Orlando Sentinel January 20, 2011
Lockheed lands sim-training deal potentially worth $287M
By Richard Burnett
Amid industry jitters about proposed defense-budget cuts, Lockheed Martin Corp.'s Orlando high-tech training unit has won a major Army war-game simulation contract potentially worth $287 million.
The company said this week that Lockheed Global Logistics & Training beat several rivals to reel in the Urban Operations Training Systems contract — a five-year deal to integrate weapons simulators, targets and other support equipment used in training soldiers for urban-combat missions.
It is the latest in a series of urban-combat training deals for the Lockheed unit, the largest player in the military simulation-training industry.
The Army awarded Lockheed the contract in October, replacing the incumbent rival General Dynamics Information Technology. But,a month later, the award was appealed by another competitor, Parsons Corp., though it withdrew the protest in December. Parsons would not comment this week on its actions.
Training soldiers in ways to engage enemy forces in cities, towns, villages and similar settings has become a critical need during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, defense experts say. And it is a specialty that is expected to continue attract contract dollars, even as U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates moves forward with his plan to cut $78 billion from the Pentagon's budget by 2015.
"Over the past decade, we've accumulated an enormous amount of combat experience in these settings," said John Pike, a defense analyst and founder of Globalsecurity.org, a research firm in Washington. "You would not want to lose that edge due to lack of funding, poor training or unrealistic training."
For years, Lockheed's training unit has provided simulation equipment for military installations across the country that were specially designed to train soldiers in urban combat. As part of the new contract, Lockheed will combine those devices and technologies to form an integrated system.
Military trainers will also be able to quickly adapt the system to account for new enemy threats and for tactics that U.S. commanders report back from the war, Lockheed said.
"We believe this training program will allow us to respond quickly to the warfighters' critical requirements through immersive environments," Lockheed's ground-training systems chief Jim Craig said in a written statement.
Mockups of buildings and streets — known as MOUT villages, for "Military Operations Urban Training" — provide settings in which soldiers can improve their urban-combat skills. Most of the 100,000 troops now deployed in Afghanistan, for example, have been trained on systems developed by Lockheed.
"Urban operations in cities and towns can be tactically complex, with short sightlines and a lot of innocent bystanders around," Pike noted. "That tends to strip off a lot of our technological advantages compared to the regular battlefield. It is pretty expensive to generate the high degree of realism that is needed for urban-combat training. There is a whole new paradigm the military has had to come to grips with."
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