After learning how the equipment worked, the soldiers used, abused and pushed the equipment in the field during the next five months. Paul Kelley, one of Scott's soldiers. The journals were turned in to leaders when the soldiers returned from the field. System contractors were on site to tweak, fine tune and fix the various systems and subsystems as the experiment progressed. And they were there to listen to what soldiers had to say.
Officials stress that the AWEs are only experiments.
They're testing concepts and procedures as much as, if not more than, equipment. SFC Gerald Newman, a mortar platoon sergeant, told the Mortar Fire Control System contractors that he needed more distance out of the system. Richard Coffron was unhappy with just about everything concerning the Dismounted Soldier System, which consisted of an IBM Thinkpad computer as the surrogate system for the DSS software. The system weighed more than 25 pounds, wires often caught on things and pulled out and the batteries only lasted a few hours, which meant soldiers would have to carry lots of batteries for extended field maneuvers. Soldiers disliked the system so much that it was temporarily pulled from the experiment.