Alliance is the Engine for Training Transformation

For the delivery of ACTS, the British Army needs a strategic training partner that, alongside the army’s training establishment, can transform on the move and continue to innovate, keeping pace with both advances in technology and the continuing transmutation of the threat.

Alliance, a consortium under prime contractor Lockheed Martin, is focused on delivering exactly that.

In addressing the ACTS requirement, Alliance comprises a collaboration of best-in-field companies – large, medium and small, traditional and non-traditional – that fully understand the ‘now’ while envisioning a path to the future. 

Smart Training

4GD has already been providing British armed forces with dismounted tactical urban training facilities for over five years.

The Royal Marines have benefitted from 4GD’s SimWall, a system of rapidly reconfigurable modular panels, at the Commando Training Centre (CTCRM) at Lympstone since 2018, while 16 Air Assault Brigade at Colchester have been training with a 4GD Level 2 SmartFacility (consisting of SimWall and 4GAV, a unique special effects and video monitoring system) since January 2021 and received 4GD SimStriker robotic targets in 2023. Under the Urban Fighting Skills House programme Whinny Hill, Catterick Training Area’s urban operations training facility, will receive SimWall and 4GAV in the spring of 2024.

The SmartFacility is an instrumented, immersive physical/virtual training environment that merges live training with the synthetic environment, yet 4GD’s current systems are already pre-enabled for further augmentation. 4GD’s SimStriker targets, for example, can already react to light, movement or sound, speak in multiple languages and shoot back, but soon they will be automated through artificial intelligence to react entirely independently of control systems.

Despite its sophistication the SmartFacility remains easy to set up and reconfigure, minimising set-up times and maximising time on the range, while 4GD’s Deployable SimWall System will allow the SmartFacility’s capabilities to be taken to wherever they are needed. A key strength of 4GD’s technology is that it already collects extensive volumes of high-fidelity data from the individual, the SimStriker targets and the environment, providing unrivalled opportunities for this data to be exploited by other Alliance partners.

Moving forward, with systems such as 4GD’s ACIES synthetic wrap and the ability to insert the more combined elements of urban combat into its SmartFacilities (such as indirect fires and complex communications), 4GD is increasingly blurring the lines between the physical and the virtual. The result is the delivery of a holistic LVC training environment that can be successively upscaled to multiple locations, both real and virtual.

And crucially, as an agile SME, 4GD can be extremely responsive in delivering what its customers need: a quality crucial to delivering on the ACTS requirement.

Effective Effects

Having developed and installed the British Army’s Area Weapons Effects Simulator (AWES) under a contract awarded in 1998, Cubic Defence UK continues to provide this key capability. In April 2023 Cubic was awarded a contract extension to its support work for AWES and there are options to take this work out to 2029, meaning that the company will continue providing world-class combined arms manoeuvre training for the British Army for some years to come.

AWES and its integrated Tactical Engagement Systems simulate large-scale force-on-force combat engagements, including the effects of direct and indirect fire, mines, air-delivered munitions and even Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear effects. AWES also tracks and monitors the actions and positions of more than 1,400 individual soldiers and 250 vehicles using GPS technology, recording ‘hits’, ‘kills’ and ‘near misses’ of small-arms fire with Cubic’s Instrumentable Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System (I-MILES) technology. 

Cubic also offers a turnkey Military Operations on Urban Terrain (MOUT) live training solution that replicates the tactical complexities unique to urban terrain, while its synthetic wrap technology, known as SCOPIC, adds virtual and constructive training layers, allowing troops to train with platforms and deliver effects that would otherwise be precluded by cost, scarcity or safety.

Cubic’s LVC training solutions are both scalable and deployable, meaning the army can train like it fights from sub-unit to battalion level at the point of need, whether a home base, combat training centre, or austere location.

Cubic’s training systems are also intrinsically designed to provide insightful analytics, empowering military forces to accelerate their combat readiness through dynamic performance assessment and comprehensive after-action reviews.

Moreover, as the world’s foremost provider of air combat training systems, Cubic know how to scale across domains, addressing complex requirements from small units to multi-echelon and even multi-national training. Cubic’s platforms seamlessly integrate with diverse military systems and technologies, allowing forces from different services or even nations to train together. This proven interoperability, which allows the inclusion of maritime, air and other effects from live or virtual platforms, ensures that joint training exercises can be executed without the challenges of system integration, enabling smoother and more effective collective training.

Expeditionary Instrumentation

For 20 years Ravenswood Solutions has been a leading provider of mobile instrumented training, testing and performance assessment for the US military. 

The Ravenswood-developed Mobile Ground Truth System (MGTS) – a rapidly deployable, GPS-based, ruggedly extensible, instrumented live training system – has been deployed in 26 locations worldwide. MGTS tracks vehicles and participants at the individual level, allowing exercise leaders to monitor events in real time and replay scenarios in instrumented after-action reviews (I-AARs). The system can be scaled to specific needs, while Ravenwood’s state-of-the-art exercise control software, ORION, is capable of integrating any sensor inputs across the live, virtual, and constructive domains, tracking up to 65,000 entities with unrivalled fidelity.

MGTS is based on, and fully interoperable with, the FlexTrain live instrumented training system that Ravenswood developed in support of the US Army National Guard.

Beyond the United States, however, Ravenswood is already providing its services to the British Army: in March 2020 the UK MoD awarded Ravenswood a five-year contract to provide instrumentation, weapon simulators, battlefield effects and I-AARs for the British Army’s Tactical Engagement Simulation in Kenya (TESIK) programme.

A vital enabler among Ravenswood’s capabilities is the ease and efficiency with which its technology can be applied. For example, while previous-generation instrumentation systems took up to a day to fully instrument a vehicle for an exercise, Ravenswood’s equipment can achieve this in 30 minutes, so when troops deploy to train that’s precisely what they do; minimal time is lost in preparation for manoeuvres.

Ravenswood can convert urban areas as small as 1 km² or open terrain as large as 6,000 km² into ultra-realistic simulation environments that subject operators to the sights and sounds of combat, security or natural disaster scenarios, with each event tailored to the client’s unique objectives.

The company’s after-action reviews – complete with video, audio, and GPS-synchronised playback – have been hailed by users as an invaluable and irreplaceable learning and assessment tool.

Ravenswood’s instrumentation technology, meanwhile, goes beyond providing just training data; interfaces with vehicle buses capture engine and automotive data that is vital to understanding how the equipment itself is performing, as well as the troops operating it.

Intrinsic to the Ravenwood ethos – and a vital asset for ACTS – is the company’s ability to look beyond the application of technology and to understand precisely how that technology can transform training to a whole new level.

No Project Too Large

From the decade-long project to redevelop Battersea Power Station to its work on more than 20 international airports, Turner & Townsend has project managed some of the world’s most complex capital investment programmes and projects.

The company’s work at the UK’s Heathrow Airport is a case in point where, such was the scale of the programme, Turner & Townsend was called in to drive performance, create confidence in investment outcomes and maximise resource efficiency with an integrated digital solution to manage the airport’s multi-billion-pound capital delivery programme.

With 75 years of programme, project and cost management experience across the full spectrum of industries, Turner & Townsend knows well enough that – beyond technology, digitalisation and its exploitation – it’s people, processes and culture that drive innovation, delivery and excellence. It is this experience that the company is increasingly bringing to the world of defence – and in particular provides Alliance with the solid foundation for its success.

Complex programmes such as ACTS demand transparency and understanding between strategic decision makers, both between those delivering the service and those operating with it. In recognising how to implement this culture, Turner & Townsend knows how to focus on sharing and collectively managing methodology and risk; nothing will ever be someone else’s problem. 

In 2021, meanwhile, Turner & Townsend was recognised with a Gold award by the Ministry of Defence’s Employer Recognition Scheme for its continuous support for the armed forces community – proving once again that the company’s continued investment in people and relationships remains at the heart of its success.

The Power of Data

In KX and Splunk the Alliance consortium has two companies that, while non-traditional entities in the defence domain, are masters at the art of data exploitation. Their involvement is built on the proposition that data is a strategic tool that is currently not being fully exploited but, when truly harnessed, can deliver an integrated, digitalised system that can rapidly deliver tailored, transformational training to forces anywhere around the globe.

KX’s mission is to accelerate the speed of data and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven innovation, enabling its customers to transform into real-time, intelligent enterprises. As such, KX is uniquely positioned to provide the total data capture and analytics solution needed for ACTS.

KX’s market-leading time series and vector database technologies are proven in high-stakes production environments, including financial services, healthcare, aerospace and Formula One. Moreover, its vector-native technology is extremely well suited for the high-performance data management and analytics required to run AI and machine learning workloads, which are central to Alliance’s goal of developing user-specific training.

The successful delivery of next-generation training relies on the combined analysis of varied and disparate types of data to generate insights that can be used to rapidly develop and deliver tailored training programmes. Whether real-time data from the field and synthetic environments or historical data from previous training exercises and other contextual datasets, the unique technical expertise and real-world experience of KX is critical to Alliance delivering a new standard in military training.

Splunk, meanwhile, is a powerful platform that uses machine learning and AI to create insights that have previously never been possible. 

Splunk efficiently ingests streaming data, constantly correlating and analysing it in real time to drive multiple outcomes. It also provides powerful data visualisation tools that can help commanders and trainees gain insights into various aspects of their training – such as the status of equipment, communication effectiveness, and overall mission progress – to evaluate performance, identify areas for improvement, and make informed decisions for future training sessions.

Splunk can monitor and analyse the performance and health of applications and systems, optimising resources and ensuring that simulations and virtual environments are running smoothly, particularly when they may be reliant on disparate networks.

Splunk is also used as a security information and event management tool, monitoring and analysing security events across a network. In military training scenarios this can also enhance the realism of exercises by simulating and responding to cyber threats.

The Splunk platform is proven in mission-critical situations and is the trusted technology for the world’s leading organisations. In fact, 90 of the FTSE 100 companies, as well as the US DoD, UK MoD and many other public-sector customers, use Splunk to prevent major issues, ensure security and accelerate transformation.

A Prime Among Equals

The overall Alliance effort, of course, is being overseen by Lockheed Martin. As one of the world’s largest defence companies, Lockheed Martin’s most obvious calling card is its prime contractorship of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter programme: the largest ever international combat aircraft programme, which has already delivered more than 980 F-35s to the air forces of 17 countries, including the UK’s own Joint Force Lightning.

The soldiers of the British Army, meanwhile, will already be familiar with Lockheed Martin equipment, from the Combined Arms Tactical Trainer (CATT) to the M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System.

While Lockheed Martin is nominally the prime contractor in the Alliance endeavour, in its role as overall integrator the company is overseeing a living governance model that provides the true freedom and flexibility that the companies of the Alliance partnership require to deliver to the very utmost of their capabilities.

In short, the Alliance partnership has the currency, the expertise and the vision to transform the British Army’s collective training – and to keep transforming it, responding in true alignment with the army as it modernises to face challenges that may yet be beyond the horizon.

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