Vanguard Magazine

T TRAINING together and it offers many advantages over other locations. CTC will continue to evolve. We will have to react to diffi cult resource pressures while making sure we put the priority on the most important elements of training, but I see opportunities here for the army going forward. QOne of those is urban operation training centres? There is a specifi c project within Directorate of Land Require- ments that will deliver capability down the road. We already have an iterative capability, but we will do more in the way of simula- tion. Nothing would be better than having a sergeant in a pla- toon, having done a building clearance, be able to go back and see on video how they did so he can debrief his soldiers on the spot. It's an important project because it's really training leadership in any scenario. It's developing the cognitive capacity of soldiers to make and take rapid decisions in stressful situations. QIs diffi cult problem-solving a key to keeping your young leaders engaged? Do you face a challenge on that front? It is going to be a challenge, no doubt about it. There's a genera- tional shift and we need to be aware of that and adapt. I think we un- derstand this reality. Every generation has a trademark and some of the young folk coming in are fearless. They talk openly about doing something for a while, gaining experience – they are not the genera- tion that joins a company for 30 to 35 years. So we will have to fi nd ways of challenging young people to develop that leadership. We have done a great job grooming junior leaders. We have a warrant offi cer and sergeant cadre, the heart of our army, that doesn't walk in the shadow of any of our allies. And we've done that by giving them a lot of responsibility and challenging them day in and day out. QThe introduction of more technology in training might help with that. Do you have the resources at the moment to do that? People sometimes think you default to simulation when you shrink budgets. In fact, the paradigm is the reverse: you want to make sure you have the money to invest in simulation because it enables you to be so much more effi cient and effective. Simulation allows us to use resources in a much smarter way. With simulation, we've seen the lines between live and virtual training blur. We do that in command post exercises but we may bring it down a notch where battle group and brigade commanders in the fi eld don't necessarily see that the group they are interacting with over the Internet and in video teleconferences isn't actually there on the ground; rather, it's a virtual representation of the operating environment. Those are tremendous opportunities to inject complexity into scenarios in ways that are not easy replicated in a live environment. It has to be integrated, though. It has to become that true system of systems. Maybe in the past we have acquired things on an ad hoc basis. We need to integrate that into a strategy and we need to think beyond the army as just land combat power, to think about it in the air-land environment and also littoral work with the navy. 16 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2012 www.vanguardcanada.com QDoes that strategy exist today? Elements of the strategy exist. I can't predict how things will unfold but from an army perspective we're certainly moving that way. QIs the longer-term virtual training strategy joint? I think so. A lot of JOINTEX is going to be virtual. We're going to have enabling us the naval task group off the coast of B.C., the air force working out of Cold Lake, army folk in Maple Resolve but also in other parts of the country. But we'll all be "virtually" in the same environment. So it's there and we will only get better. QAs you update professional development, are you identifying necessary skills sets that need to be incorporated or enhanced, such as cyber? I'm less involved on the cyber side but I would argue that in 2005 our approach to intelligence structures, infl uence activities and counter IED didn't exist. I sent the fi rst engineer to a neighbour- ing province in Afghanistan to look at the route clearance package that the Americans were deploying to inform us back in Canada. We didn't have heavy lift helicopters and all the tactics, techniques and procedures that go along with those. We still have work to do in terms of integrating those, and we're still going through lessons learned and ensuring that we instil some of those, but we have demonstrated an ability to quickly deploy new skills. The staff college program hasn't really changed. The army op- erations course is one of our successes. Our ability to plan and work through problems is very important but that's been an it- erative process; it started 10 years ago when we created an army learning process and a culture that allows us to question ourselves more openly with our subordinates. That culture of recognizing we always have something to learn and therefore we always have reason to review what we have done and work to become better as a team, that's so important. Staff College plays a big role in that. QYou are working toward a larger concept of Army 2021. Is that hampered by current budget reductions? There are so many phenomenal technological capabilities young people will expect that we need to incorporate into our system. We need a collaborative environment that leverages technology that ex- ploits greater use of simulation. It may seem counterintuitive, what with budget reductions, but now is precisely the time to modernize. We need to do that. We need to be able to accept risk. Some of that is counter to prevailing ways of thinking. But as operating environ- ments become more complex, we have to continue to improve our soldiers' cognitive capacity and ability to react. Generations change. Today's teenagers are wired differently, their brains are tuned to mul- titasking and if we are going to leverage the capacity they bring, we need to look at different ways to train. And that means you have to invest. We don't man systems, we train soldiers and the most impor- tant weapon system they've got is the space between their ears; we need to be able to develop that, wherever they are.

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