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3.3.1. Education Officers of all services will spend at least 4, and as many as 7, years in school. The school environment provides opportunities for officers to study lessons learned from recent conflicts and deployments, to share knowledge of other theaters, and a worry-free environment to hone command and staff skills. The services recognize the importance of these schools, but:
Consequently, there have been numerous efforts throughout the military to use intelligent technologies to improve both the quality and availability of military education. Some notable examples follow.
3.3.2. Wargaming and Simulation -- Soar/IFOR (Intelligent Forces) Without question, wargaming and simulation are critical to modern military training. Computer-based wargames have been prevalent since the 1970s. Yes, despite the very clear benefit they would bring, expert systems and other intelligent technologies have been comparatively slow in getting involved (Estvanik, 1994). Only now is the processing speed and power permitting viable intelligent computerized wargaming. With advances in hardware come several highly advanced projects in distributed wargaming -- using expert systems, intelligent agents, and complex computer networks. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and all three services have sponsored several intelligent wargaming projects. Among them is Soar/IFOR (Rosenbloom, et al., 1993), a collaborative effort of the Universities of Michigan and Southern California along with Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The Soar research group is developing intelligent agents for tactical air simulation. This will allow computerized pilots to participate in a simulation and behave exactly like real pilots. Such agents are especially useful when programmed to behave like a true enemy force, using Soviet-style or other doctrines. A sufficient number of pilots can be added according to the actual size of the force being simulated. The realism of the training improves greatly. NPSNet, based at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA, is a leading research project in virtual reality simulations and wargames. NPSNet's project goal is to achieve an interactive wargame with over 100,000 players. However, the current Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) standards do not provide the bandwidth to handle such a player load. NPSNet is researching the use of intelligent agents and "smart networks" to speed up message traffic. The agents would provide a filtering and combining capability that would reduce the number of messages. The smart networks would recognize which entities in the wargame are visible to the entity being updated. They will route the update messages solely to those other entities (Stone, 1996).
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