Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/235053
T Training the value of partnering with one contractor, making that contractor the training system integrator, which offloads a lot of that work from the military and puts the onus on the contractor to develop a full training system. Often contracts are performancebased over 20 years, so we have a performance-based motivation to deliver a high performing training solution at the right price point. That's a great procurement model for the military and a great opportunity for us. And when we do that on more than one platform we are able to leverage synergies. Certainly each aircraft has its own nuances, its own curriculum, its own skills that need to be developed, but there are generic aspects such as infrastructure and terrain databases that you need to have in all your simulators. Q Is this a global phenomenon? How distinct is the RCAF approach? We do see the pattern of training centre procurement increasing. We are involved in operating over 40 military and civil training centres around the world, not just for air forces but also land and maritime. We are also involved in emergency management training centres. It's a similar pattern: complex mission scenarios that require training for individual and crew skills that are hard to create either cost-effectively or from a safety perspective in a live training environment. The Canadian procurement is pretty advanced compared to other countries. With the C-130J training centre in Trenton, even Americans who have visited have commented that they view it as one of the most modern centres in the world, which is high praise coming from the U.S., which can generally afford to do much more than us. It's not that Canada spent more money, it's because it has been procured as a fully integrated system. Both the C-130J and the CH-147 centres are world class examples that other countries are now looking to. Q Is there a role for contractors in helping define the military's skill sets, especially in newer areas like sensor operators and mission systems management where you are often also the technology developer and perhaps understand the necessary skill sets better? To a limited extent. The military does most of the definitions of the functions of the crew and their roles. You are making assumptions about the knowledge, skills and ability of each of those roles when you are assigning functions to each, and sometimes we get the opportunity to be involved in that discussion. But typically we would join in once we know it's going to be a four-person crew and with set roles. Once we know that's how the system has been designed, we would analyze the requirements for each of those roles and indentify the training needs. Obviously the more upstream we can get involved with the system design community, the more effective we can be at optimizing the knowledge, skill and ability development that we are going to be responsible for downstream. But if you look at something like the next generation fighter, where we have been responsible for the mission systems and support for 25 years, we have a lot to offer into a conversation on crew training. 34 DECEMBER 2013/JANUARY 2014 www.vanguardcanada.com Q The RCAF's longer-term goal is to network both centres. That idea has been around for years but is it now in greater demand? There has been a conversation in the community about distributed mission training and connectivity – across live, virtual and constructive – for 15 years and every year we make bigger strides. For distributed mission training (DMT) to be effective, though, militaries have to take a cross-platform approach. We've seen the first examples of DMT come into effect in exercises: people used to get all the assets together and run a live exercise; now they are linking simulators and running a simulation exercise. And when we deliver a training solution like in Trenton, it is designed to ensure it is networkable so a formation of C-130Js can train together. But now to go across platforms and have, for example, all the simulators for helicopters, transport aircraft, fighters and tankers connected in a scenario, the air force has to have a structure whereby it is going to manage training and simulation across platforms. Air forces around the world are starting to do that. Canada has established new positions in the air force in the last couple of years to look at cross-air force training and simulation, not just for an exercise but as part of everyday operations. For CAE, we have contracts to support, operate or maintain training environments for the air force across the country. Though we don't have a contract that says, "work across all these platform stovepipes and cause there to be a systematic approach," we try our best to look across all the platforms we are delivering training on and help the air force bring a cross-fleet perspective to this as they are trying to cause DMT. That, in turn, causes us to help set standards: what are the training database standards going to be, the network standards, the federation network models for this distributed mission training? This is going to increase. In Canada, we are seeing the air force and army look at DMT activities so that you can have air support to ground operations in the distributed mission environment. Q Most of procurement around simulation systems, though, seems to be platform driven. At some point do you need to separate the training from the platforms and look at it in a much more holistic way?