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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:

  • Sending students to schools involves taking students out of their regular jobs for up to a year. It involves heavy relocation costs.
  • The curriculum of most military schools goes beyond the collective expertise of its faculty.
  • Schools required of all officers have the option to take the course by correspondence, thus involving shipping lots of books and administering exams using marksense forms. Unlike the resident students, correspondence students perform no collaborative work. Clearly, there is some loss of quality in the education value.

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.

  • The Army Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) teaches a course in Medical Defense Against Biological Warfare Agents. This course is expensive because of the travel and facility costs. However, by using the Internet and intelligent tutoring methods, the course is readily available and tailored to the individual students' needs (USAAIC, 1996).
  • The Army and Air Force academies offer Internet-based intelligent tutorials for classes in freshman chemistry and evaluating a satellite's ground tracks. By using computerized instruction for entry-level or basic courses, their respective faculty are able to devote more time to their advanced courses or research efforts (USAAIC, 1996).
  • The Magidan Army Medical Center (MAMC) provides an example of an intelligent tutor to improve medical service. They developed an expert system for headache diagnosis in the early 1990s and later converted it into an intelligent training system for patients. The purpose is not to teach patients how to self-diagnose headaches, but to provide a means for informing the patient of causes, side-effects, and treatments when a physician is not available (USAAIC, 1996).
  • One military research effort is Stat Lady, a project at the U.S. Air Force's Armstrong Laboratory (Shute, 1994). The goal of the research effort is to improve both the effectiveness of intelligent tutors and the speed at which effective tutors for new material can be written. One phase of the project compared intelligent and nonintelligent versions of the same tutor (for statistics and algebra). The intelligent version represents a student's conceptual knowledge, symbolic knowledge, and procedural skills, and applies that information toward individualizing the feedback. Another phase focuses on using Stat Lady for research in knowledge acquisition methods for intelligent tutorials.

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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