Page 106 - North Atlantic and Nordic Defense

North European and North Atlantic Defense: The Challenges Return

Second, the major SIMEX exercises are crafted with an eye to recording actions and events so that failures
are visible and crewmembers take those lessons learned forward as peer competition underscores success and
failure in the process of learning from simulated combat operations.

The SIMEX exercises are a yearly event and were described as such as follows:

“SIMEX is a yearly program where the crews go through an iteration of training with the most experienced
people we have.
"The simulator operators are the people from 404 squadron at the Wing.

"The crews are operating on their own as they would on a mission and they're getting tasks, which are very
realistic.

"They are operating in a realistic combat environment right down from the messaging format with regard to
how they brief and right up until the end; and they're real time missions, they're very long.
“At the end of SIMEX they get an assessment of how they did.

"That gives the commander here a picture of what is the state of affairs with the personnel and its
performance levels.

"Because we do it every year the crews are on an upward learning curve. It's an interesting program that has
maintained and improved ASW skills for us, for the fleet.”
The focus is on training for a complex, dynamic and fluid combat environment.

As Lt. Col. Bruno Baker put it:

“When I started in the fleet the synthetic environment provided training based on a number of canned
scenarios.

"These were cold war based scenarios that you saw repeatedly as you operated.

"They told you what scenario it was, you just went in your drawer and you pulled out your notes from your
earlier training and experience and you just re briefed whatever you briefed every time you did this.

"The scenario was always the same, with some minor changes, but you always knew what you were getting
into.

"It became repetitive it became a procedure trainer.

“Now this is a different ball game altogether.
"The people crafting the scenarios are gifted at coming up with relevant current scenarios that aren't
procedure trainers, but are making our crews problem solvers.

“It's about training your crew that is capable of operating in a complex environment and being able to make
decisions in such an environment.

"It is moving beyond being alone and unafraid to becoming an operational decision maker within a coalition
in a 21st century maritime threat environment.”

Second Line of Defense

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