The past decade has seen a rise in Military Operations on Urban Terrain (MOUT), where units operate in cities and villages rather than traditional open field force-on-fore battles. It is estimated that the trend toward a higher proportion of MOUT missions will continue given that a vast majority of the world’s population resides in urban centers. MOUT has become a key goal for military training today. Each urban operation is unique and will differ due to the multitude of combinations presented by the threat, the urban area itself, the major operation of which it may be a part, and geopolitical considerations.

MOUT facilities first began around 1985 when militaries around the world realized that they were starting to become engaged in many urban conflict situations, as opposed to the classical open field force-on-force battles using mechanized armor components.  With the rise of worldwide terrorism in the past ten years, mostly occurring in urban terrain areas, the importance of having realistic urban terrain training areas has increased tremendously.  MOUT missions involve a broad range of critical and challenging decisions and judgments, resulting in an incredibly complicated and fluid environment that influences the conduct of military operations in many ways.

Wassel Corporation and its team members specialize in utilizing modeling and simulation to support MOUT training. We offer guidance and support in developing and implementing MOUT training using components that imitate the appearance and the characteristics of realistic urban conditions.

The objectives of MOUT training facilities and exercises are to provide a realistic urban environment for soldiers to engage adversary troops in a building-to-building and room-to-room environment.  Training the soldiers in this realistic urban environment prepares the soldiers with the experience they need to successfully conduct combat operations in similar urban warfare situations.

The MOUT facility contains buildings that can be constructed of stucco, wood, brick or concrete, or they can consist of standard ISO shipping containers, stacked together.  Many of the MOUT sites are using semi-permanent structures.  Each of the buildings and inside rooms are instrumented with cameras and microphones to capture the action in real time.  The rooms are also equipped with speakers, lighting, realistic human target devices, and special effects to provide realistic training.  All of this equipment is controlled by the training analysts in the exercise control facility with two and three dimensional monitoring.

A MOUT facility typically consists of the actual physical buildings and the MOUT instrumentation system. The instrumentation system consists of (1) the building instrumentation subsystem (including instrumentation and special effects inside and outside the buildings); (2) the exercise control subsystem; and (3) the after action review subsystem.

The MOUT training analysts view the exercise in real-time, including real-time video; control all the special effects during the exercise, and to mark the real-time audio/video data for later use in the after action review presentation. The MOUT location and communications instrumentation allows soldiers to be tracked and all data to be collected and transmitted in real time to the exercise control facility. This tracking includes not only outdoor GPS tracking, but accurate indoor tracking of the exercise participants.

The MOUT utilizes weapon engagement simulation hardware; Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System (MILES) for a wide range of small arms, machine guns, weapons and man worn harnesses for the individuals. Also shoot-through-the-wall devices, to allow heavy weapons to shoot at building walls and cause occupants inside to be killed or wounded, as well as remotely triggered IED devices and shoot-back MILES targets.

The special effects consist of the real-life weapons type of devices, including smoke, explosions, lighting, IEDs, etc. to provide as realistic a training environment as possible for the trainees.  The after action review subsystem normally consists of a small theatre, with large screen displays, a presentation workstation, and wall mounted cameras to film and record the debriefings.