Public Order Management in a Virtual World

In urban operations, military commanders have to take into account the civilians present in the operation area. This is why Public Order Management (POM) is an important subject of their training. The organization of POM field training is challenging. It requires lots of humans to act as crowds. It is hard to make the training sufficiently effective and efficient for the own units.
Therefore the Royal Netherlands Military Police and TNO initiated the development of a dedicated POM training system for commander staff. This system includes simulations of own POM units (formations, stances and dress) and crowds (movements, formations and aggression). Virtual Battlespace (VBS2) provides the system’s simulation engine. As VBS2 is not meant primarily for staff training nor for crowd control, a fair amount of functionality had to be added.
During development, multiple trials were organized with students from the NL school for Public Order Management. The final trials were meant to evaluate the utility and validity of the new training system. These Validation & Verification (V&V) sessions revealed that the new training system creates a valuable learning experience for the staff of a full POM platoon. It provided a challenging urban setting, where the trained staff could focus on the key POM competences (in particular ‘command and control’, ‘situational decision making’, and ‘stress management’), without the logistic burden of having the full platoon and several crowds on site.