DEARBORN, Mich. (Army News Service, Sept.15, 2003) -- Development of the Future Combat System will be done primarily with simulation because the vehicles and network are still a concept, said Army officials at a four-day conference last week in Dearborn.

The FCS of 16 manned and unmanned vehicles has to be fielded by 2010, said Dr. Grace Bochenek of the Army's Tank-Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center in Warren, Mich. Bochenek is executive director of TARDEC's research arm and she served as the conference co-chair.

Because of the fast development schedule of FCS, getting the key players like Army Materiel Command, Training and Doctrine Command and contractors onto the same sheet of music is important, Bochenek said.

AMC held the Simulation Modeling for Acquisition, Requirements and Training, or SMART, conference Sept. 8-11 to give engineers "the best ability to find the best course of action" for FCS said Gen. Paul Kern, AMC commander.

Based at Fort Belvior, Va., AMC is charged with a multitude of missions around the world including storing ammunition, repairing and refitting damaged equipment and developing new equipment.

Simulation and modeling can help bridge the technology and geographic gap that the Army faces during that short testing, Bochenek said. With the fielding of that family of vehicles just seven short years away, everyone needs to work together, she said.

The conference attendees wants to start developing equipment through simulation and help bring the Army's FCS development on-line, Kern said.

Kern also said that developing simulation technology now will help training in the meantime and future.

A good example of that simulation capability currently in use is the Fort Hood, Texas-based 4th Infantry Division's Shadow Unmanned Aerial Vehicle.

The soldiers that guide the Shadow during flight can also run simulations when the UAV isn't operating, Kern said.

AMC wants to expand that capability to other platforms in the Army, he said. Instead of sending Bradley Fighting Vehicles and Abrams tank crews on Fort Hood, Texas, to a simulation center on that base, they would be able to run battle drills in their own vehicles in their unit's motor pool, he said.

The Army also wants to bring that technology to battalion and brigade tactical operations centers in the field, Kern said.

Imagine if a commander could take real-time intelligence from the search of a village and tell his staff to see how that mission might go, Kern said.

But before the Army can expand the use of simulations for training, it has to overcome the cultural and resource issues it faces today.

Kern speaks from experience. He commanded the 4th ID when it became the Army's first true "digitized" division in the late 1990s.

Before the division started what was called Force XXI training in the mid-1990s, critics said computers the division would have wouldn't handle hot, dusty environments, Kern said.

Now the 4th ID is in Iraq and proving soldiers can use computers to help fight a war in very austere conditions, he said.

But that division isn't the be-all-to-end-all of the Army's digitization, he said.

"The 4th ID is only a step in the way to what (the Army) wants to do," he said.

Part of the technology that Kern's division tested, Blue Force Tracking, is now being expanded to the rest of the Army, he said.

The challenge now is to expand the many lessons learned from that division's digitization, the Stryker Brigade testing and Operation Iraqi Freedom to developing FCS, Kern said.

It's also the Army's biggest challenge right now to integrate the current force of Abrams, Stryker units and eventually FCS so it's "not segmented," he said.