This paper describes the challenges in modernizing existing training ranges in the Army. As existing live-fire training ranges age, they become more difficult to maintain as equipment breaks down and their foundational technologies become increasingly difficult to procure due to obsolescence. The prohibitively high cost of complete range replacement coupled with ever-tightening training budgets has driven efforts to find innovative ways to extend the lives of these ranges while providing a path for affordable modernization of the ranges to align with emerging range standards and specifications, while continuing to provide dynamic support to today's Warfighter.
The Army has developed and deployed a single common target control systems called TRACR (Targetry Range Automated Control and Recording) to support the command and control of the Future Army System of Integrated Targets (FASIT) devices. While TRACR is capable of controlling ERETS (Enhanced REmoted Target System) legacy targets via a hardware/firmware bridge to the legacy infrastructure, there is no means to deploy modern FASIT targets on these legacy ranges.
The use of Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) technology over existing range wiring (i.e., twisted pairs), allows incremental upgrades to modern FASIT devices and facilitates new technologies such as downrange cameras onto these existing ranges. This approach will modernize these legacy ranges without the need for expensive trenching and infrastructure upgrades.