![\"\"](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Aegis1989-2014.34.1.jpg.jpg\")
Once the schoolhouse is set up in Dahlgren for new sailors training to serve in a handful of billets related to Aegis Combat System maintenance, the next step will be to establish Aegis VMT trainers in Hampton Roads, Va., and San Diego, SCSTC spokeswoman Kimberly Landsdale told Defense News. The Navy has also funded a pilot program that would put a single-computer training system \u2014 as opposed to the entire classroom of computers \u2014 onto a surface ship to see if it\u2019s useful to connect sailors at sea with technical experts ashore for managing particularly tough problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The trainer will also expand to include the Ship Self-Defense System and the AN\/SQQ-89A(V)15 anti-submarine warfare combat system, and future baselines of the Aegis Combat System will be added later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Stoner said the technology is necessary to keep up with changes in the combat systems the Navy fields on current and upcoming ship classes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAs a design strategy, we\u2019re going more toward software design that is agnostic of the hardware it rides on,\u201d he said. \u201cIn the past, a lot of our training has been very hardware centric: find the bad circuit card, find the bad voltage regulator or switch or component.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe ability to train on finding and fixing software faults doesn\u2019t really lend itself to the way we were doing training \u2014 so it may not be that you have to replace the circuit card, but maybe you have to go in and you have to restart part of the program, or you have to reset something in the software,\u201d Stoner added. \u201cThese systems are flexible enough to help us train to that level of detail.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aegis VMT<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
Though the Aegis VMT is still in final development, a handful of sailors are already wringing it out to provide feedback before the April rollout.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In a demonstration of the system for Defense News, Fire Controlman (Aegis) 1st Class Kirt Palmer walked through a training scenario with three petty officers third class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In an assignment to diagnose and ultimately replace a broken room alert monitor, Fire Controlman (Aegis) 3rd Class Tyler George first went to the phone to report the pending maintenance work up the chain of command \u2014 part of helping the students practice not just the hands-on work but also the end-to-end procedures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
FCA3 Felice Hahn then took over after getting permission to do the work, setting up diagnostic equipment and checking inputs and outputs to determine which component is faulty. Once she found the right component, she went back to the phone to report that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
FCA3 Thomas Wyant took over replacing the room alert module itself \u2014 but in an error made for the purpose of the demonstration, he forgot to use an electrostatic discharge wrist strap the Navy manual requires. When he tried to unscrew the module without putting on the wrist strap first, the scenario stopped and Palmer, the instructor, was alerted about a safety violation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Palmer said the system\u2019s ability to flag not just wrong actions but also safety violations is important: the student might be able to fix the fault, but if they are doing it unsafely, there could be ramifications down the road. Stoner noted most technicians do their work solo, without the supervision of a department head or the ship commanding officer, and everyone is relying on the sailor to do the work correctly and without jeopardizing their own safety, that of those around them or that of the components and systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Palmer, who has been in the Navy for 14 years, said the Aegis VMT lets him train more students at a time and also lets him train them to more skills than the previous hands-on lab.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On capacity, he said the previous lab only let an instructor work with about three students at a time due to space limitations of everyone needing to crowd around the same hardware. With VMT, an instructor could teach a dozen or even two dozen students, or a single primary instructor at Dahlgren could be working with adjunct instructors at the waterfront schoolhouses, or the instructor could be coordinating with sailors on ships.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Palmer also said it lets him teach students things that would be too risky to do before \u2014 chiefly, to practice reconfiguring software. Previously, trying to reconfigure software on the actual ship set, if done wrong, could create a big maintenance bill and take down the equipment for days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the virtual trainer, Palmer said, students can try to rework the software code and he can monitor from the instructor view on his own computer, noting only after the fact where missing slashes or other mistyped software code could have led to a situation where \u201cthis command would have actually wiped the entire program.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n He added that students gain a lot of confidence knowing \u201cI\u2019ve already practiced this on a system that can\u2019t break\u201d before they go to perform the same task on a real combat system component.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Brian Deters, the executive director at SCSTC, said during the visit that Aegis VMT represents the Navy acknowledging that, \u201cwith the growing complexity of the combat system, which is ever increasing, that we have to have more modern methods of delivering the training or we\u2019re just going to get left behind.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Larry Sharp, the director of technical support at the command, said past trainers have had something like 50 work items that can be practiced. With Aegis VMT virtualizing the combat system down to individual wires, he said instructors can pick from some 10,000 potential faults to introduce into training.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Deters said this can help students start to understand the cause and effect of one component being broken and affecting the output on a display elsewhere in the combat system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In addition to proving a more thorough learning experience, Aegis VMT also produces data that can help instructors and SCSTC refine the curriculum as they go. If students are consistently struggling with a certain scenario, Palmer said, it would be apparent in the data and the instructors could emphasize that scenario during classroom training.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Stoner said the trainer and curriculum are also flexible enough to keep up with trends in the fleet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI could easily envision where we\u2019ve learned something at sea \u2014 a ship had a particular casualty \u2014 we develop a new work procedure on how to fix that and maybe a procedure on how to detect it before it occurs, so now we know that,\u201d the captain said. \u201cHow do we put that in the minds of the technicians on 100 Aegis platforms? When you can package that into a one- or two-hour training that can be given and then demonstrated in their homeport, now that\u2019s real power to do training.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Deters said this example gets to another benefit of the Aegis VMT: it can be applied in several ways, based on how many systems the Navy chooses to buy and how it wants to employ the technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The focus of the schoolhouse in Dahlgren and the future ones in fleet concentration areas is to teach apprentice-level sailors how to do maintenance and restore casualties on ships. The technology, though, could be used throughout a sailor\u2019s career, teaching journeyman-level sailors how to supervise young technicians, for example.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s really limited only by our imagination on where we want to take it,\u201d Deters said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The system could be used to teach the entire fleet new practices as they develop, as Stoner suggested. It could also be used for sustainment training at sea to keep sailors fresh or to practice less-common maintenance actions before they\u2019re done on the ship itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Palmer said some actions on a ship might be conducted just once every three years. In those cases, perhaps no one on the ship was around the last time the maintenance action was done, and perhaps no one has been through that in a previous assignment. In that case, the sailors could practice it in the VMT a week or two ahead of the scheduled maintenance action before doing it on their ship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Stoner said the trainer could even be used to help connect sailors at sea with technical experts ashore through the Navy\u2019s Surface Training Advanced Virtual Environment (STAVE) network, something that\u2019s being funded on one ship as a pilot program. In this case, sailors on a ship could describe the problems on the combat system, while the technical experts ashore could replicate it on their own VMT and then help the sailors at sea hunt for a solution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThat was not something we were intending in the beginning, but we\u2019re starting to explore\u201d the idea now, he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The key to Aegis VMT, Stoner said, is its inherent flexibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAs the surface navy moves to a continuous development mindset for combat systems, you have to have a continuous training mindset to go along with that or we\u2019ll quickly fall behind,\u201d he said. \u201cAs they look at how to quickly bring new capabilities into the system, we have to be able to analyze that and say, does that change our maintenance training? Change our operator training? How do we bring that quickly into the classroom but also into the waterfront and even onto the ship?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A virtual trainer will help sailors learn to troubleshoot better at the beginning of their careers and stay up to date with new procedures, leading to more ready ships and better self-sufficiency at sea in line with surface navy priorities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":77894,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":16,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":{"2":{"categories":["your-military","news","left-column","home"],"primary_category":"your-military"},"7":{"categories":["your-navy","news","daily-news-roundup","newsletters","left-column","home"],"primary_category":"your-navy"}}},"categories":[160,16,36],"tags":[],"coauthors":[3354],"class_list":["post-36467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-news-roundup","category-naval","category-newsletters"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"P7BF5MCBCNEEJGT6I5G6AI6R2A","arc_canonical_url":"\/naval\/2021\/11\/15\/navy-turns-to-new-aegis-virtual-maintenance-trainer-to-boost-crews-self-sufficiency-at-sea\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/20211006_RBDP_BCAM_0003.00_00_03_04.Still019.jpg.jpg\")
Continuous learning<\/h1>\n\n\n\n