›Simulation Based Training - the Key to Military Operational Capability

Military planners and policy makers, face an increasingly unpredictable world which poses an unprecedented range of potential conflicts. Threats come from state and non-state actors and emerge from breakdown and chaos in which there are no identifiable foes.

Countering such threats requires conceptual and operational agility that demands high levels of operational capability, flexibility and readiness, including acting in concert with ad-hoc alliance partners. However, as military spending comes under increasing pressure, live training, particularly large scale and collective training, becomes increasingly unachievable. It is essential that training exploits the enormous capability of the latest generations of platforms, weapons, and systems, so that forces can rely on quality.

Proven and emerging technologies now offer the capability to conduct much, if not most, operational training in simulators and synthetic networked environments, and there are many high quality training systems achieving excellent results. However, while there are often-stated aspirations for synthetic training, there is little overall vision and direction in bringing these together. If the potential for synthetic training is to be realized, a more collective and coherent approach is needed.

This Conference will address the following topics:
- Synthetic Training as part of capability and readiness: UK, European and NATO.
- Military decision making and judgemental training
- The Live/Synthetic Balance training
- Mobile simulation: taking training to deployed forces.
- Training device capability and fidelity; how good is good enough?
- Training simulator instructors.
- What can the military learn from civil flight crew standards and training methods
- Simulator specification, accreditation, and regulation
- SMS, TEM, CRM, TRM
- Collective and networked training:
- Identifying training objectives and measuring achievement.
- Involving higher and lower levels non-military players
- Security
- Engineering and Maintenance training – role of simulation