In its largest annual war game, the Marine Corps outfitted thousands of Marines with new technology this week meant to measure just how deadly they can be — an effort to shed decades-old equipment and usher the service into a new age of combat data collection.
The exercise this month at Twentynine Palms, California, included 2,700 Marines, 230 vehicles and more than a dozen buildings equipped with technology that can measure bullet trajectory down to the inch, simulated wounds in different places on the body, and real-time individual Marine locations — all metrics that earlier equipment could not accurately capture.
The new equipment, called the Marine Corps Tactical Instrumentation System, or MCTIS, is a welcome replacement to older generations of “laser tag” training systems, which were time-consuming to equip, inaccurate and generally unreliable, Marine officials told Military.com.
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“At the end of this, we’re going to be providing information that’s usable by every level across the board,” Lt. Col. Rory Hermann, the Marine Corps’ product manager for range training systems, told Military.com on Tuesday. “So, whether you’re the regimental commander, you’re getting the feedback from how your battalions performed, down to the squad leader [who] can look at how his Marines performed.”
The MCTIS can tell the Marine through voice…
