"Only perfect practice makes perfect." Said another way, warfighters must train as they would expect to fight in order to ensure that sound mental habits are established, which will increase the Warfighter's opportunities to make good (and winning) decisions in stressful situations. Unfortunately, for many reasons (e.g., lack of resources, inadequate technology, legacy system limitations, time, etc.) military personnel have not always been able to train in a manner consistent with their doctrine and tactics. Recent Department of Defense (DoD) and Navy "Transformation" doctrine emphasis on realistic integrated training, along with significant advances in Modeling and Simulation (M&S) technology, have resulted in training opportunities that aircrews could once only dream about.

This paper will describe a new initiative to enable netted tactical team training within the Navy. The initiative, part of the ONR-funded Virtual At Sea Training (VAST) program, is called Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) Air VAST. ASW Air VAST will result in a system of deployable and networked laptop trainers for the aircrew of the SH-60B (LAMPS MK-III). As part of this program, a new system called the Mission Rehearsal Tactical Team Trainer (MRT3) has been developed to allow the aircrew to perform mission rehearsal as a team with the crew's ship and other ASW air platform counterparts. The MRT3 is designed as a fully integrated tactical team trainer for the LAMPS aircrew and the entire ASW Team. It is not a flight trainer; rather, the focus of this deployable system is on providing a capability to develop ASW tactical team expertise, specifically the cognitive aspects associated with performing a tactical mission. Therefore, MRT3 can be described as a "stick and rudder trainer for the mind" that facilitates collaborative decision making and enables Warfighters to train in an operationally relevant synthetic battlespace, just as they would perform during combat operations.