Donald Mitchell, an aircraft fuel systems flight chief at the 97th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron at Altus Air Force Base in Oklahoma, won first place and the accompanying $225,000 for his automated tool control and accountability idea, AETC said in a release.

This tool tracker would “drastically increase aircraft production and maintenance response capabilities,” AETC said in the release. It would also reduce overall operating costs, and making maintenance operations more effective, the command added.

Two other entrants won the runner-up prizes of $125,000 each.

An idea for a virtual reality lab for teaching foreign students English was the first runner-up. This entry, from English as a second language instructors Guy Stieglitz and Greg Foreman of the Defense Language Institute English Language Center at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland in Texas, sought to use 3D models and take advantage of the resources and expertise that already exist in the Air Force to improve how international students from allied and partner nations learn English.

The second runner-up idea, from Master Sgt. Douglas Gissendanner of the 59th Medical Operations Squadron at Lackland’s 59th Medical Wing, seeks to improve the feedback process for medical personnel. The VAPOR — or Validated Assessment Program for Operation Readiness — concept would streamline training efforts, lower costs and improve the readiness of medics, AETC said. Gissendaner is the wing’s operational medicine senior enlisted adviser.

The prize recipients will next try to further develop their ideas, track down more resources to make them a reality, and find other innovators they can collaborate with and learn from. The prize money is intended to be used as seed money to flesh out their concepts.

“The 2022 iChallenge winners embody our need to modernize our learning opportunities and techniques to train airmen and bridge our force development gaps and challenges,” Lt. Col. CJ Hale, chief of AETC’s rapid deployment office, said in the release. “Long-term U.S. military supremacy depends on our ability to rapidly innovate and be at the cutting edge of science and operational thought.”

This was the second annual iChallenge competition, and it took place during the ForceCon conference.

AETC hopes the contest will encourage airmen to come up with new, innovative ideas to train personnel, uncover those ideas and get them the resources needed to get those ideas into airmen’s hands.

While VR offers many benefits, the Department or Defense could seek to ensure that virtual training content derives from operational needs, integrates with existing processes and curricula, and is validated. Furthermore, this process could be assessed and refined continuously because although we cannot predict the future of technology, we can be confident that what we need and what we want will change.

The United States military has always derived great benefit from novel technological advances, and today is no exception. Rapid acquisition and innovation are focal points for the DoD. This focus extends to training as well, where emerging technologies can present many opportunities. But too often the tie from various capabilities to actual training objectives can be tenuous at best.

Within the training arena, there is now considerable focus on virtual reality and augmented reality. VR involves a user being completely immersed in a virtual environment, and AR involves overlaying virtual entities on real items. The Army, for example, is developing the Integrated Visual Augmentation System that will allow soldiers to see what combat vehicles see, have 3D terrain maps projected onto their real field of view and enable other capabilities for increased situational awareness.

In addition, most of the services are developing aspects of live, virtual and constructive, or LVC, capabilities that can, for example, allow pilots in real jets (live) to train with pilots in flight simulators (virtual) in different locations, all interacting with computer-based (constructive) representations of adversary jets.

Furthermore, the hype surrounding virtual capabilities has recently increased as a result of discussions of the metaverse, a persistent virtual environment whereby disparate users can revisit a virtual location and even own various virtual entities in that environment. In fact, recently, the Space Force filed a trademark application for “Spaceverse.”

These capabilities can offer significant value like increased training repetitions for relatively low cost, opportunities to practice risky activities safely, or connecting multiple participants in distributed training events across services, domains and allied forces. Nonetheless, to reap the benefits of technology while remaining cost effective, one must consider the context. With the current hype surrounding VR, there could be a risk of acquisition efforts chasing the allure of technology rather than the practical value. There can be a tendency for industry to push the technology rather than having end users pull the technology based on actual needs. However, there are methods for mitigating this risk.

The first step in avoiding the chase of new technology just for technology’s sake could be to clearly define what the new technology can offer — and common definitions and vernacular could be key. While this may seem obvious, the definitions of terms like LVC, metaverse or artificial intelligence are not always widely accepted in the U.S. government, much less the broader public. Furthermore, it may be necessary to identify, characterize and broadly communicate what practical capabilities a new technology can offer to various operations.

Although VR and its variants are hot topics in the training community, the appropriate training tool depends on the underlying training objectives. Thus, the second step could be considering the mission and operations that one is training for, clearly parsing what the new technology may be needed for. Missions could be decomposed into tasks and skills, which can then map to the most appropriate technology. For example, practicing dynamic flight maneuvers may require an expensive, full-motion simulator or even live flight, but basic preflight checks may require much lower fidelity.

In addition to ensuring virtual content derives from user needs, it may also be important to consider existing training processes and curricula during technology development. Especially in the case of new capabilities, the development process could include considering where new tools will fit in existing training processes. Technology needs for initial qualification training, for example, are different from those for advanced training or continuous training. Deploying new capabilities within a training process (e.g., a course or sequence of courses) and within an organization may deserve dedicated analysis.

Finally, once new training technology is deployed, validation could be critical. How do you know it really works? Efficacy and training transfer (the transfer of learned tasks or skills to on-the-job operations) could be tested experimentally, and this could require continuous data acquisition during training and during operations.

The steps laid out here should not be completed sporadically; one should not just take a snapshot of training conditions and technology. Rather, this process could be assessed and refined continuously. Thus, in addition to focusing on acquiring technology that helps retain a competitive advantage, the DoD could also focus on codifying processes that align technology with user needs and that adapt as technology, military operations and needs change. Considering context when planning the development and use of training technology could be crucial.

Tim Marler is a senior research engineer at the think tank Rand and a professor at its graduate school.

WASHINGTON — Air Education and Training Command is looking for new ideas on how to transform the way it trains the next generation of airmen — with hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money is on the line.

The winners of the second annual iChallenge competition will be announced in San Antonio, Texas, on May 24, during the ForceCon conference.

The person or team who wins the top prize will receive $225,000 to be used as seed money to further develop the top idea. Two runners-up will each take a $125,000 prize.

In a May 11 interview, Chris Adams, AETC’s innovation advancement division chief, said the command hopes the contest will spark airmen’s interest in innovating new ways to train personnel, uncover those ideas, and get the innovators the necessary resources to make their ideas a reality and get them into airmen’s hands.

The iChallenge contest not only gets innovative airmen in front of command leadership, Adams said, but it also connects them with one another, industry officials, academic organizations and funding sources so they can further exchange ideas. This will be the first time representatives from industry and academia will hear the iChallenge pitches.

“One thing that we’re doing this year is sharing what our pitches are so we can help solve our force development gaps and challenges and really accelerate change like [Chief of Staff] Gen. [CQ] Brown has tasked us all to do,” Lt. Col. CJ Hale, chief of the rapid deployment office at AETC, said in the interview. “This will be a great opportunity for industry and academia to see where our airmen innovators’ minds are and how they’re trying to incorporate emerging technology to modernize and enhance the AETC mission.”

Competitors in this year’s iChallenge entered in one of four categories. One category focuses on training “multi-capable airmen,” a concept in which U.S. Air Force personnel are taught the basics of doing other jobs in addition to their own. This could become necessary in a wartime situation, in which airmen on isolated bases without reinforcements would have to perform several jobs to keep the unit functioning. Brown emphasized the importance of multi-capable airmen in his “Accelerate Change or Lose” strategy.

Another category is looking for ways to use augmented or virtual reality, as well as mixed or extended reality — technology meant to improve how the service trains its force. AETC has already used these concepts in programs such as Pilot Training Next, which used artificial intelligence and virtual reality to improve and quicken the process for training new pilots.

The other two categories include ideas for building and delivering customizable software applications, and for improving airmen and leaders’ soft skills, such as communication.

Hale said AETC is particularly interested in making training programs to create multi-capable airmen that are accessible, modern and customizable. The command also wants to create and update these training programs in-house by airmen, instead of contracting out and having to go back to vendors for updates.

Finding fresh and innovative ways to use technology, such as virtual and augmented reality, in training is crucial as the Air Force seeks new recruits who grew up as “digital natives,” Adams said.

Virtual reality allows complete immersion in a computer-generated environment, sometimes by using goggles, and augmented reality overlays virtual elements on top of the reality the user sees. As an example of augmented reality, Adams cited the game Pokémon Go, in which players use their smartphones to find and capture hidden creatures as they walk around.

“This allows us to actually meet our learners where they are,” Adams said. “They’ve been using this stuff all their lives. They’ve done Pokémon Go and all these other things, so this is very natural for them.”

And adopting these kind of immersive learning techniques gives students more control over how they learn, Adams said, since they can often keep learning at home and study at their own pace.

Each contestant has 10 minutes before the selection board, which will be led by Brig. Gen. Caroline Miller, who was until recently commander of AETC’s 502nd Air Base Wing at Joint Base San Antonio, Texas. That includes a three-minute pitch for their idea, followed by a seven-minute question-and-answer session with the judges.

The inaugural iChallenge competition last year, which was structured differently than this year’s contest, awarded first prizes to ideas in three different categories, including an award for an interactive cyber education program called Cyber Space Odyssey.

With $475,000 in total prize money offered this year, there is also much more money at stake than last year, in which the prizes totaled $300,000.

Commanders could, at a glance, see the readiness of their equipment fleet as they prepare for battle. Even on the personnel front, a basic spreadsheet could tell a unit leader who is healthy, who completed the necessary training and who is ready to fight.

But granular detail on how an individual soldier or groups of soldiers might perform has remained tantalizingly out of reach … until now.

The Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command has been at work on a kind of soldier/squad “dashboard” that would put all of that data in a usable form and at a leader’s fingertips.

Measuring and Advancing Soldier Tactical Readiness and Effectiveness, or MASTR-E, kicked off in 2018. Researchers with the command have since transitioned a portion of their work to a more permanent program with 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, New York. Other elements are still under research as the command prepares to further test, gather data and refine the software tool for hand off to Army leaders in 2024, officials recently told Army Times.

And this wasn’t dreamed up in a lab. “Our stakeholders at the outset of this program, initially from the operational community, came to us and said: ‘We want to know what [are] these critical “X” factors that can predict the ability to sustain performance under tough conditions,’ ” said George Matook, MASTR-E program manager.

They’re doing that with the help of a lot of soldiers who are being measured on everything from marksmanship under stress, to memory and cognitive functions while trudging on treadmills with heavy packs for hours.

The gathering of data in the field, in the lab and from archives of research material all flows into creating baseline information. That info provides a clearer picture on performance expectations, the factors that contribute to high-level performance, and how that can be tweaked or supported to improve performance, Matook said.

The aim is to build a predictive algorithm that not only tracks soldier and unit performance but can pull in data from decades of research. That combined tracking and data library should give commanders a reasonable threshold to know when to rotate a unit out of an exercise — or otherwise press forward. The two options can be balanced by monitoring sleep, hydration, exertion and mental stress, among other factors.

That way, just like running a safety check on a vehicle before heading to the field, leaders can perform a “spot check” in real time on their troops.

Some soldiers have done shock tests in a laboratory to measure how they react to stress levels. In early March, 100 soldiers contributed 1,000 hours of test data on stress tests, during which volunteer participants ran through high-fidelity simulations where they were “on the lookout” for threats. If they failed to identify or react accordingly, they received a mild shock.

Certainly that shock was a tough bit of feedback, but it was also designed to increase the mental stress on the subject so researchers could measure how well they handled additional stress, said Tad Brunye, a senior cognitive scientist at Combat Capabilities Development Command.

In February, researchers concluded physical stress tests that included incline treadmill walks for two hours with a rucksack containing half the subject’s body weight.

But beyond the laboratory, squads and platoons are undergoing monitoring of their performance in dayslong field exercises and tests. Scientists are using a host of measurements, devices, tracking and input to identify what makes a soldier perform, strengths and weaknesses, and breaking points for individuals and units.

April saw new field studies with units running live fires on a range, plus sleep assessments to measure recovery times and performance. Units at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and Fort Devens, Massachusetts, participated.

Brunye also noted researches have pulled in hundreds of government human performance studies to build their models. For example, they relied on a paper that analyzed 45 laboratory studies on air temperature and cognitive performance dating between 1980 and 2018 to better understand how temperature affects focus.

“Heat stress causes the most significant decline in the most attention-demanding tasks,” according to the paper’s authors.

Two researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine performed a “meta study” — or studies of studies — to process findings from 70 published articles on sleep deprivation and cognitive speed and accuracy.

The takeaway? Time awake — not just total sleep in the previous 48 hours — makes for distinct differences in speed and accuracy performance by test subjects.

The researchers run a major annual evaluation; the most recent event was in June 2021 with 75 soldiers from the 1-325th Airborne Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Devens, Massachusetts.

This June the team expects to run another group of soldiers through a 72-hour field training exercise, all the while monitoring heart rate, hydration, eye tracking, sleep and more.

The Army and Marine Corps are not quite down to devices smaller than smartphones; they’re closer to beefed-up binoculars or tablet-level devices. For its part, the Corps selected Northrop Grumman’s Next Generation Handheld Targeting System, or NGHTS, earlier this year with a $252 million contract to provide Marines with a new hand-held targeting device.

In late April, SemiConductor Devices announced it will provide infrared capabilities for Northrop’s targeting system. A key feature is the method of cooling components to run infrared lasers, which allows designers to build smaller devices.

The NGHTS device can rapidly acquire targets as well as use laser terminal guidance and laser spot imaging. NGHTS has high-definition infrared sensors for grid capability and accuracy at extended ranges, and users have a high-definition color display to distinguish targets.

This single piece of gear replaces at least three legacy targeting devices Marines had to carry to access all shooter platforms. Those included the portable lightweight designator rangefinder, the laser target designator and the thermal laser spot imager.

The binocular-like device has options for both wide and narrow fields of vision for day and night. A day-and-night celestial compass is also built in for better wayfinding and navigation.

Targeting isn’t tied to one type of shooter. The platform-agnostic device gives troops ways to strike targets from airborne platforms, loitering munitions, ships, and conventional and rocket artillery.

Outside of simply targeting, devices such as the Marine Air Ground Task Force Common Handheld let users spot friendly and enemy positions with real-time mapping on the battlefield. And like any smart device, Marines can share that information, relaying messages and locations to other users on the network.

The common hand-held device uses less bandwidth than previous communication platforms, meaning less power consumption. It also “talks” with other smart gear, such as the Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System, the Command and Control Personal Computer, and the Army’s Joint Battle Command-Platform, according to a Marine Corps release.

An upgraded version of the handheld was fielded in late 2019.

The Army fielded its own device in early 2018 dubbed JETS, or Joint Effects Targeting System, made by Leonardo DRS under a $340 million contract. The man-portable, hand-held target observation, location and designation system is effective during the day and night and in all weather conditions, Army officials said.

The three-part system uses a target location module, a laser marker module and a precision azimuth vertical angle module for positioning.

That last module lets the system operate in GPS-denied or degraded environments.

Soldiers testing the device in its earlier fielding told Army Times that past setup, target acquisition and fires could take as long as 20 minutes. The new device cuts that down to only a few minutes.

The handheld portion weighs less than 6 pounds. The total system comes in at less than 17 pounds, according to Army data. And users can identify targets as far as 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles) in daylight and 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) at night.

On an even smaller scale, the Army has used the Android Team Awareness Kit. It’s an Android smartphone used as the individual soldier’s tactical hub. The device aids precision targeting, navigation and data sharing through a host of applications.

The Army is now experimenting with delivering those same features in a ruggedized smartwatch, officials with Program Executive Office Soldier recently told Military Times.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army’s One World Terrain, a virtual world that the service has been building for roughly five years to give a real-life feel to training, is becoming much more than that.

When the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division deployed to aid the evacuation operations from Kabul, Afghanistan, One World Terrain came along with it. The system helped the division assess terrain and conduct mission planning while extracting service members from the Hamid Karzai International Airport in August when the Taliban took over the city, Brig. Gen. William Glaser, who leads development of the Army’s Synthetic Training Environment, told Defense News in an interview this month.

“We continue to get requests from across the United States Army and the intel communities for that capability all over the world,” he said, including from Maj. Gen. John Kolasheski, V Corps commander in Poland.

V Corps stood up late last year in Poland to bolster Eastern European allies in a deterrence effort against Russia.

Kolasheski wants the system for an automated war gaming capability in his tactical operations center, where he develops plans as part of the military decision-making process, Glaser said. But the V Corps leader plans to take it even further, Glaser added, by ensuring the system can be used during operations.

“He’d like to war game decision points in the middle of the fight,” Glaser said. “If there is a situation coming up, they don’t know exactly what the right answers might be, and it would be interesting to have a little bit of science behind some of these decisions that they are making.”

This means One World Terrain must be easy to use and able to quickly replicate an environment, Glaser said.

Kolasheski is acutely aware of the benefit of One World Terrain, Glaser noted, because he holds a master’s degree in modeling and simulations from the University of Central Florida. “He understands the impact of how we can use some of our tools in the operational world.”

Developing such a virtual world “is so incredibly important. It’s not just the three-dimensional terrain that it provides to commanders and leaders out there so that they can do their visualization, their planning, their rehearsing,” Glaser said.

OWT was originally meant to be a training tool, designed to replace 57 different terrain data formats in the simulation world. It’s clear, however, that the system is gravitating and bridging toward the operational Army, according to Glaser.

While using simulation tools isn’t new — the Army used a program to make more effective decisions during the Gulf War, for example — OWT brings a higher-fidelity visualization and mapping tool to the force, Glaser said.

OWT was used on a small scale during Project Convergence 2020, but the virtual world has since been used in 15 different systems at Project Convergence 2021, according to Glaser. That annual event is the Army’s campaign of learning that examines how the service will fight in the future against high-end adversaries using capabilities it plans to begin fielding in the 2030s. The exercise is heading into its third year, during which OWT will expand to 36 different systems, Glaser said.

OWT wasn’t just used as a visualization and planning tool in PC21; it was integrated into autonomous vehicles, for example.

“Autonomous vehicles need to have a data terrain format in order to get it from point A to point B,” Glaser explained, so the Artificial Intelligence Task Force out of Carnegie Mellon used OWT for this purpose during the event.

Glaser’s outfit also used it in different mission command systems, including the Maneuver Mission Command System, and integrated it into the Command Post Computing Environment as well as the Command Post of the Future.

Since PC21, OWT has sought validation from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency for precision targeting, in hopes the system can help with fires systems in PC22.

Just prior to this year’s Project Convergence, the Synthetic Training Environment’s Information System, OWT and the Reconfigurable Virtual Collective Trainer for a variety of air and ground platforms will go through an operational assessment around September. PC22 will take place mostly in October and November.

In PC23, the Army plans to use OWT not just as a training capability, but for rehearsals.

“We will essentially be using it as a rehearsal tool for the lower tactical level for platoon leaders and company commanders,” Glaser said. This will be demonstrated at the operational assessment, but because it takes place just before PC22, the service will wait a year to try it out in a Project Convergence environment, he added.

Within two years, officials say, these LVC-TEs will be operational at five bases across the Corps, and the Marines will move forward on plans to network virtual training with other services, providing the effect of large-scale joint training exercises at a fraction of the cost.

Or at least that’s the hope.

The plan, dubbed Project Tripoli, is meant to increase meaningful “reps and sets” by giving more Marines access to a realistic, simulated training environment that allows them to interact with battle buddies and other units like they would in combat.

At its core, the project will network together five existing virtual training tools — ranging from the service’s indoor simulated marksmanship trainer and VBS3 first-person shooter simulation to the aviation distributed virtual training environment flight simulator — so Marines can communicate and move in the simulation in relation to other troops.

While this might not provide the exact sights, sounds and smells of combat, planners say the result will be more quality training available live, even with limited resources and complex logistics.

It’s cheaper, too: While a standard predeployment exercise workup costs $8 million, officials believe they can lower the cost to $5.2 million by eliminating a map exercise and integrating up to a dozen simulations.

Capt. Garrett Loeffelman, a modeling and simulation officer at Training and Education Command’s Range and Training Programs Division, discussed the technology Thursday during the Modern Day Marine expo in Washington. He pitched a prospective “virtual Range 400” — a reference to the Corps’ most realistic live-fire range at Twentynine Palms, California, used to train company-level elements in complex combat tasks, such as attacking fortified positions.

Every aspect of that grunt company, from the mortars to the combined arms, he said, could be replicated and networked in the LVCTE while participants experience the training in real time.

“The only time you get to do that [now] in a full-up, high-fidelity experience is out at Twentynine Palms,” Loeffelman said. “Imagine if you’re a company commander at Camp Lejeune: You can train all of those skill sets. You can even bring them together with your squad leaders and above.”

The version of LVC-TE that’s set to roll out is referred to as a “minimum viable solution.” Loeffelman said command officials plan to collect feedback from Marines on the simulators in order to improve the planned future iterations.

“We’re not replacing Range 400 with these systems,” Col. James Kidd, director of the Range and Training Programs Division, confirmed. “What we’re doing is we’re making the live-fire portion when you get to Range 400 much more beneficial to the user.”

All three headquarters of the Marine expeditionary force will feature an LVC-TE setup by 2025, as will Marine Corps Base Hawaii — a key location because of its collocation with U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s Pacific Warfighting Center.

Joe Lomangino, LVC-TE team lead, reiterated plans to network simulated training among the armed services in hopes of launching large-scale joint exercises that are completely virtual.

“We don’t fight by ourselves, right? We don’t fly by ourselves,” he said. “So this has to be connected.”

But some kinks must still be worked out.

There’s the technical “fair fight” problem present in live simulations, in which an environment can’t update quickly enough, leaving two war-fighters to encounter different scenarios and unequal challenges. Presenters on Thursday said that problem still exists and will probably be present for years due to immature technology.

It’s also unclear how virtual training involving, for example, air and ground combat elements will coordinate with legacy Marine Corps training and readiness standards that don’t have a category for such an exercise.

Loeffelman acknowledged a “gap,” but said planners are working to refine training manuals and push for communication and coordination improvements across disparate units.

There’s a cultural aspect, too, particularly when it comes to red tape around Marines operating on a network for training.

“Why can a battalion commander sign off on the risk of a live-fire training exercise, but it takes essentially a [general officer] to sign off on the risk of spillage?” he wondered. “These are all questions we’re trying to solve.”

That’s coming to Marines of all ranks and billets through exercises large and small, board games and advance artificial intelligence options that are being adapted for future use at the unit level.

Those were some of the items presented Wednesday by Col. George Schreffler, director of the war-gaming division at Marine Corps Warfighting Lab, here at the 2022 Modern Day Marine expo in Washington.

If a Marine’s job is touched by Force Design 2030, and all Marines’ jobs are being affected by that guiding document, then war-gaming had something to do with how the service made that decision and likely future decisions.

For example, in the recently released 2022 update to force design, the document notes that “extensive wargaming” in the form of Expeditionary Warrior 21 informed the service’s distributed maritime logistics operations concept now being developed with the Navy. That game and another called “Enigma” tested concepts for operations in the information and competition below the level of armed conflict, also called “gray zone” operations.

The data fed into a soon-to-publish Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 8, “Information,” according to the force design update.

The center will bring together the staff and visiting leaders in one location with advanced technology to double the number of war-games the force can conduct in a year.

Schreffler said the center will “increase the realism of the player experience,” and “significantly increase the amount of data” able to be put into the scenarios. Those two factors alone will “enable a more rigorous analysis” of war-game results and deliver “better and potentially more concrete insights from war games.”

Lastly, and perhaps most important, Schreffler and others see the center as providing a backing to “produce more defendable positions to support service level decisions” on force design and development.

That’s key as Marine Corps leadership has see public criticism of some of the Force Design 2030 changes, such as eliminating tanks, reducing conventional artillery and experiments that could fundamentally alter the size and composition of the infantry.

The center was first announced at the 2017 Modern Day Marine exposition by then-Commandant Gen. Robert Neller.

Neller had said he wanted a kind of “holodeck” for Marine war-gaming, a nod to the Star Trek technology that allowed character Capt. James T. Kirk to step into a virtual reality scenario and work through tactical or strategic problems.

The aim at that time was to have a center that could support 20 war-games each year, including two large-scale, 250-participant exercises. Currently, the service runs about a dozen war-games annually, officials said.

Former head of training systems command, then-Col. Walt Yates, told Marine Corps Times that advanced artificial intelligence could allow the center to run a single scenario as many as 1,000 times to better evaluate outcomes and better inform decisions on what to deploy and how to deploy Marine assets.

Marines broke ground on the new war-gaming and analysis center in May 2021. The $79 million center is aimed at figuring out tough problems on what technology, types of formations and even tactics might work in future fights.

Schreffler said the center planned opening is in 2024.

At the time, Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. Eric Smith, then a three-star heading Combat Development and Integration, provided tangible reasoning for how the center will affect even the lowest ranks.

“It’s a big deal to those 19-year-olds here, to the ones down at Parris Island or at San Diego, because they do the fighting and the dying,” Smith told Marine Corps Times. “We’re going to make sure they do less of the dying part by what we do here.”

The center’s site is next door to the Marine Corps University and not far from a number of mid- and senior-level Marine office schools and training programs. Its proximity should allow for cross-pollination of ideas from the schools for concept testing at the center.

Former heads of the war-fighting lab and Marine Corps Systems Command also previously told Marine Corps Times that the center will help them back decisions with deeper, evidence-based data, whether that is for unit employment, unit composition or weapons and equipment development and fielding.

But some of the thinking of the center is set to spread across the Corps.

“The vision for the Marine Corps Wargaming and Analysis Center allows us the ability to plug into remote locations and play games using the system or systems that we have in the analysis center,” Schreffler said.

That software is still in the development stage, he said.

“That should be able to allow us to tie into the fleet and elements of training and education command,” he said.

On a per-share basis, the Canonsburg, Pennsylvania-based company said it had net income of 81 cents. Earnings, adjusted for one-time gains and costs, came to $1.36 per share.

The results beat Wall Street expectations. The average estimate of six analysts surveyed by Zacks Investment Research was for earnings of $1.14 per share.

The maker of engineering-simulation software posted revenue of $425.1 million in the period. Its adjusted revenue was $428.6 million, also topping Street forecasts. Four analysts surveyed by Zacks expected $406.4 million.

For the current quarter ending in July, Ansys expects its per-share earnings to range from $1.46 to $1.64. Analysts surveyed by Zacks had forecast adjusted earnings per share of $1.83.

The company said it expects revenue in the range of $450 million to $475 million for the fiscal year’s second quarter. Analysts surveyed by Zacks had expected revenue of $485.5 million.

Ansys expects full-year earnings in the range of $7.53 to $7.94 per share, with revenue ranging from $2.01 billion to $2.07 billion.

Ansys shares have fallen 28% since the beginning of the year. In the final minutes of trading on Wednesday, shares hit $288.71, a decrease of 18% in the last 12 months.

The purchase is expected to help Thales broaden its footprint in the land market by providing new training and simulation solutions to promote combat readiness, the firm said in a news release. Peter Hitchcock, Thales’ vice president for training and simulation, credited Ruag S&T as a “major player in live training, covering everything from prime contractor responsibilities to the individual sensors used, as well as delivering the services at combat training centers.”

He noted that Ruag S&T considers itself a “live” specialist, while Thales is more versed in “virtual” technologies.

“Coming together brings mutual reinforcement, greater critical mass and allows us to accelerate the convergence of technologies to build the next generation of hybrid live, virtual and constructive training solutions,” he added.

The acquisition aligns with armed forces modernization programs across the globe, and a move toward digitalization across land forces. Prior to the sale, Thales and Ruag S&T partnered on the French Army’s CERBERE program. That effort entailed developing a simulation system that could train and monitor various capabilities in a joint environment, to include assets such as the Griffon and Jaguar armored vehicles; upgraded LeClerc tanks, along with their munitions; the Scorpion program’s SICS information system; and radio units.

Negotiations for the sale began in November 2021, and the contract was signed this past January, according to Ruag. The next step is to integrate the two companies, Thales said. With the acquisition, Ruag S&T’s 500 employees will fall under the Thales umbrella, bringing together more than 1,400 employees across six countries: France, Switzerland, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates and Australia.

Thales cited the first four nations as “priority” areas where the acquisition will help reinforce its existing footprint, and the company said it looks forward to increasing its presence in the UAE and Australia. Ruag S&T saw sales of approximately €90 million (U.S. $95 million) in 2021, per the two companies.

Thales is primarily focused on training and simulation solutions for military air, land and naval capabilities. It also builds and operates civil helicopter simulators, and offers operational training services for armed forces.

The sale to Thales was part of an enterprisewide realignment for the Swiss company, Ruag said. It recently reached an agreement for Australian company ASDAM to take over the Ruag Australia division, while General Atomics Europe took over Ruag’s Germany-based aircraft maintenance activities in 2021. It sold its aircraft maintenance sites in Geneva and Agno, Switzerland, to Dassault Aviation in 2019.