Decisive Action Training Environment (DATE) Update: One Donovia

As a result of the current European theater security environment, the TRADOC G-2 has substantively updated the DATE country Donovia. Donovia is designed to be representative of an acute threat for two DATE regions, Europe and Caucasus. Historically, due to development over time, DATE had two separate instances of Donovia. One Donovia for DATE Caucasus and a separate one for DATE Europe (“Donovia-West”). This update consolidates these two separate instances providing a singular unified Donovia experience across all DATE regions better enabling DATE to provide training and exercise scenario developers a more realistic representation of a European theater acute threat. 

The changes to Donovia include updated geographic boundaries that span Europe and Asia, improved military capabilities, organization, and equipment, and updated operational environment (OE) conditions across all variables: political, military, economic, social, information, infrastructure, physical environment, and time (PMESII-PT). Moreover, this update improves the narrative across all DATE OEs, providing details on relationships between Donovia, other DATE countries, and real-world countries. These changes provide the necessary material for scenario developers at all echelons to develop robust and comprehensive scenario products to train for multi-domain and large-scale combat operations.  

Examples of changes include: 

• The military variable has been expanded considerably to include units tailored for specific environments like the Arctic and postured towards specific geographic regions like the Pacific Fleet. 
• The social variable now includes religions from across Donovia and not just from a single region like the Caucasus. 
• The economic variable now includes updates depicting Donovia’s trade relations with the new DATE Indo-Pacific nations of Himaldesh and Bagansait.   
• The information variable includes more detail to address the needs of Multi-Domain Operations (MDO). 

With these changes to Donovia, DATE provides the environment to support complex, comprehensive, multi-theater training events with a realistic adversary capable of challenging U.S. interests across combatant commands (COCOMs). The development of a unified Donovia allows scenario developers to provide greater depth to the area of interest.1 The expanded depth and increased Donovian military capabilities facilitates higher echelon deep operations and targeting efforts. Scenario developers can now portray a more complete depiction of Donovian national power and how it could be leveraged against friendly forces. 

Figure 1: Donovia graphic created by U.S. Army TRADOC G-2  

The changes to Donovia will impact scenario and exercise design. The graphic below depicts the exercise design sequence. The items highlighted in red are the areas that the unified Donovia OE variables and single force structure directly impact. Using a common OE in these phases of the design process facilitates collaboration between unassociated scenario developers and exercise design teams. 

Figure 2: Exercise Design graphic created by U.S. Army TRADOC G-2 

A unified Donovia more accurately depicts the acute threat, driving education and Soldier awareness of the OE. The new Donovia also supports simultaneous, joint, and combined training across multiple theaters and COCOMs. The expanded and more realistic Donovia, heavily informed by observations of conflict in Europe today, ultimately supports the Army’s “train as you fight” mantra.  

Donovia, and DATE as a whole, will continue to evolve as the TRADOC G-2 DATE team monitor and collect observations of contemporary conflicts. However, DATE is a collaborative training tool that benefits from engagement with and feedback from our customers; we welcome input from users on identified gaps in content. The TRADOC G-2 Training Community of Practice was designed for this task and can be joined by clicking here:  

See Also: 

DATE: Decisive Action Training Environment: https://oe.tradoc.army.mil/date-decisive-action-training-environment/
Russia, the acute European theater threat: https://oe.tradoc.army.mil/how-russia-fights/