Many businesses and innovators appeared on panels, lectures, and networking events at  the annual I/ITSEC conference last week. Keeping track of the events at Orlando from afar (there is a cheap flight from New Haven to Orlando but social media, YouTube, and local obligations prevented me from taking advantage of that), it was interesting to develop a sense of where the U.S. military is regarding training and research today, and where it’s hoping to move in the future. There’s more than money at stake, though there is quite a bit of that, too.

THE BIG STORY

A $68 Billion Opportunity

Training the U.S. military is costly. It's also the single most important thing the military can do to prepare for the next war.

In 1997, RAND published a report titled “Making Military Education more efficient.” Written in the context of a post-Cold War military that was shrinking, and adapting to a momentarily-unipolar world, the report took as its beginning point that too much money was being spent on institutional training. $14 billion, at the time. The paper’s hypothesis was that there was opportunity to make that number smaller. The means by which RAND suggested the military spend less on training was to rely more on technological advances. 

That probably sounds familiar, though the number has grown from $14 billion over the intervening 27 years. By 2022, USSOCOM alone required $1.1 billion for its training needs; the cost meanwhile had ballooned into dozens of billions across the rest of the force and theaters of command.

Establishing a precise breakdown of the dollars is difficult, though probably not by design. The Peter G. Peterson Foundation (drawing on the same document linked above) puts training dollars in with operation and maintenance, part of a $291 billion pot. Digging a bit further, the closest I could get to an approximation of the money to be spent on training was…

USINOPACOM — $2.3 billion

USEUCOM — $4.2 billion (some part of this for training)

USCENTCOM — $.5 billion (mostly Iraq and Syria)

ARMY — $16.4 billion (Ground/Aviation readiness)

NAVY — $32.1 billion (Ship/Aviation readiness)

USMC — $1.5 billion billion (Ground/Fleet Air Training)

AIR FORCE — $9.9 billion

SPACE FORCE — ?

USSOCOM — $1.1 billion

…for a total of (again, an approximation that includes non-training activities, and neglects Space Force, for which I could find no information) $68 billion.

That’s big money. And at the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation, and Education Conference last week, companies, researchers, and military minds gathered to talk both about what was working in the present, and what was possible or necessary for the future. 

Some of the companies that attended or presented included Trideum Corp, Rexota Solutions, LLC, SimPhonics, Real-Time Innovations, Veracity Technology Consultants, The Stephen Still Institute for Sustainable Transportation and Logistics, Borgh Enterprises, LTD, Soar Technology, BadVR, The MIL Corporation, CMSP Maneuver Battle Lab, Aptima, General Atomics, EpiSci, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Antech, and Intuitive Research and Technology. As one can see from this partial list, a wide variety of interests were represented, valued from millions to billions of dollars.

Perhaps it is a hallmark of this type of conference and exposition that more attention was paid to research and development than implementation. Artificial Intelligence was a frequent topic of conversation, as was the subject of using simulations and games to train soldiers and units on core tasks.

One event, titled “Black Swan: Dawn of the Super Soldier,” explored what the soldier of 2040 or 2050 would look like, aided by biological and mechanical enhancements — as well as the ethical considerations around fielding such augmented people. Among the exciting notions were a blood that could recycle oxygen more efficiently, leading to extended time diving underwater; implants permitting soldiers to see using limited night vision without need for cumbersome devices; exoskeletons; and memory-augmentation devices that stimulated learning speed and retention by 20% or more. 

These are the fruits of some of the $130.1 billion that the Department of Defense has invested in RDT&E (Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation) this past year, and in previous years — a stronger and more lethal soldier. And businesses that are able to envision training and preparation beforehand are at an advantage when it comes to predicting future needs. 

At the same time, many from the military were more circumspect about their training needs. In particular, the needs of today were seen as more urgent than potential needs in the future. The need to train Army or Marine Corps infantry squads with drones, for example, ends up putting the chicken before the egg; the military does not (outside Special Operations, at any rate) field a modern drone at the squad level. What should be is different from what is, even when it comes to technology that is within reach of the average public high school engineering enthusiast.

Another concern that was echoed across a number of panels was the tax on troops’ time. Training is zero-sum, in that there are finite opportunities to train, and there are built-in limitations to what can be done, and where. The expense of training jet pilots or ship crews is necessarily exorbitant, and substantially offset by simulation programs and devices. And while it requires less money or equipment to train infantry and support formations, much of the expertise in operations at the battalion level and higher has atrophied since they were last trained regularly in the 1990s. 

The services with the most need for simulated training: Air Force, Navy, and (once it figures out its mission set) Space Force, also have the biggest budgets for training. The Army and Marine Corps have less need for money, and a greater need for time (to coordinate and move the large numbers of people needed to train units effectively).

If I/ITSEC identified extraordinary opportunities for future capabilities and training, it also underlined gaps that exist in preparing today’s military, both in terms of what industry is providing, and in terms of how the military is thinking about training in public. Preparing for the next war isn’t rocket science; on the contrary, the U.S. has a great deal of data and experience on which to base its preparations. But which companies will provide the military with what it needs? Can the military effectively employ those companies to the best effect? What kind of ROI will $68 billion — nearly 9% of the budget — bring to the force?

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HUMOR

This is a weird one on The Onion, not quite sure what to make of it.