Vanguard Magazine

www.vanguardcanada.com JUNE/JULY 2026 29 S T F O R U M ahead of time, we're going to see the first River Class, and we're not going to know how to use it." What the Science Says The luncheon keynote shifted the conver- sation. Shelly Blake-Plock, president of the Institute for Infrastructure and Interop- erable Data in Learning and CEO of Yet Analytics, made the case from first prin- ciples. For most of the twentieth century, he argued, training was designed around a flawed theory of how the human mind works. Lectures and summative assessment assumed learning happened through trans- fer. The evidence says otherwise. Learning happens through adaptation, through pre- diction error, through retrieval and recon- solidation. "When reality differs from pre- diction, learning happens. We learn from mistakes. We learn from failure. Within simulations, it is often actually more im- pactful for learners to fail than to succeed." The implication for Canada's training enterprise is significant. AI-enabled simu- lation is not a supplement to existing sys- tems. Properly instrumented, it becomes the engine of learning, capable of identify- ing skills gaps before they become opera- tional failures, personalizing training to the individual, and compressing timelines in ways that conventional approaches cannot match. Blake-Plock was careful to distin- guish hype from substance. Large language models are one piece of a larger paradigm shift. The deeper opportunity lies in learn- ing engineering: bringing together learn- ing scientists, experience designers, and systems architects to build training systems grounded in evidence and capable of mea- suring what they claim to produce. "There is no learning system that should be creat- ed, let alone touched by a learner, if it does not have a learning science fundamental background underneath it." The Partnership Problem Panels two and three returned repeatedly to the word partnership. Major-General John Errington, Commander of the Cana- dian Army Doctrine and Training Centre, was unequivocal about the stakes. "If we don't take advantage of this opportunity, it's now on us. When I say us, it's not those in uniform. It's on all of us." He described an Army in structural transformation, shifting to functionally organized divisions with units coast to coast. people. But he was clear about where the gaps are. "The expansion of radar-guided weapons around the world is something that keeps me up at night. One-way at- tack drones, things we can't simulate that you might encounter for the first time. The variability of the battlespace and the complexity of weapons now out there." Simulation of the electromagnetic spec- trum, he said, remains fundamentally in- adequate. "The EM spectrum is incred- ibly difficult to replicate currently." Culhane was equally direct about what the Navy needs and does not yet have. His priority in five years: the ability to lo- cate adversary submarines holding North American infrastructure at risk in a degrad- ed environment, with limited communi- cations, fighting at distance. "I can't do that with the simulator I have right now." He also named the River Class destroyer training gap plainly. Canada is sending its first operators south to Dahlgren, Virginia to train on the AEGIS combat system be- cause no domestic training infrastructure yet exists. "If we don't do the work into developing the training program for that Le to right: Chris Pogue, President Defence & Space, Calian; Jean-Marc Lanthier, Chief Executive Officer & President, ADGA Group; Major-General John Errington, Commander Canadian Army Doctrine Training Centre (CADTC), Department of National Defence; Col Richard (Rick) Fawcett (Ret'd) Le to right: Lieutenant-Commander Nicholas Culhane, Operations Room Officer Course Officer, Naval Fleet School Pacific, Royal Canadian Navy; Major Jake Balfe, Chief Training Officer at 436 (T) Squadron, Royal Canadian Air Force Air Commodore Rob Caine, Head of Flying Training, Directorate of Flying Training, No. 22 Group, Royal Air Force Jeff Tasseron, Director, Strategy and Innovation, CAE Defense & Security Canada

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