 Today's Navy is a highly complex and sophisticated fighting force, one that combines cutting-edge technology with highly skilled sailors and officers that create and maintain a strategic advantage throughout the world. Twenty-first-century warships, like the Littoral Combat Ship or LCS, requires highly trained, forward-thinking and adaptable sailors to navigate and fight in today's theater of operations. In order to effectively train these modern-day warriors, new training technologies and approaches are required. To ensure our training meets the mark, Navy created an innovative and uniquely modern training approach known as Surface Training Advanced Virtual Environment, Littoral Combat Ship, or STAVE LCS. STAVE LCS is an initiative to provide better, more immersive training to our sailors and officers to help them more efficiently and rapidly attain qualifications before they get to their ship. STAVE LCS is training infrastructure and supporting curriculum to execute the LCS, train to qualify and train to certify concept of operations. It's the training infrastructure that we use in order to provide training from the individual level all the way to the small team, watch team and full ship level using training that's as close as possible to the actual representation of the ship and its systems. STAVE LCS combines instructor-led curriculum with state-of-the-art virtual reality technology supported by hands-on training applications. It allows students to fully immerse themselves in their future job on the ship without actually being there. The most helpful aspect to my training I think is the realism behind the technology and kind of the holistic nature of what the trainer is and you get the sounds. Everything short of smell is there. It's not really just a first-person gaming environment, but it's a first-person shipboard gaming environment. So they have to go through all the start and stop procedures for their equipment that they normally would. They learn the operations, they learn the maintenance of their equipment so they're comfortable with that equipment. Your eyes are hitting what your eyes would hit out in the fleet. You're looking at the same sensors, your hands are touching the sticks when you're driving, you're seeing water flare up when you make a turn. It's very realistic and it's almost identical to what they're going to find on the ship. You actually get to sit in the seat as you're maneuvering through a simulation and applying that hands-on reps and sets so that you become proficient at what you're doing. We can provide scenarios that are much more rigorous, much more realistic and much more like what we expect crews to see in combat, things that we can't do out at sea. You're just not going through a series of PowerPoints. You're working, you're performing steps, you're conducting casualty control, performing system alignments and learning the system based on how it's supposed to be on board the ship. My first impression as a hands-on learner was fantastic. Absolutely loved coming into the simulator and just getting to drive the ship. The STAVE LCS training methodology is all-inclusive. Every sailor and officer on board receives state-of-the-art training, preparing them for situations they encounter at sea. We can engineer the training scenarios to be exactly what we want and what we need them to be for the training objectives we're trying to meet. We can go live visibility, we can go night time, we can add rain, we can add snow and instead of having to say simulate this and then just walk through the actions, you can make the student have to recognize that scenario coming up. They prepare you to deal with these incredibly high-stress evolutions. We're engaging, you know, small boats, avoiding white shipping and we're dealing with inbound missiles all at once. The virtual training certainly is effective and allows many more repetitions and sets in this environment where we can reset instead of burning lots of gas at sea. STAVE LCS is better because it allows us to train our students up to and actually through failure. We can allow an officer of the deck to make a wrong turn and see the cause and effect, the second and third order of effects of those decisions. All facets of the training program, from virtual reality labs to part-task trainers to mission bay trainers and integrated tactical trainers are designed to maximize a sailor's skill development through repeated actions which are conducted in a variety of environments and scenarios. STAVE LCS covers every crewman on an LCS in both an individual and team environment. There's a multitude of jobs that we prepare the students for. Everything from a maintenance person all the way up through the highest echelons of driving the ship, being officer of the deck qualified. You're hitting every wicket that you possibly could hit. STAVE LCS provides multiple training areas from both navigation to combat systems. So we're able to mimic defense of the ship as well as navigating through straight passages. So they learn those individual skills and abilities but more importantly they learn how to work as a watch team really provide that crew resource management. The STAVE LCS innovative approach is getting results and drawing attention throughout the Navy. The students can go back out to the fleet in such a short amount of time and do what those seasoned sailors maybe it took them so much longer to be able to accomplish. With this vendor training, commanding officers were taking about six months to qualify their sailors. With the STAVE LCS courses online we're seeing that qualification time drop down to three to four weeks. And because of that we are getting better productivity quicker and faster out of a sailor when they arrive on board. STAVE LCS training creates sailors and officers that are confident in their ability to immediately contribute when they reach the ship. It also provides assurance to Navy leadership that LCS crews are qualified and certified in their areas of expertise. Crews will be able to maximize LCS capabilities at sea starting on day one. I think we're getting a much better product with the training that we get from STAVE LCS. This is the way of the future to prepare our crews to go overseas and fight and do the mission. Having seen and participated in the training that's available here that comfort level on my end that sailor, that officer that is coming to my ship to operate her to maintain her, knows what they're doing is just that much higher knowing that they've done it countless times before. That success can only be attributed to the training that they've received and the fidelity by which these trainers work. It gives me confidence that every time my ships go to sea they go to sea safely. Overall I feel like I could go on a deployment get into a combat situation and know what to do.