Military Technology 05/2021

“That in and of itself is not absolutely ground-breaking, but it’s what it enables and provides,” Jez Milne, BAE’s Head of Operational Training, and a former deputy commander of the RAF’s TYPHOON Force, told the panel. “At the moment, what the guys and girls are used to is training the way they fight, and that’s no way to do business in the future. What these devices will provide is an ability to ... actually rewrite the way you train in the first place […] Imagine a pilot who doesn’t do terribly well against ... a particular tactic […] We can metricate where he went wrong and why he went wrong. We can come up with an AI-derived specific training syllabus to address that, and a particular style of training that will get after it, and we can then take that on to where we start to say: ‘Maybe the tactic ... was wrong in the first place.’ That gives us genuine human-machine, tactical AI-driven training that is in a completely different league to anything we could even imagine at the moment.” “Whenever we talk about technology, we’re talking about enabling human beings to do better with that technology,” explained Defence Science and Technology’s Hashim Hassam, a science advisor on people and training within the RAF’s Air Command. “We should build on that to use the opportunity to rebuild training alongside the synthetic environ- ment, and that’s really what we’re looking at doing with GLADIATOR and moving forward.” There are limits, of course, and some live flying is not just essential but also desirable. Getting the blend right is not just about technology and military capability, but about culture and people, too. “You don’t join the Air Force, or the Fleet Air Arm or the Army Air Corps, to fly in a simulator,” said Air Commodore David Bradshaw, First Assistant Chief of Staff at HQ Air Command, responsible for delivery of combat air programmes. “You absolutely need that live element. But I joined to be the best possible pilot I could be, and I see this as a way of really profes- sionalising our training system - so that when the chips are down and you go into battle, then your reactions are instinctive. The ideal environment to do that is not when you’ve got 30 minutes of gas in the jet and you just [try] to do it as best you can - it’s to do it again and again and again in the simulation, until you’ve absolutely nailed it.” Technical capability and economic reality are the main limiting factors in almost every attempt to improve military technology. But the Royal Air Force is finding that these factors need not only be exerting a downward pressure on systems and aspirations. Within the Boeing-provided GLADIATOR training system, increasing techni- cal capability and the need to limit the amount of live flying that takes place when training pilots to operate increasingly sophsticated and expensive-to-fly platforms is pushing the service towards goals that, even five years ago, seemed unrealistic. As recently as 2017, the RAF’s aspiration was for a 50/50 ratio of syn- thetic to live training in its fast-jet fleets. This was viewed as a significant ambition, driven in part by necessity - there are some systems on new aircraft (such as the F-35) which it will be impossible to train in the live enviroment in the UK’s relatively restricted airspace - and limited by what the service believed was realistically achievable. But greater capability in synthetic training systems is allowing the force to set far more ambitious targets. By the time the service launched ASTRA, described as its “campaign to build the next-generation RAF,” in December 2020, the view appears to have become that the vast majority of training can be conducted in the virtual environment. And, by doing so, the quality of the piloting that can be achieved will be higher, because the approach will be significantly improved. “I’m looking at this quite excitedly,” Jake Scott, Boeing Defense UK’s Training Services Manager, whose experience prior to joining the compa- ny included 20 years in the RAF, told a panel on next-generation training during DSEI 2021 in London in September. “If we’re trying to get to an aspirational goal of 80/20, 90/10 - as far as we can go ... and how that then shifts and affects the flight-training pipeline coming into it, I think it’s hugely opportunistic.” The award of the first two parts of a three-part Typhoon Future Synthetic Training contract were announced the day before DSEI began. The £220 million ( € 257 million) deal will see BAE Systems deliver ten ad- vanced TYPHOON simulators to the RAF - six at RAF Coningsby and four at Lossiemouth - with a further six squadron-level trainers and two deployable trainers also included. With a professional writing background that covers issues as diverse as cricket, music and crime fiction, Angus Batey has strong credibility in aerospace and C4ISR issues as well. He will become a regular contributor to Mönch publications. Angus Batey Technology and Imagination Driving RAF Training Concepts The Eurofighter TYPHOON is a powerful and complex aircraft to master – and its stablemate the F-35 even more so. Hence the training regimes for the aircrew that operate them need to be as cutting-edge – and as effective – as possible. (Photo: BAE Systems) 70 · MT 5/2021 Special Feature