Against the synthetic backdrop, the sniper watches a squad of allies advance, before zeroing in on his target. He or she quietly radios, telling all to hold steady. The sniper fires, a miss followed by a second shot that strikes the enemy. With the coast clear, the squad advances through its training simulation, as the sniper watches it all in his training pod more than 200 miles away.
This scenario, or at least a version of it, is the big promise of 4GD, a British and American company that is in the business of building a new kind of training system for urban combat. To deliver on that promise means borrowing extensively from virtual reality, synthetic training environments, and biometric sensors, all to create a system that plays as smoothly as running through a game of laser tag.
It is an ambitious plan, still largely in search of a buyer. As militaries, like those of the United Kingdom and the United States, look toward conflicts of the 2020s, 2030s and 2040s, it is likely they will want to train soldiers in the regular use of everything from coordinating with snipers and drones to reading intelligence beamed to chest-mounted tablets. Big real-world training exercises can offer practical experience, but actually pulling a drone for field surveillance means using an expensive tool to train grunts and, even then, only for the limited time it can participate in the exercise.
While it's impossible to predict every kind of danger that will be present on a future battlefield, enough is known to anticipate some of the contours of a new and modern way of fighting. The trenches still present at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia, were dug by Marines in anticipation of the U.S. joining World War I. Training in trenches was a low-tech accommodation around the known high-tech hazards of the Western Front.
The Pentagon anticipates urban battlefields to be a crucial part of the coming decades of war, and those wars will be fought with drone scouts. By leaning into the augmented reality of 4GD, soldiers could train for anticipated battlefields, with the tools and threats evolving over time.
4GD was founded by Royal Marine veterans in 2016 "with the recognition that urban warfare isn't going anywhere," said James Crowley, 4GD's business development director.
"We were all relatively contemporary soldiers; however, we had all been trained in fairly inert, quite boring urban environments, both in the U.K. and internationally," said Crowley. "Some were made out of shipping containers, others fairly simple breezeblock-type facilities. We knew there was a gap there to bring technology in and offer a soldier's eye view."
The threshold for what counts as an urban training facility can be quite modest. One such compound, used by West Point cadets, consists of about a half-dozen cinder block structures in a wooded clearing, with none of the density or complexity of any urban area more populated than a rural farmstead.
The US Army is actively looking to develop a training tool that incorporates augmented and synthetic reality, under the name Synthetic Training Environment. Contractors for the program are yet to be determined, though there is a planned emphasis on the Microsoft-built Integrated Visual Augmentation System. Previously demonstrated components include virtual reality headsets and laser attachments to rifles.
To accomplish more sophisticated, and thus more realistic, training, 4GD initially looked at virtual reality, or VR.
"Virtually reality doesn't really suit the needs of dismounted close-combat soldiers," said Crowley. Those needs, as Crowley understood them, are to have the training be as close to the real experience as possible. That means using the same gear as in the field, from regular rifles with simulated ammunition down to the same chest-mounted tablets worn in combat.
"When you're using a dismounted situational awareness device, it sits in a specific point in your chest," he said. "What you want to get to is the stage where intuitively as you move to flip that down … you've done it a million times."
A VR headset, while offering an immersive experience, requires the user to fight through game console controllers. It also, by covering the wearer's eyes, eliminates any peripheral vision. For a single player running through a game, that's fine. For a squad training to pick up on each other's nonverbal cues, eliminating peripheral vision is a no-go.
The training environment offered by 4GD, rather than a fixed and familiar compound recognizable to generations of cadets, instead uses modular and flexible set-ups inside a dedicated facility. Troops could train with the same configuration over and over, or it could be set up as unique scenarios to advance training. 4GD offers five levels of complexity, with each one incorporating more technologies to enhance the experience, and to support trainers' analysis of squad performance.
Lights, smoke, smells and automated targets that can respond to sensor signals on the soldiers themselves all combine to create progressively more immersive experiences. A plethora of sensors inside the facility also track movement, light and sound. Trainers facilitating an exercise can simulate gunshots and explosions.
The other perk of the complex virtual training is the ability to include participants from a distance, such as the sniper working with a unit in 4GD's scenario. The sniper, miles away from the others training, has the scenario projected onto a wraparound screen. Inside the sniper's scope, he can see and aim at a target on the screen.
That same target is a moving unit in the 4GD facility, inside the room. Were the squad to open the door or shoot through a window, the sniper would be able to watch it remotely.
"When the target was hit, it would drop physically, but at the same time, the sniper observing this virtual reality would see the avatar of the target drop and the unit move into that room," Crowley explained.
Training alongside snipers in a combat exercise without the synthetic environment would require the units to be physically at the same site, and would need the same substantial space as in the real world to train. By using the synthetic room and a virtual reality mediator between the training facilities, the unit running the course can train with snipers based elsewhere, and still learn the motions of calling in help, waiting for the shot to come, and then clearing the room.
Where regular training gets really expensive is when other tools, like drones overhead, are used. 4GD can simulate those and pipe in video feeds to the soldiers' chest-mounted tablets in training.
For troops, whose daily routines do not regularly involve interpreting drone surveillance video, having it on hand every time they run through a training scenario lets them get familiar with the kind of information they will see in the field. It is, by design, a method of going through the motions, of making the modern and specialized aspects of combat feel rote and routine.
The full suite of facility levels was debuted by 4GD in January 2021. At present, there are no military facilities yet that have adopted the technology. A demonstration of the technology is part of the U.K. Ministry of Defence's ongoing Army Warfighting Experiment, and while the company has sold aspects of its system, it hopes to sell the full suite in the near future.
"We wanted to turn urban tactical training and make it as accessible as going to the gym," Crowley said.
