Page 97 - Australian Defence Magazine May 2022

MAY 2022 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
SEAPOWER SIMULATION & TRAINING 97
DEFENCE
LEFT: Junior Maritime Warfare Offic rs under instruction in the bridge simulator at HMAS Watson
ABOVE: A Principle Warfare Office at the operations room console during a fleet synthetic training exercise held in the Anzac-class simulator at HMAS Watson
that happen every day out there in the real world. I can just inject that into a simulator whereas I can’t easily replicate it all at sea.”
Synthetic training aids also allow students to progress through their curriculum at their own pace, which reduces wastage in terms of failure rates or training times and pro- vides a better-trained individual at the end of the day.
“You didn’t get the frequency of repetition, the ability to reset or pause the lesson, and talk about it before you got to the assessment phase,” CAPT Robertson adds. “Simulation is just too valuable; and it’s too expensive to go back to the wayweusedtodoit–whichwasayearortwoatseatobe- come qualified after you’ve done your
schoolhouse training.”
HMAS Watson is currently under-
going a seven-year redevelopment pro- gram, which is progressively replacing many of the original buildings with modern, purpose-built facilities and will see training devices for the new classes of surface combatants, such as the Hunter-class frigates, installed.
“WHEN I WENT THROUGH A SIMULATOR IT WAS VALUE-ADDING, NOW IT’S ACTUALLY WHERE
I QUALIFY PEOPLE”
MARITIME WARFARE TRAINING
CAPT Robertson also says he is
working with Australian industry to produce less-sophis- ticated simulators which might be distributed around the Navy’s operating bases and institutions like the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) to provide continuation training and keep skills up to date. It is intended to install the first of these in Darwin and if the program proves suc- cessful, the training devices will be rolled out across the other bases.
“The next step is making sure all our systems are fully- federated. We do have a degree of federation now with our allies and partners and our combat systems but, more im- portantly I want to be able to run exercises with ships that are at sea and alongside – here and with the US and other partners – all happening at the same time and in the same space,” CAPT Robertson says.
In terms of bridge simulators alone, CAPT Robertson is responsible for ten devices at HMAS Watson and a further three at Garden Island in Western Australia.
“When I went through a simulator it was value-adding, now it’s actually where I qualify people,” he explains. “You get your Bridge Watch Certificate in the simulator here. For me to give 60-90 Maritime Warfare Officers the op- portunity to do high-end warfighting against a large fleet and to do that in a condensed period of time is something I can only do in a simulator. I can’t get the frequency or the richness of assets every day off the east coast of Australia, whereas in a simulator I can provide them with a rich train- ing environment – with ships, aircraft and submarines and perhaps complicated by fishing vessels and other things