Effective Training for Joint Fires and Air-Land Integration

Inzpire Limited has delivered the first Exercise Steel Dragon of 2018 to the Royal Air Force’s Air Battlespace Training Centre (ABTC), housed at RAF Waddington. 

The four-week Exercise, which delivers Joint Fires and Air-Land Integration training to the Royal Artillery, includes a five-day exercise repeated four times over a month-long period. The first day of each iteration allows for a series of briefings and capability updates, followed by four days of intensive training, with scenario complexity gradually increasing across the week. Training in a synthetic environment allows the safe integration of a range of surface-launched weapon effects with fast jets, attack helicopters and Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition, and Reconnaissance (ISTAR) assets.

Inzpire works directly alongside military role players to deliver the exercise, with 15 people in total delivering briefs, missions and debriefs on a daily basis. In a demonstration of the Whole Force Approach in action, Inzpire and their military colleagues are supported by QinetiQ, Plexsys and Boeing, who provide the operating system and software support which allows the exercises to run. Approximately half of Inzpire’s yearly exercise delivery at the ABTC is taken up by training the Army in Joint Fires. To ensure the learning environment is optimised, Inzpire’s experts regularly liaise with the Army front line to ensure that training objectives and procedures are both current and relevant.

“It is very satisfying to see our training audiences improve through the week. We work hard to expose areas of weakness in their processes to allow for development and constantly strive to make them better as a team than they are when they arrive,” observed Richard Tattersall, ABTC Operations Director for Inzpire. 

Tim Mahon