NTTC Adds Realism to Tactical Training with New Simulator

Photo By Brian G. Rhodes | U.S. Navy Technical Training Center students perform dynamic team movements during training  

SAN ANTONIO, TX, UNITED STATES

09.30.2022

Story by Stefanie Antosh 

502nd Air Base Wing

JOINT BASE SAN ANTONIO-LACKLAND, Texas  –  Instructors here at the Naval Technical Training Center evaluated the first class of U.S. Navy Master-at-Arms’ students to maneuver through a new Tactical Training Simulator, or TTS, Sept. 30, 2022.

More than a decade in the making, this new facility provides students with a dynamic and realistic training environment to better prepare for the force protection situations they may encounter when they move on to their first duty station.

The simulator consists of two small buildings: the “ship-in-a-box” which simulates the interior of a naval ship, and the “port operations” unit which is similar to a regular building on a pier.

U.S. Navy Chief Master-at-Arms Gerardo Oliver, Lead Chief Petty Officer of Training Unit 3, said the watertight doors, steep ladderwells, and narrow passageways in the ship-in-a-box unit affect how security forces respond “to different situations that you might encounter inside … from a barricaded suspect to an active shooter to an active threat.”

Clearing a similar threat in a building on a base or pier requires a different approach. The port operations unit provides wider doorways and normal stairwells for students to practice different team tactics for the open environment.

Students are also provided with weapons familiarity while training in the TTS.

Matt Levell, NTTC weapons instructor, said “If you’re shooting at a stationary target, that’s not very hard. But if you’re moving, shooting at a moving target, that’s a completely different shooting scenario,” he said. “And it’s even harder when that target is shooting back at you.”

Each Sailor is provided .22 caliber paint ball like rounds they fire from a hand gun that has a training bolt and altered magazine preventing any live ammunition from being used. The instructor staff wears special protective equipment to role-play.

Oliver said, “As [the students] shoot the rounds and they see the paint hitting either the wall or the person, they know exactly how accurate their shots were. Which helps the student because it’s not the same thing as hitting paper [targets].”

Previous training environments required students to use their imagination to envision a threat. In this new training environment, students encounter real obstacles, face practical challenges, and must work together as a team to neutralize a threat.

Additionally, instructors spend at least a week teaching foundational tactics before students begin dynamic movements in preparation to enter the TTS using a crawl, walk, run approach.

“We let them figure it out, and do that critical thinking, so they can work as a team and talk to each other and accomplish the mission,” Levell continued.

The students only enter the TTS once the instructor staff feel they are ready to move forward.

“We try to put a little bit of pressure on them, try to make it a little chaotic to see how they are going to perform under that pressure,” Levell said. “We try to get that realism [in training] so that if that ever did happen—God forbid—in the real fleet they will be prepared for it.”

Levell added that there are color codes, ranging from white to black, that help the instructors evaluate how a student responds in these scenarios.

“We don’t want them going into the white, which is total vulnerability, and we don’t want them going into black, which is complete shut down … and they have no idea what to do.,” he said. “If they are going to shut down, we want them to shut down here in training not in the real world.”

If a student does shut down, instructors pause training, guide the student through breathing exercises to get ‘out of the black’, and provide additional instruction to place the student back into training. In addition, fire extinguishers, stretchers, and trauma response kits are readily available inside the port operations unit

“Safety is a high priority any time it comes to gunfire and shooting stuff,” Levell said.

Nearly 1,800 Master-at-Arms graduates from the NTTC each year and TTS is the last training block before students graduate. Some will continue to advanced technical training, or “C” school, but most will go to a fleet unit where they will stand guard on a ship or submarine, at the entrance to a pier, or as part of a security force that controls base access.

“This year alone, we’ve had over 500 active shooter, mass shootings, in the United States,” Oliver added. “You don’t know if one of our Sailors is going to be the next one standing [guard] at the gate, getting shot at, at the gate. Those are real threats today.”

NTTC is a U.S. Navy command at JBSA-Lackland with leadership at the Center for Security Forces in Norfolk , Va., and Naval Education and Training Command in Pensacola, Fla.

• Date Taken: 09.30.2022
• Date Posted: 11.02.2022 14:06
• Story ID: 432354
• Location: SAN ANTONIO, TX, US