Date posted: 05/20/2009*

How do you ensure soldiers receive top-notch training before deployment while allowing them to spend more time with their families?

Take the training to them with the Expeditionary Instrumentation System (E-IS).

This was the solution a team of Raytheon engineers began developing five years ago when they started thinking about how they could make training easier and less expensive for their U.S. Army customers.

Three of the Army’s premier training centers located at the Joint Multinational Readiness Center (JMRC) in Hohenfels, Germany; the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif.; and the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, La., can only accommodate a limited number of units for training per year. For soldiers to travel to those locations, it requires an additional 14-to-21 days on top of the 25 spent on location for training. On top of this, it costs the Army resources to move all of the equipment needed for the exercise.

“We thought, wouldn’t it be easier for everyone if we could help deliver the same, high-quality training experience to soldiers’ home stations?” said Harry “Skip” Mohr, Raytheon Technical Services Company’s site manager for the JMRC. “That’s what we’ve tried to do.”

600,000 lines of engineering code later, Raytheon has a modified JMRC Instrumentation System (JMRC-IS) that can be mobilized and taken to soldiers. Portions of this system, called the E-IS, were recently mobilized and shipped to Fort Bragg, N.C., to train the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division.

The system that was transported provided soldiers with the multimedia captures and detailed data needed to conduct analyses and after action reviews (AAR) that improve soldier and unit readiness before deployment to a real-world conflict. Raytheon has mobilized the system over the past few years and has been expanding its mobile capability.

The mobile system taken to Fort Bragg included capabilities to monitor and record real-time position location and engagements of instrumented vehicles and soldiers; collect and record real-time live video; and to integrate constructive players and activities. It allowed the monitoring and recording of radio communications. It also provided the ability to control the exercise and multimedia monitoring and editing work stations to permit analysis and AAR preparation. The team deployed a trunked radio system to provide a communications network for the exercise observer/controller teams, exercise control and tactical analysts.

Transporting the system from Germany to North Carolina and having it ready for the exercise presented a number of challenges the Raytheon engineering team, based in Hohenfels, does not encounter at the fixed training center in Germany. For instance, the team had to rent six radio towers to enhance communications during the exercise. They also had to consider differences in the ground elevation, vegetation and radio frequencies – all issues that do not come into play at a fixed training location.

Forty-five Raytheon employees worked 18 hours each day, seven days a week for nearly two months to ensure the exercise was a success.

“This exercise really required us to think outside the box when tried-and-true solutions didn’t work,” Mohr said. “This innovative training experience sometimes required innovative troubleshooting, but the team was up to the task.”