Keeping the Spirit of Transformation Alive
ITEC 2007 HIGHLIGHTS PROMISES AND CHALLENGES OF TRANSFORMING MILITARY TRAINING AND EDUCATION PROGRAMS.
The April 24-26 2007, ITEC in Cologne, Germany, captured the promise and challenges of transforming nations’ military training and education programs. While the industry-military partners highlighted a number of technical achievements and successes, they also served notice that they continue to solve some very basic challenges, including ways to increase their language proficiency and cultural awareness of other nations’ services and organizations with whom they are increasingly operating.
PANEL DISCUSSION HIGHLIGHTS
The Tuesday morning senior officer panel was conducted in an interactive discussion format. This was a welcome departure from previous conferences which required panel members to provide national or organizational updates—often at the expense of not sharing valuable senior leadership insights on a wider range of contemporary training and education issues.
Brigadier General Erhard Drews, commander, Center for Transformation, Bundeswehr, Germany, and the panel moderator, set the tone for the members during his opening remarks when he asserted that training transformation must remain focused on the individual.
“One main challenge the Bundeswehr Transformation Center as well as all the other armed forces are facing, is that the important factor in the transformation process is the human being itself—not the technology. Without well educated and properly trained military personnel, the success of transformation will be doubtful,” he said.
The general’s panel members supplied insights into a wide range of issues for the benefit of the predominately European audience—addressing both the servicemember and technology.
One topic which enlightened many conference attendees was how the U.S. military is training to support integrated operations. This is a natural evolution under the Department of Defense’s Training Transformation program, whose motto has matured to “Train as we operate” and whose focus has moved from training in a joint context with the other services, to a much broader and inclusive training audience.
Integrated operations “include our four services, the interagency organizations, such as the Department of State, humanitarian support agencies, and multinational nations and coalition partners,” said Dan Gardner, director, Readiness and Training, Office of Deputy Undersecretary of Defense (Readiness). He added that the “other parts are the intergovernmental partners—these include the 50 state governors—and of course industry. It is another major player in today’s operations from the perspective of being a logistics provider, and supplier of contractors in the theater and on the battlefield, for security and other services.”
He rhetorically asked, “How do we prepare properly for this very complex environment?”
Gardner answered his own question when he noted that the U.S. DoD’s challenge includes providing a realistic, persistent, training environment to replicate the operational environment so that the Total Force has the opportunities to train first and establish those relationships, to work through the command and control challenges, and bring that complex environment together—prior to deployment.
Language and culture awareness was an important topic on the minds of Major General Andrew Graham, director general, Army Recruiting and Training Division, U.K., Major General Jean Claude Allard, commander, French Army Aviation, and other panel members. The military leaders noted shortfalls in these areas continue to surface as their nations participate in combined and coalition missions. Allard, in particular, recalled his nation’s efforts to provide French language training to military members of its contemporary African alliance partners, in an effort to increase their interoperability.
CONSOLIDATION CONTINUES
The restructuring of the training systems industry was again evident at the conference.
CAE noted that it acquired MultiGen- Paradigm days before the ITEC’s opening session. This transaction comes on the heels of CAE’s recent acquisitions of two other commercial software companies, Engenuity and TERREX. The company’s new partners bring an array of proven products and competencies to the partnership.
“The story around this strategy is a combination of two goals,” revealed Mike Greenley, CAE vice president, Modeling and Simulation. “First, in our commercial software business we are trying to get to a solid, integrated suite of products for the Modeling and Simulation [M&S] market. Second, CAE has always been strong in providing trainers and training services, but we are bigger than that. We want to ensure that we expand our M&S business beyond training, so that we are also into analysis, design and experimentation—more across the entire defense life cycle,” he added.
DEMONSTRATIONS
Saab and Krauss-Maffei Wegman (KMW) provided one of ITEC’s better illustrations of how the Live-Virtual-Constructive training environment is evolving.
A live “soldier” put several of Saab’s live training products, including its Anti-Tank Weapon simulator and an instrumented Personal Detection Device through their paces against a virtual Main Battle Tank (MBT).
The tank was operated through one of KMW’s most recent products—a Table Top Trainer (T3). The T3, designed to support Leopard2 MBT and other vehicles, was demonstrated at the ITEC with yet another upgrade—a command station, noted Christoph Mueller, senior vice president, KMW Strategy and Corporate Communications.
The connectivity of the live and virtual entities was supported by Saab’s Widely Integrated Systems Environment (WISE) platform.
Ken Jackson, vice president, Concurrent, demonstrated one of his company’s newest products, the Simulator Workbench.
The workbench provides a complete framework to develop and execute realtime hardware-in-the-loop simulations and other tasks.
The product supports the evolving A400M aircraft program and runs on the Red Hawk Linux real-time operating system. Red Hawk Linux is an integral part of several upgraded U.S. Air Force F-16 fullflight simulators and other systems.
ANNOUNCEMENTS
A number of product and program advisories were released at the conference.
BAE Systems stated it will supply a new training system for Royal Navy sonar operators and maintainers. Under this recent contract, the company will provide a high-fidelity emulation of Sonar 2076 and a computer-based training system for initial operator training and maintainer training for several classes of U.K. submarines.
Saab previewed its BT46 MKII training system. A number of upgrades are evident from the venerable MKI product. One improvement is a new laser transceiver for short range (for mobile operations in urban terrain) and long range (for munitions and weapons) simulations. The sum total of advances has provided a new infrastructure with fewer components and wireless connections.
L-3 Communications’ Link Simulation and Training has delivered two F/A-18C/D Aircrew Flight Trainers (AFTs) that have achieved ready-for-training status to U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, Calif. The trainers consist of two independent cockpits for the pilot and weapons sensor operator. The crew station for each cockpit is housed within an L-3-built SimuSphere visual display system, allowing the training system to support both single seat F/A- 18C and integrated dual seat F/A-18D training. The F/A-18C/D AFTs also have a distributed training capability compliant with the Navy Aviation Simulation Master Plan.
VEGA Group PLC and Logistics Business Systems have teamed up to create a common content data base that can simultaneously provide content for elearning modules and electronic technical documentation. The database is reported to be Sharable Content Object Reference Model-conformant and use the ASD S1000D standard. The significance of this and similar industry efforts is that training courses and technical publications can use the same source material and can be concurrently updated.
Tactical Language Training noted that its menu of tactical language and culture training systems now includes Iraqi Arabic and Pashto. A Tactical French course for use by U.S. forces in Sahel Africa is under development. ♦