Training & simulation
“Ensuring that connectivity and data exploitation are at the heart of the new system will ensure flexibility for the future and provide the widest range of scenarios,” Chalmers explains.
Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) will also be key technologies. VR creates a fully simulated artificial environment in which almost any scenario can be modelled. AR overlays data onto real-world situations to enhance the information an individual soldier can access or interact with.
“Soldiers in training will benefit from this immersive, complex, adversarial and realistic environment, which will evolve to keep pace with the changing character of warfare.”
“Project Synthetics will replace in-service collective training capabilities, including those that come into service 2020–25,” says Chalmers. “The totality generates a synthetic operating environment. Soldiers in training will benefit from this immersive, complex, adversarial and realistic environment, which will evolve to keep pace with the changing character of warfare. Such a training environment will encourage and empower commanders to innovate and experiment, while also supporting and inspiring a competitive and adaptive combat ethos.” The single synthetic environment will provide multi-domain representation of the operating environment. It will be supported by a common constructive simulation to provide a consistent representation of entities within the synthetic world. Together, they will realistically represent effects across the political, military, economic, social, information, infrastructure, physical environment (PMESII-PT) spectrum.
“Blended reality technology will be exploited for virtual systems to generate immersion, replicating operational environments, capabilities, and effects not possible in live training,” says Chalmers. “Fixed sites will support battlegroup and brigade training. Instrumentation of live personnel, platforms and equipment, blended with virtual systems, will support realistic and challenging live training while providing objective data for training
Blended reality technology helps replicate operational environments that aren’t possible in live training.
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management and evaluation.” “VR is one of the pathfinder projects within the synthetics scope,” Chalmers adds. “We do not envisage mass VR capability but an incorporation of the technology to
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supplement training. The aspiration is that the FCTS 2025 will deliver single synthetic environment capability for thousands of users simultaneously, therefore could exercise at significant scale, with a blend of live, virtual and constructive (LVC) training.” One key area of projects within CTTP will be A3ES, which will deliver credible and dynamic forces and actors that represent the Future Operating Environment. A3ES comprises, firstly, ‘audiences’, to encapsulate the frictions of mass opinion and consensus, replicating relationships between groups and individual people and that delivers complexity beyond cause-effect. Secondly, it focuses on ‘actors’, representing individuals or groups from within the audience who directly exert influence on an operation, whether supportive, neutral or hostile. Thirdly, it features ‘adversaries’ posing hostile threats and seeking to prevent a force from achieving its objectives. Also present will be ‘enemies’ opposing the force with armed lethal means. The training system will be able to represent regular, irregular and hybrid enemy threats, including chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) threats. Finally, a specialist service will provide support and guidance to both live players and exercise control. Together, these five factors will allow training to be scaled up in complexity in any environment or terrain.
“A3ES will be scalable, configurable and consistent across the LVC environments,” Chalmers notes. “It will test combat, combat support and combat service support capabilities to facilitate Army-wide collective training outcomes, rotational unit training objectives and the continual development of adaptive leaders.” Overall, CTTP, and the FCTS for which it lays the ground, represent the most ambitious modernisation project in living memory for the British Army, and will pave the way for a new era of co-operation between defence forces and industry. ●
Sergeant Rupert Frere / British Army
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