A revolution in training has profoundly affected Navy training organizations and day-to-day operations. Since June 2003, all shore schools supporting training for the submarine force have been placed under one command, the Submarine Learning Center, whose function is to coordinate learning at all of our schoolhouses, but whose mission is far broader: to infuse today's submarine force training with tomorrow's technologies and learning strategies.
Our submariners must learn more in less time, and with less sea time. We are concentrating on:
* Decreasing training time by 30%
* Decreasing costs by 15%
* Improving learning efficiency by 15%
* Improving, increasing, and measuring understanding
We must improve training for a very different era, the information age of warfare as opposed to the industrial age, and for a very different student, the millennial sailor, who will serve in this new era. As always, the future offers opportunities and challenges:
* Unlimited information (the BQQ-10 sonar system, for example, has more information and processing power than entire submarines of even fairly recent vintage)
* Unlimited new technology
* Increasing rates of technology insertion
* Flatter command-and-control structures
* Decreased decision-making cycles.
We must accept the truism: "If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always gotten," and set a different course for our 21st century undersea warriors. Most important, we must ensure that our undersea warriors are ready for every mission. Our strategy is to develop a continuum of learning for each of our sailors, creating learning and advancement opportunities during their entire career while fostering a commitment to life-long learning.
Our industrial-age submariners were best characterized as maintenance technicians whose training and learning was linked to their age or their rank rather than their need to learn a skill or accomplish a task. This approach produced well-trained and ready sailors during the Cold War, but it will not support the needs created by the information age.
We must transition to an "expert generalist" training strategy to produce sailors who can be rapidly retrained as operations- or skills-focused experts, ready to understand how to fully operate and merge information-rich systems to solve operational challenges.
Millennial sailors-or the Net Generation (those born after 1982)-bring to our submarine force aptitudes and abilities better developed when more fully understood. They are academically driven, culturally diverse, and seek peer-to-peer interactions. Test scores for millenials, reversing a 30-year trend, show marked increases in math and related subjects. And while they didn't invent the computer, they have mastered it-more than 99% are wired and connected. They blog, click, and flicker with the ease of their predecessors going to the white board to learn.
Millennials are optimistic and cooperative team players who accept authority and seek recognition from seniors while developing and deepening trust with their peers. Transforming millennial sailors into undersea warriors requires innovative approaches and applied technology to deliver the right training at the right time while establishing an assessment and evaluation system that contributes to life-long learning and skills development.
Submarine training must continue to employ augmented/ mixed virtual reality technology to allow the learner to fully develop and practice critical skill sets. Before such technology was available, cost and physical limitations prevented the learner from being exposed to such realistic situations on his own ship
Helmet-mounted virtual reality ship handling trainers, mixed virtual reality fire fighting trainers, and multiple reconfigurable weapons launch trainers are allowing exceptional flexibility in our ability to provide training realism, relevance, and experience.
We must provide trainers that can be reconfigured for multiple uses and rapidly upgraded to support technology advances. They must be scalable for use ashore and at sea. Our trainers must allow for networking and must automatically, continually, and simultaneously assess a sailor's accomplishments and skills mastery.
We have the foundation of planning, preparation, and execution needed to transform our millennial sailors for the future-and it's not around the corner. It's here.
Captain Lotring commands the Submarine Learning Center, Naval Submarine Base, New London. Connecticut.