Page 68 - Australian Defence Magazine November 2022

68 SIMULATION
NOVEMBER 2022 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
To assist industry with this, Army has produced a suite of documents, including the Generic Simulation Architecture (GSimA) and Generic Vehicle Architecture, and will in the future introduce Generic Training and Ranges Architecture (GTRA) and Generic Soldier Architecture documents.
“To truly future-proof you have to have that architecture to enable you to remove things when they become obsolete and move something new in, because technology and threats are constantly changing,” Fallon added.
As an expert on live training, having previously run the US Army’s National Training Centre (NTC) at Fort Irwin in California’s Mojave Desert as a Colonel, Dave Cogdall concurred. “We were really excited when
the Australian Army started talking about a
GTRA from the live piece of it and already
knowing what simulation core was in there
as well,” he said. “Because all of that at some
point will be brought together into the LVC
environment.”
DATA ANALYSIS
Another key tenet of future training systems will be the ability to gather and analyse extremely large amounts of data, to provide both continual enhancements to the training system as well as providing valuable feedback on its effectiveness.
This data enables a force to not only train
but to enable mission rehearsals to be performed and analysed before beginning a live operation.
“On Army’s marksmanship ranges for example, the data is collected but it’s only used to determine the individual’s proficiency,” Dave Fallon said. "But, when you need to get to a collective level of preparedness, how do you assess that you’ve achieved that? You can only do it with data analytics; there’s a huge volume of that work being done in the US. Data analysis is being used on everything and to me that is the next important development.”
RANGE ENHANCEMENTS
Some of the ADF’s training ranges will also require enhancing to allow the effective use of LVC training. This
LEFT: Lockheed Martin’s Integrated Land Target System (ILTS) blends Live, Virtual and Constructive (LVC) training methods
process has reportedly already begun with the provision of target runs in the SWBTA under the Australia-Singapore Military Training Initiative (ASMTI); and the new Greenvale range is being designed from a green-field site as a modern training area.
“A lot of the fixed ranges will essentially remain the same,” Fallon predicts. “Some ranges will see development, some will see business as usual, but with new systems added and some will become ad-hoc ranges. The training outcome requires us to not go
down fixed lanes all the time, you need to be able to go into a training area and operate effectively, so you need to develop a different thinking process around how you set that up.”
In his subsequent career with Lockheed Martin, Dave Cogdall has assisted in the development of a range for a customer in the Middle East, which has 16 lanes, 460 targets and is fully integrated with attack aviation and ground platforms, but modern training is moving away from the fixed lane approach, where axes of approach and the siting of targets can become somewhat predictable.
“It’s not going down lanes anymore,” he said. “It’s manoeuvring in a manoeuvre box. Build their manoeuvre for them and they will decide how they’re going to fight, and that’s exactly what
“THE KEY TO DEVELOPING TRAINING SYSTEMS THAT ARE ‘PLUG AND PLAY’ IS TO DESIGN TRAINING SYSTEMS AND INDIVIDUALELEMENTS THAT CONFORM TO A STANDARD”
for proficiency,
the US Army does at the NTC.”
INTEGRATED LAND TARGET SYSTEM
Defence has a requirement for an Integrated Land Target System (ILTS) to provide effective training and safety. Dave Cogdall said he sees a multi-layered approach, beginning with the development of ‘smart’ and responsive targets (something Lockheed Martin does not do in Australia) and their integration with a standards-based target management system.
“Lockheed Martin has developed what we call the VisualShot target management system, which uses the US FASIT (Future Army System of Integrated Targets) standard,” he explained. “One of the other things that helps us in Australia is that we’ve been delivering digital ranges to the US Army for over ten years and so we have great experience in instrumented ranges and where the realm of the possible lies.”
Both Fallon and Cogdall said that any multi-layered solution would involve several Australian companies, with Lockheed Martin seeing itself in a managing contractor role.
“Our concept of an ILTS is based around not just delivering a product, because someone out there may have a better one,” Cogdall said. “We would analyse that with a third-party who is completely independent of our product line.” ■
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