THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 3, 1995 TAG: 9509020364
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVE MAYFIELD, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 193 lines
They'd just taken off from Norfolk: a lawmaker on his way to Minneapolis, the government engineer sitting next to him en route to San Diego. Both were going by way of Pittsburgh.
This brief encounter between strangers might have gone the typical way: small talk about the weather and sports scores. But on that morning last spring, the engineer filled Del. Frank Wagner's mind with grand high-tech visions as he gushed about his work place: a new state-of-the-art Defense Department battle lab in Suffolk.
``He popped open his briefcase and starting showing me some stuff,'' Wagner recalled last week. ``It became apparent to me real quick that there were all kinds of commercial possibilities from this thing.''
Wagner, a Virginia Beach Republican, now stands toward the front of a push to make the military's futuristic war-gaming center a nationwide hub for research and development in the fast-growing field of simulation.
He and others involved in the effort say Hampton Roads is being handed a gold-platter technological opportunity.
Indeed, military leaders connected with the Suffolk facility are practically begging companies and universities to set up shop outside their door. It's part of a major reversal in military thinking, which traditionally held that the more proprietary and secretive its technological development, the better.
When it comes to simulation, ``we're in the lead,'' said Marine Corps Brig. Gen. Michael P. DeLong, director of joint training for the Norfolk-based U.S. Atlantic Command, which oversees the Suffolk center. It can't afford to stay there, he said.
``We don't have the money anymore to be in the lead. We need to have the academics and the industry in with us, so they can get ahead of us.''
``It's to our advantage,'' explained Eugene Newman, acting director of the Suffolk facility, officially known as the Joint Training, Analysis and Simulation Center. ``The more they do, the cheaper the products become for us.''
The principal catalyst behind the idea of broadening the impact of the Suffolk center is its former director, a retired Navy captain named James Sherlock.
Sherlock, who now works as a senior Washington analyst for defense contractor Science Applications International Corp., drafted a six-page paper last month entitled ``A National Technology Hub for Virginia.'' The paper outlines his vision for ``a world-class center for simulation-related technologies, applications and education in the Tidewater area.''
Sherlock explained in an interview that the military uses simulation in a way that is generally too expensive for private industry, but affordable to the Defense Department because the alternatives cost even more. He said simulations on average cost about one-tenth the amount of a field exercise, which can run into the tens of millions of dollars.
But technologies under development by the Defense Department will reduce the costs of simulating and make it far more realistic and flexible, he said, opening up wide commercial possibilities.
The key to making Hampton Roads a hub for simulation technologies, Sherlock said, is the commitment of the state's universities to a wide-ranging research and studies program devoted to the field.
``If the state doesn't create an academic and research leg,'' he said, ``it risks losing the business and jobs that will be created by the high-technology applications that industry will develop out of the DOD activities.''
Virginia Tech and Tidewater Community College have already shown some interest. They sent representatives to a meeting Del. Wagner arranged last spring to discuss potential university involvement with the Suffolk center.
Old Dominion University has gone a few steps further. After that meeting, it posted an electrical engineering professor at the simulation facility for two months.
Old Dominion dispatched two others to the University of Central Florida in Orlando, where a modeling and simulation institute is established. Their mission was to ``steal what ideas we could get out of there,'' said Ernest J. Cross Jr., dean of ODU's College of Engineering and Technology.
Now, Cross and other senior ODU administrators are floating a ``pre-proposal'' for an academic and research center in Suffolk. Cross said that with teleconferencing, other universities in the state, including the University of Virginia and George Mason University, could be actively involved in teaching graduate courses at such a center.
Meanwhile, Del. Wagner said senior officials in Gov. George F. Allen's office have become ``interested, very much so, in this technology.'' The administration might budget some money for the project, he said, if the universities come up with ``hard information about why this is necessary.''
Outside Hampton Roads, opinions are divided about how much time and effort state and local leaders should devote to developing a simulation industry.
``I don't think that there's any question you'll become very important in that area,'' said John Disher, executive director of the Arlington-based National Training Systems Association, a trade group for companies in the field.
The Suffolk facility is a very advanced example of multimedia training: using computers, videos and other technologies. Two-thirds of this $5 billion global industry is military-related. But the military's uses of simulation are rapidly spinning off other applications in everything from health care to entertainment, Disher said.
Companies involved in simulation tout disaster preparedness as a particularly big potential market. Eventually, they say, hurricanes, earthquakes and fires will all be replicated with simulators.
Sensing the possibilities, about 230 members of Disher's association came from all over the country on Aug. 23 for a Norfolk briefing sponsored by the Suffolk center and another leading simulator now under development: the Joint Warfighting Center at Fort Monroe in Hampton.
Brig. Gen. DeLong said the industry representatives were ``salivating'' at the presentation. ``They're saying, `How do we get in on this?' ''
Despite the showing, Michael J. Walter, president of the Orlando-based Training & Simulation Technology Consortium, said he doesn't expect a massive shift of industry brain power to Hampton Roads.
``Orlando already has a critical mass in simulation and training,'' he said. ``I don't think Virginia is going to wrest that away.''
Besides his Defense Department-funded consortium, which tries to commercialize military simulation technologies, there are more than 100 companies involved in the industry in and around the central Florida city. Walt Disney Co. is among them. Orlando is also the headquarters for both the Army and the Navy simulator-procurement activities.
But retired Navy Capt. Sherlock said wresting away Orlando's leadership isn't necessary or even relevant. There is room for another major center, he said, and Hampton Roads has what's needed to convince companies to set up commercial operations.
Hampton Roads' biggest appeal, he said, is that it has become the operating headquarters for the single biggest user of simulation technologies: the U.S. military.
The U.S. Atlantic Command, based in Norfolk, oversees 80 percent of the nation's Armed Forces. Meanwhile, the Army, Navy and Air Force all have their doctrine centers, where war-fighting principles are set, in Hampton Roads. That's largely why so many of the military's strategic simulators are locally based. Besides the simulators in Suffolk and at Fort Monroe, there are also key facilities at Fort Eustis and Langley Air Force Base.
The crown jewel among local war-game centers is the Joint Training, Analysis and Simulation Center in Suffolk.
Just a few thousand feet from the Monitor-Merrimac Bridge-Tunnel, the 220,000-square-foot compound was originally to have been a submarine research center. After the 1993 Base Closure and Realignment Commission ordered that center moved instead to Newport, R.I., the U.S. Atlantic Command pounced on the facility.
``It's perfect for our needs,'' Brig. Gen. DeLong said while showing visitors through a jam-packed computer room that is the technological heart of the facility.
Adding up those computers, high-speed telecommunications switches and other cutting-edge technology, the U.S. Atlantic Command has spent about $35 million to outfit the facility. And the first exercise there doesn't start until November.
The command expects to spend another $40 million a year to run the center and recently awarded TRW Inc. a long-term contract to support it. TRW and its subcontractors will employ about half of the projected 400 year-round employees. The remainder will be military personnel and Defense Department civilians. The largest number of those, about 100, will be from the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency.
ARPA's involvement will be the key to getting the most advanced simulation technologies out of the military and into the commercial marketplace, Sherlock said.
Beginning in 1997, ARPA will use the Suffolk facility as the test bed for its most futuristic developments in the simulation field: a project known as Synthetic Theater of War.
Among other things, that involves inserting artificial intelligence into tanks, airplanes and other objects used in simulation.
ARPA has also been working on making factors such as terrain and weather more detailed and realistic. And it is attempting to replicate complex urban environments in which troops might find themselves.
All this means that the commanders of joint military task forces and their staffs, which the Suffolk center is mainly set up to train, will face battle scenarios that are far more complex. As time goes on, these commanders will even prepare for real crises there, Sherlock said.
``We want to do Bosnia. We want to do Haiti. We want to do Somalia. We want to do Rwanda. We want to be in a position where as soon as that joint force commander has developed a plan, we can simulate and rehearse.''
An important result of using more advanced technologies, he said, is there will be a large reduction in the thousands of people who may now be called up in the field to help support simulations. In the future, not nearly as many will be needed to replicate the conditions the top game players require to effectively train, he predicted.
And that, Sherlock said, will help reduce the costs of simulating to the point where eventually companies will routinely use it before making key business decisions.
``IBM's not going to muster half their work force to run a simulation about a major business decision,'' he said. ``But they will run one when only the people who need to participate are the players.''
Newman, the Suffolk center's acting director, said that eventually, ``industry will have 100 applications for every application we have.''
It boggles the mind, said Brig. Gen. DeLong. ``The potential here is unbelievable.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photos
LAWRENCE JACKSON/Staff
ABOVE: Marine Corps Brig. Gen. Michael P. DeLong is the director of
joint training for the U.S. Atlantic Fleet Command, which oversees
the Joint Training, Analysis and Simulation Center in Suffolk.
BELOW: The Suffolk war-gaming center is a very advanced example of
multimedia training: using computers, videos and other
technologies.
by CNB