Army National Guard Linux Training
By Arthur Williams of Military Training Technology Magazine
http://www.mt2-kmi.com/, Volume 5, Issue 3

With Army National Guard citizen-soldiers more and more likely to be deployed since Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm and peacekeeping operations in Kosovo, training and retention have taken on increased importance. Conducting battle-staff training through the Guard’s wide area network can lower costs and improve retention by cutting travel time for more than 360,000 citizen-soldiers working out of 3,200 armories in 54 U.S. states and territories, Guard officials say.

After all, if a “weekend warrior” signs up for one weekend of monthly duty and two weeks of annual duty, it gives the Guard limited opportunities to train him individually or as a part of a fighting force. In addition to its work with the active duty Army, each state National Guard reports to its governor in cases of civil disorder, natural disaster and other forms of aid.

“One of the biggest challenges in the [Army National Guard or ARNG] today is conducting battle-staff training, which exercises the full spectrum of operational units [that] would be part of the war fight,” said Lieutenant Colonel Marlin F. Levendoski, training technology team chief at the National Guard Bureau in Arlington, VA.

Here’s a scenario that gets Levendoski excited: New Jersey Guard unit could act as an opposing force fighting the Wisconsin Guard’s 32nd Brigade through its asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) GuardNet XXI wide area network (WAN). Additionally, attack helicopters from Tennessee could be called in to support the 32nd Brigade. Meanwhile, the Missouri Guard officials could clear enemy mines and obstacles, and the New Mexico Guard could give air-defense artillery support.

In February, ARNG officials from four states conducted a proof of concept for Remote Janus, a simulated, battle-staff training exercise. Guard officials connected 24 workstations through the GuardNet XXI wide area network, using notebook PCs that run the Linux freeware Unix operating system. Officials from the National Guard Leader Development Center at Fort Leavenworth, KS; Iowa National Guard’s Regional Training Institute at Camp Dodge, IA; the 34th Division Armory in Rosemont, MN; and Wisconsin National Guard State Headquarters in Madison, WI, participated in the two-day exercise.

While only three workstations at Fort Leavenworth took part in Remote Janus, seven workstations in each of the other three facilities participated, said Lieutenant Colonel Joel D. Hart of the Leader Development Center at Fort Leavenworth. They used terrain sets from the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, CA, as well as Kansas terrain from the area near Fort Leavenworth, and terrain from Korea.

“Janus uses standard terrain data for both features―roads, trees, rivers, lakes, buildings, etc….―and elevation from [National Imagery and Mapping Agency or NIMA], which is then processed through a program called Janus Rapid Terrain Generator, in order to make the map and terrain data files usable by the Janus software,” said Major Sean P. Donahoe, futures and technology integration director at the Iowa National Guard’s Military Interactive Multimedia Instruction Center at Camp Dodge.

“Janus terrain can be generated from any location in the world, as long as NIMA has the feature and elevation data, at a maximum terrain size of 100 [kilometers] by 100 [kilometers] per data file,” he said. Guard officials can use up to six sides in Janus, including friendly, enemy, allies, partial allies and neutrals. The software tabulates killed in action, wounded in action and vehicle data based on historical and statistical data, Donahoe said.

Guard soldiers usually use the Reserve Component Automation System (RCAS) workstation, a PC by Compaq Computer Corp. of Houston, running Microsoft Windows NT Workstation 4.0 that the service purchases through its RCAS contract with Science Applications International Corp. of San Diego. The company inherited the contract when it purchased Boeing Information Services Inc. from The Boeing Co. of Seattle last year.

But on Remote Janus Version 6.34, used during the proof of concept, the Guard utilized portable PCs by Broadax Systems Inc. of El Monte, CA, which run Linux, the freeware Unix operating system that’s generally available for less than $20 a copy. They also used BSI notebook PCs with Intel Pentium III 400-megahertz (MHz) processors, 128 megabytes of random access memory, 8-gigabyte (G) hard drives, 15-inch monitors and 10-Base T Ethernet cards, Levendoski said.

“Janus should run on the RCAS Compaq computers, however, they would have to have their hard drives re-partitioned or add another hard drive to allow a Linux partition to exist with about 2G of space reserved for Linux and the Janus software,” Donahoe said. Iowa Guard officials run Janus on Vectra PCs with Pentium III 500-MHz processors by Hewlett-Packard Co. of Palo Alto, CA, partitioned drives giving 2G of space to the Linux operating system and its applications, and 8G going to Microsoft’s Windows NT Workstation 4.0 or Windows 98. For the Remote Janus test in February, however, the four sites ran Linux on the BSI notebook PCs.

Linux has network monitoring and administration tools that enable users to verify network connections and troubleshoot workstations that don’t respond, Major Raymond M. Steinbart, ARNG training simulations officer and Janus branch chief, wrote in a post-exercise memorandum. Most of the machines ran Janus under Linux 5.2 by Red Hat Software Inc. of Durham, N.C. Several machines also ran Rat Hat Linux 6.0 and 6.1. “No problems were encountered either in loading or executing Janus under this updated operating system,” he wrote.

Steinbart recommended upgrading ARNG user sites from Linux 5.2 to 6.1 because the latter has a better user interface and desktop environment.

Besides wanting to know how well Remote Janus runs on the GuardNet WAN, officials wanted to evaluate how the software runs on the notebooks, since ARNG is also fielding a maneuver control system and all-source analysis system surrogate for intelligence on the notebook PCs, Levendoski said. “These systems are currently being fielded to provide ARNG units with the ability to train on digital command and control systems without having to wait until they are formally fielded the official Army systems,” he said.

The Remote Janus test in February followed a Command Post Exercise (CPX) Distributed Janus test, which occurred in May 1998, according Donahoe. A CPX helps commanders evaluate the decisionmaking and information transfer between main, rear and tactical command posts at command headquarters. It also monitors information flow between the evaluated headquarters and its adjacent and subordinate units, as well as higher headquarters.

Unlike the remote version, Distributed Janus uses more than one server and requires more installation work. Guard officials found they had to do more installation, programming and technical support for the modeling translation server software to work with the Janus workstation hosts.

Named for the Roman god of war who could see the past and future, Janus is a “very versatile” modeling program developed by Lawrence Livermore Laboratories in California during the 1980s, Levendoski said. First used 10 years ago to model nuclear effects, Janus later evolved, under rewritten code, as an Army simulation trainer for junior officers.

The Army’s National Simulation Center at Fort Leavenworth has the lead for Janus development, and they use the updated Version 7.1 for battalion and brigade battle- staff training. “The ARNG is a user of the Janus software, and when something better, such as One SemiAutomated Force, comes along or is completed, we will upgrade our battle-staff training PCs to that software,” Levendoski said.

It’s much easier to host a Remote Janus over a wide area network, which allows remote units to participate, while they developed Distributed Janus to work on an Ethernet local-area network, he observed. “Unless many hours and dollars are spent, distant units could not cooperate,” Levendoski added. “With the successful remoting of Janus, we have opened the door for tremendous training opportunities for the many varied and geographically dispersed units of the [ARNG].”

Distributed Janus also involves several simulation games “running at the same time, in different locations, but exchanging critical information about the current state of each game across a wide area network,” Donahoe said. While Remote Janus is one game running through a WAN at the same time,

“Each of the hosts in (Distributed Janus) are in turn connected to a translation server, which extracts relevant data about the state of the individual simulation at that location, [that] packages that information as event/state data in DIS [Distributed Interactive Simulation]-compliant Protocol Data Units [PDUs],” Levendoski said. “[It] then sends those PDUs out as a broadcast to the other translation servers on the WAN, where the event/state data is translated back as enemy/adjacent unit information that the Janus host can understand.”

DIS was the Department of Defense’s (DoD) standard for simulation applications prior to DoD’s adopting High Level Architecture (HLA) as its standard. In September 1996, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and technology mandated HLA as DoD’s architecture for simulations. After Oct. 1, 1998, DoD agencies stopped software development or modification for any systems that were not in the process of achieving HLA compliance. By Oct. 1, 2000, according to the memorandum, DoD agencies have to retire any non-HLA compliant systems.

ARNG officials had to overcome some problems during the Remote Janus test caused by the different configurations for firewalls and other security products the states used, according to Guard officials. Leavenworth’s Hart attributed the successful Remote Janus test to “full cooperation [among] all the participants. Network difficulties and issues [to include firewalls] were addressed and remedied.”

They also had some connectivity problems, after the Camp Dodge group got on the WAN immediately. “There were some initial problems getting out through the firewall in Minnesota,” Steinbart wrote. Eventually, they connected with the Minnesota troops, with a Wisconsin connection established two hours later. Minnesota troops then suffered a 65-minute power outage due to local power company problems.

Connected over the GuardNet XXI WAN and the Minnesota State WAN, the Janus Remote simulation “loaded well. The simulation was not degraded and had full functionality and played at all speeds,” Hart said. Minnesota’s 34th Division Armory had the slowest connectivity and went through a firewall.

The available test-site bandwidth ranged from T-1 to T-3 speeds, which means 1.544 megabits per second (mbps) to 45 mbps for digital communications. “The smallest ‘pipe’ within the test was 1.5 (mbps), but we came nowhere near utilizing the full bandwidth available on even the smallest pipe,” Donahoe reported. In 1998, Guard officials tested Remote Janus on Integrated Services Digital Network lines operating at 128 kilobits per second “with no noticeable degradation in simulation performance,” he said. “But that [speed] is really the lower limit for a dedicated connection.”

Guard officials also measured bandwidth requirements on their ATM network for voice and data to make sure they could use those communications means without slowing down the network for day-to-day operations.

The two-day Remote Janus test followed an experimental simulation in January with five workstations and one host between the Iowa and Kansas Guard installations that participated in the February test, Hart said. The January simulation, which had 500 icons and moderately complex terrain, “loaded as rapidly over the WAN as it does locally,” Donahoe said. “Game play was not degraded in any way and the simulation had full functionality.”

Since Guard officials thought the Remote Janus’ test conditions were not difficult enough, they conducted the follow-on test in February, Hart said.

What’s the next step for Remote Janus? It’s not a separate program and needs no funding or specific approval, such as a Milestone evaluation, Levendoski said.

Iowa Guard officials want to run Remote Janus command-post exercises on 96 workstations simultaneously, with a 10,000-icon limit using DIS- and HLA-compatible simulation data, Donahoe said. The February test used as many as 1,200 icons. They envision continuous 24-hour operations, Janus PC suites in all Iowa armories, adjustable bandwidth on demand, as well as voice, data and video teleconferencing capabilities in the field.

Summary: Army National Guard officials hope to save tens of thousands of dollars by conducting battle staff training exercises for units in several states through an asynchronous transfer mode network, rather than requiring citizen-soldiers to travel to distant sites for such training. They moved one step closer to their goal by completing the Remote Janus proof of concept in February in the Midwest involving units from four states.