Official US Army Fire Team & Squad training vids

[John Kettler]

Some help for those learning to handle US infantry! These are what the Army's CM level sims look like. My understanding from one of the comments on a vid is that this is something called VVS and is a military only version of Arma.

Introduction to Rifle Squad
 

 

Squad Movement Formations & Techniques

Regards,

John Kettler

Edited April 26, 2016 by John Kettler

[Seedorf81]

Thanks John,

Interesting and helpful!

[Kevin2k]

VVS? You mean VBS as in Virtual Battle Space?

VBS2 used to be available to consumers, it is pricey though. I don't know any private VBS3 users. The nice thing is that ArmA II with Arrowhead contains a lot of VBS2 functionality and assets, and was arguably a more polished package. Though ArmA II is more limited regarding tactical control.

There was a VBS2 Lite version freely available to active US Army personnel only. There is still freely available a VBS2 Jcove Lite package featuring the British Armed Forces. Both these older VBS Lite editions do not feature the fancy shaders of ArmA II.

 

 

[John Kettler]

Seedorf81,

You are most welcome. There are many more like that. They'll be in the sidebar when you watch one of the vids on YT, rather than simply on the page here.

Kevin2k,

I believe you're correct, but since I don't know ArmA at all, I defer to those who do.

Regards,

John Kettler

[Currahee150]

Oh god...not these videos again. Well, I guess my complaint is less at the videos and more at the simulator in the videos.

I remember during training they decided to try to familiarize our upcoming landnav course by having us run around on a VBS map. "Hmm, this is just like ArmA, but crappier..."

Needless to say, the map in VBS and the landnav course at Buckner were two entirely different things. 

Edited April 26, 2016 by Currahee150

[Kevin2k]

1 hour ago, John Kettler said:

I believe you're correct, but since I don't know ArmA at all, I defer to those who do.

I spend quite some time on ArmA II with its Addons in 2014 and 2015; modding and playing. It is an amazing game/sim actually.

The latest thing I tried was the World War II Eastern Front setting provided by the addon called 'Iron Front'.

ArmA II's predecessor Armed Assault (1) is obsolete since. As to its futuristic successor ArmA III;  I never played it.

33 minutes ago, Currahee150 said:

Needless to say, the map in VBS and the landnav course at Buckner were two entirely different things. 

The VBS map in the video looks kinda unnatural, I don't think they tried very hard.

[Currahee150]

16 minutes ago, Kevin2k said:

As to its futuristic successor ArmA III;  I never played it.

It's pretty decent. I only played the vanilla, baseline version, but it was least fun, kept the simulator reaslism of the other ArmA series, and had pretty good graphics. The setting was kinda weird though - apparently the US Army divested all of its M1A2s and bought the Merkava IV instead. Things like this made me think "WTF?" And what on earth is CSAT and what do they want? The endings were also weird, and the plot made zero sense outside of giving you an excuse to shoot at things.

16 minutes ago, Kevin2k said:

I don't think they tried very hard

They didn't. 

I don't know why the military decides to stick with crappy, buggy simulators to try and train its soldiers. Games like Combat Mission and the actual ArmA series, CMANO, and heck, maybe even Call of Duty are going to teach me way more about squad tactics, combined arms, and tactical problems than some half-baked, pixelated mess that kept bugging out every other checkpoint.  

Edited April 26, 2016 by Currahee150

[AttorneyAtWar]

You can get mods that add in the modern US military, modern Russian forces, some other NATO nations and old Arma 2 maps. Its a lot of fun running them with all of ARMA 3's improvements. If you have ever seen a user named "Stagler" posting on here he is actually part of the development team for the American and Russian forces mods.

[Kevin2k]

I believe you, but suppose I will wait it out a few years until all the ArmA 2 to 3 porting is finished. I don't even have/want a Steam account.

Also AFAIK there are some important ArmA II exclusives:
- Ambient Combat Manager (ACM), random mission generator and whatever is scripted with those, like the 'Flashpoint' missions by thomsonb; Great way to spend a free hour.

- 'Cold war Rearmed' Total Conversion. Haven't even found the time to play this yet...

36 minutes ago, Currahee150 said:

I don't know why the military decides to stick with crappy, buggy simulators to try and train its soldiers. Games like Combat Mission and the actual ArmA series, CMANO, and heck, maybe even Call of Duty are going to teach me way more about squad tactics, combined arms, and tactical problems than some half-baked, pixelated mess that kept bugging out every other checkpoint.  

It is surprising... With such a big army and budget you would expect them to obtain some practical software.

When I checked out some VBS (Jcove) Lite maps I found them similarly dissappointing and unnatural. I wonder if the army makes these maps themselves, or if they pay the VBS devs too little to make them proper?

 

[panzersaurkrautwerfer]

VBS2 and similar platforms are pretty crappy training aids.  For vehicles, they're just bad, none of the switchology works and the capabilities of vehicles in the VBS2 system are fairly unrealistic.  CCTT was a much better trainer given it came with all the switches and was positively punishing in vehicle performance.  It did suffer from being a dinosaur system though.

For dismounted stuff, VBS2 required too much "learning" how to operate in.  Like any time you put someone in with it, it was going to take an hour of your three hour block to sort of learn how to move and issue commands.  And it didn't practice anything that was especially relevant to the rifleman level of things.

Never got good results from it.  For virtual mounted options CCTT was the only way to go, for dismounted stuff, there was more cheaper and effective training by finding a small bit of land to run around and yell "bang bang" at each other on.  

[antaress73]

****ty simulators are part of military training everywhere ... got to do with the acquisition process and greasing some contractor`s wheels. You need contacts on the inside to get a contract and game companies do not.

 

Edited April 28, 2016 by antaress73

[Panzerpanic]

On 26/4/2016 at 6:55 PM, panzersaurkrautwerfer said:

VBS2 and similar platforms are pretty crappy training aids.  For vehicles, they're just bad, none of the switchology works and the capabilities of vehicles in the VBS2 system are fairly unrealistic.  CCTT was a much better trainer given it came with all the switches and was positively punishing in vehicle performance.  It did suffer from being a dinosaur system though.

For dismounted stuff, VBS2 required too much "learning" how to operate in.  Like any time you put someone in with it, it was going to take an hour of your three hour block to sort of learn how to move and issue commands.  And it didn't practice anything that was especially relevant to the rifleman level of things.

Never got good results from it.  For virtual mounted options CCTT was the only way to go, for dismounted stuff, there was more cheaper and effective training by finding a small bit of land to run around and yell "bang bang" at each other on.  

I was sure the us used steel beast or something like that for armor simulation.

[AttorneyAtWar]

Yeah Steel Beasts actually has dialogue in the training missions on what to do after you have finished, like calling your instructor over and understanding your score.

[panzersaurkrautwerfer]

22 hours ago, Panzerpanic said:

I was sure the us used steel beast or something like that for armor simulation.

 

22 hours ago, Raptorx7 said:

Yeah Steel Beasts actually has dialogue in the training missions on what to do after you have finished, like calling your instructor over and understanding your score.

Actually, not so much.  Some unit, somewhere, some time must have used it.  But the only time I ever saw a sign it'd been employed was on the "customer satisfaction" card you'd get if you ran an exercise through the simulation center.  There was a series of tickboxes to select which services you were commenting on.  One of the possible selections was indeed, Steel Beasts.  

However I never saw it actually running on a Army computer.  I purchased it for myself though, but ultimately did not really use it much (it's good if you're trying to get a tank simulator, less good if you're trying to simulate tank units if that makes any sense).

The primary tank simulators were:

CCTT: Basically a big 1990's simulator unit.  One "box" was the entire turret interior, the other was the complete driver's station.  Graphics would have been pretty so-so for 2000 or so, but they were functional, and you could put a whole company's worth of tankers into one scenario across a fairly large battle space.  There were also Bradley and other vehicle simulators that operated on the same system, and could share the same scenario.   

It was a good tool, the amount of effort that went into setting up a mission was pretty modest. It wasn't "perfect" but man if you had a fairly free day, it was a great way to fill it with good training.

Downside was it was housed in a building the size of a medium warehouse, and required some contractors to run.  It was still present on every post with ABCTs stationed nearby.  It also used a less complicated, but more restrictive model for gunnery so hitting anything in it was much harder than in reality.

MAGTS (Mobile Advanced Gunnery Training System): The mobile came from the fact it was built into a semi-trailer, but in practice one placed it did not leave.  It replicated the complete commander and gunner's station for the tank, and was used for gunnery specific training.  It did not do anything else, the "tank" only moved where the simulator operator told it to or on a pre-programmed path in the simulator.  Virtually all crews had to spend hours and hours doing simulated tank ranges in it before firing real bullets for qualification.  

These are usually allocated one to a Company (not like, it was "owned" by that company as much as each company was assigned a trailer of their own to use), and unlike CCTT, was operated by personnel within the Company.  Given the nature of the "rush" times prior to going to gunnery, it wasn't uncommon to be in the MATGS at 2 AM which is really peak awesome for insanity.

[Kinophile]

Does the army have a simulator in the vein of CM? IE Company  ->Battalion  scale? 

I imagine there would be use in it,  especially for officers. 

[Codename Duchess]

1 hour ago, kinophile said:

Does the army have a simulator in the vein of CM? IE Company  ->Battalion  scale? 

I imagine there would be use in it,  especially for officers. 

In my experience with mid-level officers and government funded computer programs this would be too clumsy, inefficient, overpriced, and never used. 

Plus by the time you get there you should have an understanding of what you're doing.

[Stagler]

They are still updating the VBS platform and are looking to push VBS 3.6 out. The engine has been much improved to the levels of ARMA 3 but  some of the models are still low quality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyCOALQJceo

[panzersaurkrautwerfer]

3 hours ago, kinophile said:

Does the army have a simulator in the vein of CM? IE Company  ->Battalion  scale? 

I imagine there would be use in it,  especially for officers. 

Not really.  Part of my anti-VBS2 rage comes entirely from when the Army tried to use it for a Company mission (Company, platoon, and squad leaders were real humans), and it was terrible.  The command interface is so poor, and the AI too dumb to act on it's own that it basically just turned into an FPS deathmatch.  Our instructor stopped the tomfoolery by dropping a warship of some kind onto the hill we were taking to signal the end.

There's some other 2D map icon type things that I've seen get used, but they're poor for the combat end of things.  It's worth remembering in larger exercises a lot of what's being trained isn't "3rd Platoon takes hill 303" it's after 3rd platoon takes the hill, how do we get them more ammo, replace the tank they lost, evacuate the 1 KIA, 2 Urgent Surgical WIA they received, and running stuff like IADs.

CMBS came out after I was out of command, but I used to push CMSF on people pretty hard, as it's quite user friendly compared to most simulators.  If I had a millions dollars and was in a procurement kinda place I'd just buy up a mess of licenses for CMBS and give it out to folks graduating armor/infantry basic officer's course and maneuver captain's career course as those would likely be the audiences best able to use CMBS as a learning tool.  

[Kinophile]

29 minutes ago, panzersaurkrautwerfer said:

 Our instructor stopped the tomfoolery by dropping a warship of some kind onto the hill we were taking to signal the end.

Best. Admin. Rage. Quit. Ever.

[panzersaurkrautwerfer]

Addendum:

One of the things the Army was getting big into was sort of blending all the different training events.  If I recall correctly things were basically:

1. Real life training events as we know them.
2. Events held in simulators 
3. Traditional map type events

So if you envisioned a Battalion scaled operation, one company conducts an air assault  mission with real helicopters against an objective in the training area.  A tank company then establishes defensive positions using the same terrain as simulated in CCTT.  The Battalion command post is established in it's tents and command vehicles on the parade field across the way from their normal offices, and they're commanding and controlling both the air assault, the mission in the CCTT, and then the other two companies in the battalion exist only exist as markers on the map with their battle losses/successes determined by some sort of observer-controller team.

Where simulators break down is once you really get past about company or so, your direct hand of god control pretty much goes out the window, like between tank D32 and the Battalion Commander there are numerous commissioned officers and NCOs all handling most of the actual on the ground commanding and controlling.  

So Battalion Command is less walking with a swagger stick and pointing out what must be done, and a lot more managing a series of units that largely can control their own affairs, but ensuring they all work in unison to achieve your overall objective, which really needs humans in the loop, or to be very abstracted to simulate humans to be a good training aid (vs just a good game).