Troopers industry-test technologies, innovation at West Virginia mine

FOLA, W.Va. (AP) — As Location, Boston Dynamics’ doggy-like quadruped robot, nimbly paced its way across rocky terrain, a massive unmanned aerial car or truck silently hovered 100 ft overhead.

In the length, a pair of AH-64 Apache helicopters could be noticed orbiting previously mentioned the ridgeline. Somewhere in the forest beneath, 220 troopers from the elite 101st Airborne Division, who had been airlifted to 3 onsite landing zones, have been getting portion in a coaching state of affairs. Their mission: Locate and destroy an enemy’s air protection program.

Dust Times 23 was in complete swing April 20 at the Fola Experimentation Facility, a previous Consol Strength floor mine complex that made 105 million tons of coal right before closing in 2012. Later on repurposed as a military teaching web page by the West Virginia Countrywide Guard, the site is now operated in partnership with the Civil-Navy Innovation Institute, or CMI2, a nonprofit centered in Morgantown.

The weeklong Driving Innovation in Reasonable Schooling event aimed to entail troopers in acquiring and industry-testing new strategies and technology whilst getting part in hard, reasonable coaching routines. An first Filth Days event took put at the Fola site past summer season.

“DIRT Days is all about soldier-driven innovation,” said Mitch Kusmier, a vice president at CMI2 and a colonel in the Military Reserve.

“We curate the complications soldiers face with products in the discipline and then crew up with WVU, the Military Analysis Laboratory and other associates to come up with answers that are industry-examined and tested to perform,” he reported.

The strategy is to stay clear of sending freshly intended technologies and products into the subject without having input from the people today who will be applying it.

“When I was in Iraq, at times a container would demonstrate up entire of equipment created to remedy issues we didn’t know we had,” Kusmier explained.

Retired Maj. Gen. Buff Blount, who commanded the 3rd Infantry Division when it led the three-week cost to seize Baghdad in 2003, was on hand to observe the exercise at Fola.

“You do not want to send experimental gear into the industry,” he reported. “We owe it to our soldiers to present them with verified technologies.”

Among the equipment being discipline examined at Fola past 7 days was Saab’s Power-on-Pressure Teaching Process-Future, in which troopers don laser-activated, sensor-geared up vests all through simulated enemy steps to allow for their movements and steps to be monitored and recorded for publish-workout critiquing.

“We appreciate Fola,” reported David Rees, director of instruction at Saab’s protection and security division. “You have a big, open piece of terrain as nicely all these steep slopes and wooded spots. It’s a pretty exclusive and difficult web site for training and screening.”

Other equipment becoming examined final week bundled:

♦ An Superior Dynamic Spectrum Reconnaissance system, designed at Vanderbilt College, that integrates and automatically tunes legacy Army radios to accommodate the operation of distant sensor networks for detecting enemy presence.

♦ A Mobile Quick Have to have Engineering Source, or MINER, unit — a containerized, self-powered store composition geared up with 3-D printers and assorted equipment to repair equipment in the subject.

♦ A new soldier-designed machine gun ammunition bag method developed to replace the exercise of cramming belts of ammo into regular rucksacks, often producing them difficult to stability and gradual to unload.

The new ammo bag, designed to serve M240 machine guns and nearing the creation phase, may perhaps be low-tech, but it “can pretty much cut in half the time it requires to get a gun on a tripod and all set to fireplace,” mentioned Lt. Col. Dale Marrou, a battalion commander with the 101st Airborne. “And it all arrived from one captain with an idea.”

Demonstrations of new technological know-how also involved utilizing an unarmed aerial car or truck to make 150-pound resupply drops of MREs and ammunition.

Marrou claimed the Dust Days function furnished “a wonderful prospect to function with newly developed technology and establish know-how we want to be made.” As a site for education routines, Fola gives a terrain mix that “can’t be replicated at Fort Campbell,” the 101st Airborne’s residence foundation in Kentucky, he said.

In addition to the 220 troopers from the 101st Airborne, an added 80 or so troops from the 82nd Airborne Division took section in Dirt Days.