Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/476674
18 FEBRUARY/MARCH 2015 www.vanguardcanada.com C C4iSR "It has to be seamless, otherwise you are duplicating effort and you are adding impediments to people being able to train," Gilkes said. "Our thought was always that you would take the training capability with you, to the field, to your headquarters, to your unit lines – you just do it when you need to. It might be on a vehicle as an embedded training experience where you flip a switch and now you are in training mode and can link with other vehicles. Or in the case of an HQ, it might be flipping a switch and going to training mode on desktop or laptop computers, all the while using your operational systems that are being stimulated by a smart tool." As much as possible, he said, that needs to be automated. For example, C4i has developed tools to automatically configure a C4I system and prepare it for training mode with just one laptop connected to a network of 20 or 100 computers. "We hide all the hard parts," Gilkes said. "Everybody is concerned about the functionality rather than the usability. We try to focus on both. We designed our systems to operate in the back of a C-17 while people are headed off to their deployment." C4ISR training also has to become much better and more cost effective at helping soldiers manage the ever-increasing volumes of data that pass across their systems. Gilkes says the only time most operators receive training on information management is during large, complex exercises. "At the zenith of Afghanistan, some of the training for a headquarters of 25 guys required 200 people, including other soldiers and contractors, and 50 comput- ers. If that is what you have to assemble to give the operator train- ing on information management, that to me is a bust." C4i's solution involves providing an integrated "master events list" with its simulation tools. "What this does is drive huge amounts of intelligence information along with positional infor- mation and everything else so that when people are training on their systems, they are doing it under realistic conditions," he said. "How do you get people to fuse information unless you have high volumes of it? How do you get intelligence analysts to pick the pepper out of the rest of it without giving them huge volumes that they would normally receive?" As the army moves forward on a number of projects around the modernization of its Land Command Support System (LCSS), including tactical communication systems, ISR systems, and tacti- cal C2 information systems, Gilkes believes automation and com- puter-enhanced planning and updating of systems will be key to delivering complete capability in the near future. Modern radios, he notes, now have hundreds of settings that re- quire more knowledge and decision-making skills. "It is no longer passing down a frequency and everybody runs to their vehicle and turns on that frequency; if there are a hundred settings, you have to mistake-proof this. You can't have people entering it by hand, so you have to have some way of automating this. I know Direc- tor Land Command Systems Program Management (DLCSPM) is working on a signals operation toolset to try and simplify this." Likewise with planning tools, systems need to be intuitive for soldiers who are cold, wet and tired. "The systems are very com- plex and it all has to work perfectly from the beginning," he said. "The only way to do that is with the assistance of a computer." the human element Lost sometimes in the maelstrom of technology innovation is the human factor. In a discussion about the complexities of training to operate C4ISR systems and the challenges of interoperability in networked environments, Gilkes returns on several occasions to the human at the centre of this systems vortex. "I firmly believe that the human element is probably the biggest factor in success or war winning and probably not enough focus is put on that," he said. "We need to acknowledge that the human element plays a huge part in our ability to respond and act during times of crisis, disaster or a war. Who wins wars? It's people with good equipment, but not necessarily the absolute best equipment, who are able to rout another force. We have seen this time and time again. We read about one tank operator who is able to take out 100 tanks. Why is that person able to use that tool to that ef- fect? Because they are just really, really good at it. "So we need to have better ways of training people so that the first time in war or combat or in a disaster, it is not the first time they have practiced this – they have done this a lot with simula- tion, using their actual tools, and they are really, really good at their tools." As Colonel Hall considers the options to address the army's C4ISR training requirement, Gilkes believes one opportunity might be a collective army and industry experiment akin to the Multinational Experimentation series – a mash up of army re- quirements and industry ideas through seminars and practical ex- periments to identify problems and possible solutions. That, too, might be music to Colonel Hall's ears. Embedded training