Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/235053
Training T Q Does that conversation also extend across domains as well as across fleets, given that all these platforms need to be networked? The Air Mobility Training Centre in Trenton and a CC-130J full-mission simulator. In smaller countries that are more in the "development" phase of their defence capability and have a smaller force and more centralized thinking, there is an opportunity to take a pan-force perspective and act more "joint" than some of the more developed countries with established army, navy and air force cultures. But as budgets get cut and money gets tight, I think that will drive more joint behaviour in western nations. Shrinking budgets can knock down stovepipes pretty quickly. Q Are militaries creating new units or positions to hold these discussions with you? If militaries want to have that system-of-systems approach to training, the opportunity is there. Instead of procuring at the platform level, you could procure across the fleet; we would then deliver an integrated training solution at the fleet level. You get more flexibility, more opportunity to optimize the knowledge, skill and ability development, more optimization of resources, and more sharing from a pan–fleet perspective. That can work, but sometimes the commercial contracts for each platform get in the way of trying to cause cross-fleet synergy. I am seeing some countries in Europe now starting to switch from procuring ISS (in-service support) for each platform to contracts that are across fleet – instead of buying ISS with each armoured vehicle, they now want an armoured fleet maintainer to have the ISS and drive synergies across the fleet. For things like training, ISS and C4ISR, where you want a common C4ISR solution on every platform, there are opportunities to look across the fleet and encourage those synergies and interoperability. Q Is the army taking this approach with the Land Vehicle Crew Training System? That opportunity would be there. If you look at how the army deals with C3, command, control and communications, Director Land Command Systems Program Management has contracts with General Dynamics and Thales that are cross-army contracts so that it ends up with integrated C3 across the fleet instead of different C3 solutions on each vehicle. We are in conversations with many different countries that want to take that approach. Given where technology is today, many are asking how industry can partner with the military to be the training system integrator and deliver the cross-fleet solution. As military budgets get tight, the other increasing opportunity is for us to actually own the training centre and for the military to pay for it as a service. That is another level of partnership. For both militaries and emergency management, that is a conversation many are having around the world. We do that on the civil side every day. We have dozens of civil training centres for Boeing, Airbus and business jet aircraft where we own the centre and deliver training as a service. In some countries. In Canada it is still an army, navy, air force discussion. With the evolution of the Canadian Defence Academy, I think there is an opportunity to have a Canadian armed forces training conversation as the CDA continues to mature and have more influence in the community. Certainly the operational training tends to live within the army, navy and air force, but CDA gives you the place to have that joint training conversation, to look across the force at skill development as part of skill generation. Q You've touched on a few trends. Take us out five to 10 years: what does training look like for a trooper? One trend is the concept of point of need. It is expensive to have someone leave their job, fly somewhere, and be locked in a classroom. We have to constantly look at the mix of classroom-based, computer-based and simulation-based training and how to make it easily accessible. How can we decrease the cost of expensive facilities and instructors and get more e-learning and, at the higher end, more simulation-based training instead of live vehicles or aircraft? The use of connected simulation environments will also continue to grow. I also see a potential trend in more performance-based learning frameworks, using behavioural science and our understanding of knowledge, skills and ability to figure out how to develop those skills and then how to test them. That's advanced training thinking. It allows you to move students through their educational experience at their pace while ensuring they meet a performance level. When you combine those things, you are saying: how do I make training more accessible, how do I ensure I am using the most cost-effective yet richest training media experience, and how am I measuring the student on a performance basis so that once they have the skill they can move on to the next? That is going to be increasingly more important. People talk about the next 10 years as being one of "home deployed" forces. We're pulling out of Afghanistan and people don't see a lot of scenarios for large deployments. If I have shrinking budgets and home deployed forces yet I must maintain readiness at the most cost-effective level possible, my ability to use this technology for training and distributed mission rehearsal will be critical. www.vanguardcanada.com DECEMBER 2013/JANUARY 2014 35