Future soldier
The RAF said it plans to conduct 80% of its training in a simulated environment by 2040.
The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) is confronting these enduring problems as it tries to manage the training of personnel across the armed forces. In the RAF, trainee pilots are facing extended times in ‘holdover’, the period when one training course has finished and another has yet to start. In conjunction, the government lacks the capacity for training at the point of demand – new, mobile firing range sites are being procured to meet the growing demand. It appears that alternative training tools are used, in this case, to plug holes in the defence estate rather than to optimise training as an end in itself. The former Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Mike Wigston, explained to the previous Defence Select Committee in February 2023 that the service faced a major training backlog after the Covid-19 crisis. Subsequently, Wigston made the case for synthetics as a shining solution to these lingering problems. He even left open the possibility that synthetics could replace the Hawk T2 training aircraft, which approaches the end of its life cycle in 2040. This prospect resurfaced once again, in January 2024, when the Committee grilled British industry over the potential future training gap. At the time, Simon Barnes, group managing director air, BAE Systems, was similarly open-ended, suggesting that there will be a “transformation” in flight training in terms of the “balance between live and synthetic”. However, simulated training offers far more than the ability to compensate the armed forces with a cheap, on-demand alternative to real-world training. While it is true that military training in the synthetic environment offers the ability to improve minute aspects of flying, this should not disrupt efforts to overcome the government’s inability to manage the time, cost and logistics of real-world flying and training requirements.
Data and repetition
The value of simulation training lies, also, in the data and analytics captured from repeated use cases. “The more data you have, the better your insights are going to be,” Niall Campion, managing director, VRAI, told Global Defence Technology.
A start-up that arms instructors and trainees with actionable insight based on extensive simulation training datasets through its flagship product Heat, VRAI has worked with the RAF since 2020. The company has captured more than 900 million data points from 39 active-duty pilots, and this has coloured its growing picture of British airmanship. However, this is not enough to generate insight, Campion stated. This is why air forces must be able to draw on decades of simulation training data to shape the optimal performance of trainee pilots. “In defence, the biggest bottleneck at the moment is access to these datasets,” he added.
“The analogy I like to use is ChatGPT or the large language models that are being used at the moment. They’re trained on billions of pages of text. In fact, some would say they’re trained on all the internet. There is no equivalent dataset in defence, for obvious reasons (security, among others), but the main reason is that no one is capturing it,” Campion explained. The RAF has been running simulations for the past 30 years. While it previously used stand-alone simulators for each aircraft type, the service now creates networks of distributed synthetic multi-domain integration training through the Gladiator capability and the Air Battlespace Training Centre. These assets enable realistic large force, multinational exercises in the synthetic environment. Yet in all that time, the RAF is left with no data from what would have been enough to inform any
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