Emilie Reitz

United States Department of Defense · Joint Staff, J6

Bold Quest (BQ) is a Joint Staff J6 coalition capability demonstration and assessment event focused on improving joint fires interoperability in a coalition environment. It provides a rich operational environment for assessing new training and simulation technologies, integrated with live command and control (C2) systems. BQ 22 built on the succes...

The ongoing development and fielding of Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) capabilities will change how joint and coalition forces operate, providing new capabilities to enable the Department of Defense (DoD)-wide approach to accelerate risk-informed Joint Command and Control modernization across all domains and phases of war, h...

U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) is committed to providing its Service Component and Sub-Unified Command Commanders a synthetic environment enabling distributed mission operations/training, exercises, and no notice/short notice mission rehearsal. In October 2016, the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Training, and Logistics and...

In early 2019 the Swedish Armed Forces proposed a small, multi-phase BQ 20.1 event to be conducted in Sweden in May 2020. The live exercise phase of this event was to be focused on exercising Special Operations Forces (SOF) in sensor-to-shooter (S2S) vignettes to develop procedural and technical interoperability in joint intelligence, surveillance...

Digitally-Aided Close Air Support (DACAS) is an increasingly important operational capability for many nations and Services. DACAS now allows the use of digital messages to expedite communications, rapidly build shared situational awareness, reduce human error and shorten the kill-chain. Digital systems in aircraft and DACAS ground kits provide oth...

Formal learning is a story written by an organization and addressed to its people. Social learning, in contrast, is a story largely written by the learners, themselves. It’s about tacit, tribal, and lived wisdom that exists within distributed communities. It’s often untidy, diverse, and deeply personal, as people bring their own perspectives and ex...

Consider the following hypothetical scenario: As tensions continue to rise in East Asia and with many of her fellow Marines already forward deployed, Captain Smith looks forward to a quiet Saturday as Staff Duty Officer catching up on email before her own unit’s deployment. As she scrolls through her inbox, she notices “WARNING ORDER” in a subject...

As enemy armored units threaten to overrun coalition forward lines, the Finnish Defence Forces Company Commander tries to contact the supporting Joint Air Ground Integration Center (JAGIC) to request fires. Enemy jamming has degraded voice radio communications. The supporting Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC) requests immediate close air supp...

The military training and education community spends hundreds of hours a year on training warfighters not just for the job in front of them, but their next job, and contingencies foreseen and unforeseen. This training and education process requires a strong foundation of understanding Joint or Service procedures, and is dependent on each warfighter...

Against a backdrop of disruptive change, it is tempting to try to categorize and spot patterns early: we have seen a recasting of politics, the upset of established systems, the emergence of new media, challenges to traditional models of learning and an evolution in the nature of knowledge itself. The relentless march of technology masks part of th...

This paper builds on the three year research and development project for Joint Continuum of eLearning (Fautua et al, 2014) and discusses the Joint Staff J-7's (Joint Training) initial effort last year to develop measures and assessments of cognitive performance among cross-functional staffs and planning teams in Joint Force Commands (Reist et al, 2...

For years, the use of simulation by smaller countries has been marked by the saying, "it is very expensive to be poor." In contrast to the larger coalition partners or the budgets of a potential adversary, smaller countries have fractional military budgets; this makes it difficult to acquire the same assets as larger partners. When it comes to trai...

During operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere over the last decade, one significant lesson has been learned: a failure to recognize, acknowledge, and accurately define the operational environment (OE) led to a mismatch between forces, capabilities, missions, and goals. Fortunately, warfighters and senior leaders were able to overcome the in...

When training Soldiers, it is crucial to monitor the progress being made in Soldier performance to evaluate the effectiveness of a new training method. Whether an organization is considering the effectiveness of training or evaluating Soldiers' fitness for a task, the true performance cannot be judged without data. During two courses taken by milit...

The Joint Force of today is facing an inflection point with respect to the way it believes it should learn, train, and educate. The generation that fought America’s longest war is more savvy and intuitive but also sober on what really “works.” The authors have observed, for instance, that “Jointness” is being redefined, and correspondingly preparat...

Black Swans are unknowable events, by their nature unpredictable, asymmetric and easier to recognize in retrospect: nothing is clear at the outset, there is only an emergent sense of understanding, and traditional diagnose/act/review cycles may trap us into mismatched known responses. The unknowable cannot be mitigated or fully understood through e...

As part of the U.S. Joint Staff's Bold Quest (BQ) coalition capability demonstration and assessment event, nations, Services and programs pool resources in a recurring cycle of capability development, demonstration and analysis. In the Live, Virtual and Constructive (LVC) domain, BQ provides a venue where participants can demonstrate integrated LVC...

A fire team breaches a two story building, quickly suffering casualties; an infantry platoon comes under mortar fire while conducting a cordon and search supported by an RQ-7 Shadow and AC-130; a squad leader participates in a key leader engagement for the first time to disastrous outcomes. In all cases, the leader steps out of a virtual training e...

Close Air Support (CAS) is a complex, joint military operation in which aircraft engage ground targets identified by a Forward Air Controller (FAC). The difficulty in organizing CAS training activities in live conditions is to find large military venues where staffs, units and their weapons systems can come together to train in a coalition context....

If a training event happens and no one builds a record of its gains and outcomes, does it matter? How do you know that the gains and outcomes you recorded, or the tools you used to make that record, are even valid and generalizable to other situations? Are you really improving human performance, or just inferring that you improved it? It’s a challe...

An infantry platoon maneuvers toward a village; above them, an unmanned aerial system (UAS) provides a video feed to the operations center. The platoon reacts to nearby mortar strikes, while a Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC) assigned to the company Tactical Operations Center (TOC) confirms the target with radio communication and the UAS’s v...

In 2011, the Joint Staff J7 (Joint Training) directorate initiated the Continuum of eLearning project in order to integrate blended learning into joint exercises. This three-year research and development effort included construction of both the blended learning instructional materials (e.g., best practices for online instructional delivery [andrago...

A fire team mounts the back stairs of a two story duplex and is quickly picked off by insurgents firing from inside the top floor. With four men down, the squad leader shakes his head and takes off his helmet. Thankfully, this occurred in an immersive environment at Fort Benning, Ga., during a capability demonstration and assessment hosted by the U...

Joint staff exercises are fast paced and challenging, with a wide range of training objectives that must be accomplished on a compact schedule. In other words, these exercises represent the "run" phase of joint staff training. However, newly arrived staffers and Individual Augmentees (i.e., temporary individual placements) are frequently tapped to...

There is an increased understanding that training in virtual environments will play a key role in future force development (Department of Defense, 2010)-but there is still a need to better understand the interaction between classroom-based learning, virtual exercises to reinforce those skills and force-on-force field training. There is now a wideni...

The potential benefits of e-learning are well established: It is available anytime/anywhere, boasts high return-on-investment, and offers a range of other practical advantages. Well-designed e-learning systems also possess impressive training benefits, engaging students and enhancing their learning outcomes. However, think back to your last e-learn...

General Dynamics Information Technology Joint and Coalition Warfighting Suffolk, VA Suffolk, VA emilie.reitz.ctr@hr.js.mil jay.reist@hr.js.mil ABSTRACT Fratricide is a fact of war; yet, its pervasiveness is shocking. It is likely to grow as future conflicts are fought in complex urban battlespaces with ever more diverse military coalitions. Under s...

FM 3-24 serves as the foundation for U.S execution of counterinsurgency operations. It states in Chapter 7, Paragraph 6, " Senior commanders should, at a minimum, ensure that their small-unit leaders are inculcated with tactical cunning and mature judgment. Tactical cunning is the art of employing fundamental skills of the profession in shrewd and...

The Combat Hunter program was first conceived in 2007 to meet a training gap in small unit close combat warfighting. This US Marine Corps (USMC) program of instruction (POI) trains the fundamentals of combat profiling, tracking, and optics-based observation, helping students become successful "combat hunters" in an irregular warfare battlespace. Th...