Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/476674
"We have to free people from this technical enslavement that they have right now. The C4ISR systems that we have acquired are very difficult because we have asked for all of the options," Gilkes says. "How do we train this? Everything has to be embed- ded so that no matter where you are, what you are doing, whether it is in a tank or in your office, you have the tools you need to plan and the training mode embedded." That might be music to Colonel Stephen Hall's ears. In an inter- view with Vanguard last year, the director of Land Command and Information said his biggest challenge was institutionalizing C4ISR capability acquired by the army over the previous decade, and to do that he required a new model for education and training. "Capability and education are not linked up in my field," he told an audience at Army Outlook 2014 last April after asking industry for help defining and writing the specifications required to make a soldier highly proficient in a C4ISR application. "We need to get closer together to build a full capability." Added a senior officer in the Directorate of Land Requirements, "people, process and technology all need to be aligned to deliver an effect. We can't look at C4I projects as single, individual proj- ects, but [rather] as a coherent and complete capability." He sug- gested the army might be wiser to buy fewer systems and know how to use them to their fullest rather than let "boxes" gather dust on a shelf. Gilkes understands the problem well. He believes the Canadian Army may be one of the best in the world at warfighting at the battlegroup or combat team level and below, but he says there are significant problems ensuring "complex tools" are being ef- fectively used as combat multipliers. Whether it is earlier C4ISR systems that did not live up to their billing or were overly difficult to train on, soldiers have not always adopted them as doctrine or incorporated them into their tactics, techniques and procedures. "We need to have a simpler and more effective training system for C4ISR tools," he said in a recent interview from C4i Consul- tants' office in Calgary. "It has to be able to be done by anybody, anywhere. We just don't have that deployed right now within the Canadian Army." Not only are many C4ISR systems extremely complex, creating the time to practice can be difficult when systems are often most accessible during live training events or on operations. "It's not like air traffic controllers, who use their system all day, every day, to its full capability. People operating C4I systems typically go in fits and starts," he said. "For eight months you will do nothing and then for four months it will be very busy and you'll be using it every day. So the real skill is maintaining muscle memory and knowing operationally how to use the system." That means embedding a training mode on systems that is dis- tinct from operations, doesn't interfere with operational informa- tion yet draws from the same databases, and is both easy to access and realistic to train on. "It can't require a bunch of bushy haired scientists to make it work. It has to be embedded where they can push a button and go into training mode. The more obstacles that you put between these very busy people and their ability to train correlates to a reduction in training capability or reduced frequency of training events. They won't do it if they have a hard time doing it." "And just as in real life, they are not going to train if it is boring or not leading anywhere. They have to win a war or fight a battle, or something that gets them some short-term recognition or ful- filment. Soldiers and officers need that to stay focused; it can't be a walkthrough, they need to be actually sweating and exercising their brain muscles." Seamless transition As the distinction between virtual training and live operations converges into near-real time updated environments, so too will the training requirement for C4ISR systems. In fact, C4i has de- liberately designed its simulation tools to look and function ex- actly like a C4I system, using the same maps and integrating with the same databases. C C4iSR www.vanguardcanada.com FEBRUARY/MARCH 2015 17