, and these troops need more realistic training to operate within these future megacities, a US Marine general is warning.
“I’ve trained in every environment, jungle, the desert, the mountains, cold weather, but I’ve never really trained well in an urban environment,” said Brig. Gen. Julian Alford, the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory commander, earlier this month at the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) in Orlando, Florida.
For him, that’s a problem because “the first time I ever dropped a bomb, shot a rocket, threw a grenade, killed a person was for real in an urban environment,” he said. “That should never happen again.”
The one-star general asked industry participants at I/ITSEC to help coming up with ways to prepare troops to better fight in an environment that is becoming a reality.
“We are going to have these megacities that are ringed with these shanty towns and we are going to fight there because it will be the people who are uneducated, unemployed, the young men who are not married and they are mad about their lot in life,” Alford said.
“We talk about the three-block war, but we are moving quickly to the four-floor war,” he added. “We are going to be on the top floor of a skyscraper . . . evacuating civilians and helping people. The middle floor, we might be detaining really bad people that we’ve caught. On the first floor we will be down there killing them. … At the same time they will be getting away through the subway or subterrain. How do we train to fight that? Because it is coming, that fight right there is coming I do believe with all my heart.”
Augmented reality shows a real landscape and other troops but can, using head-mounted displays, superimpose or overlay virtual reality images and effects such as vehicles, explosions and aircraft dropping bombs.
See the full story here: http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/training-simulation/2015/12/28/us-troops-need-training-battle-future-megacities-marine-general-warns/77826210/