Western navies are seeking the right balance in training types between simulated, synthetic training that can deliver intensity in terms of asset or firepower volume, agains live training which can deliver intensity in terms of real-world action and reaction pressures.
Imagine a scenario where three ships – an aircraft carrier, a destroyer, and a frigate – are deployed at sea together on operations in a task group, but at the same time had in-built capacity onboard to conduct integrated operational training with each other, and with others, using synthetic simulation technologies located in each of their operations rooms.
This is the kind of integrated, at-sea, practical training opportunity many navies are seeking to introduce, together with the supporting technology.
Often in the past, training time and operational time have been divided. Even operational training at sea has been seen as a distinct activity from operational deployment.
In contemporary naval operations, however, several factors are forcing a re-think of this division. First, the lack of sufficient available assets means navies often just do not have enough aircraft, submarines, or surface ships to dedicate exclusively to training activities. Second, the impact of a lack of spare assets is made even more stark by the return of both naval competition around the world and conventional conflict in the Euro-Atlantic theatre (emboldened by the Russo-Ukraine war). Third, the returning requirement for greater presence coupled with the emphasis on high-end naval tasks is increasing the demand for operational availability of naval assets. The UK Royal Navy (RN), for example, is looking to drive surface ship availability from 60 percent to 80 percent, but with a view to increasing asset availability primarily at sea for operational deployments, rather than providing platforms for tasks such as sea training.
The increased focus on operational availability and deployments raises the question of how navies can find sufficient time and capacity for individual, small team, and whole ship training. One of the primary solutions here is to expand the use of simulated training using synthetic technologies.
The use of synthetic technologies is now well-established within navies’ shore training facilities. However, with navies increasingly turning their attention to operations at sea, there is more intense discussion of developing further the use of such simulated training at sea, onboard operational platforms. This would allow platforms to be able to do two things at once: deploy on operations, while simultaneously providing individual, small team, and whole ship training.
The increasingly important role of synthetic training is also underlined by the relatively rapid emergence of new technologies in naval warfare. Technologies like unmanned vehicles – operating in the air (UAVs), on the surface (USVs), and below the surface (UUVs) – are providing increased mass that requires replication through simulation in training. The Russo-Ukraine war has highlighted another factor within the need to increase simulated training to counter the use of mass: there has been significant employment of missiles in the maritime domain, with weapons fired from both sea to land and land to sea. Moreover, technologies including hypersonic missiles are providing an increased threat that is difficult to generate in live training, and so requires replication through simulation.
Thus, simulation clearly can add value in providing training to counter both mass and new technology, creating realism in a way that cannot be reproduced in live training. However, given the return of high-intensity combat at sea during the Russo-Ukraine war (including the sinking of surface ships such as the Russian Navy cruiser Moskva in April 2022), the question remains as to what extent can even the most advanced simulation technologies recreate the conditions of todays combat at sea. Thus, finding the right balance between simulated and real-world training is an increasingly hot topic in naval debates.
Here to Stay
There is no doubt that the use of synthetic technologies for simulated training is here to stay. Such technologies can replicate, for example, operational complexity or ordnance expenditure in a way that live training cannot do; simulated training can also take place against pre-set training parameters, and provide the opportunity to stop, review, and fix actions taken, again in a way that live training cannot do.
Thus, the questions are what type of simulated training to undertake, where to do it (ashore or at sea), and how to best to use such technology to maximise operational effect.
Simply, in developing naval training and supporting operations, “Synthetic training is going to play a big part,” Andy Mitchell, deputy director of Navy Develop – the RN’s capability development sponsor – told the SAE Media Group Maritime Reconnaissance and Surveillance Technology (MRST) conference, held in London on 1-2 February 2023. “Our training will have to become synthetic: whether it’s 90/10, or whether it’s 70/30 – you have to have an element of live training – the majority is going to be synthetic.” Having such synthetic training capacity in place will be critical to supporting operational development, Mitchell added. “We’re going to have a Type 45 destroyer, and a carrier, and a Type 23 frigate together, and we’ll do some synthetic training between the three of them. So, people will be in the ops room of all three ships, and we’ll run a virtual scenario,” Mitchell explained. “We should be doing that all the time,” he added.
Mitchell highlighted two other central developments in the synthetic training world. First, he said, improved at-sea connectivity will be critical in enabling the onboard use of synthetic training technologies. “When we talk about the network, we talk about the training you could have, the tactical development …. [Such] actions want to use the same synthetic environment,” said Mitchell.
Second, noting the parallels between synthetic, simulation training technologies and contemporary technologies used in the computer gaming world, Mitchell said that gamers don’t need pre-training before being able to use a computer game, as in-built tutorials are provided to guide the user. Thus, he argued, training processes prospectively can be made more efficient through using synthetic technologies.
In sum, Mitchell asked, the key question relating to synthetic technologies is “How do we best use them?”
Striking the Balance
The SAE MRST conference provided interesting discussion regarding the balance between live and simulated training, and the role of the latter.
“The threat is developing beyond that which we can reasonably expect to practice and rehearse in a live environment,” Commander Christopher Jones, Commanding Officer of the RN’s 824 Naval Air Squadron, based at Royal Naval Air Station (RNAS) Culdrose, UK told the conference.
824 NAS provides aircrew and engineer training for the Leonardo Merlin Mk 2 helicopter (recently upgraded by Lockheed Martin), which the RN uses for anti-submarine warfare (ASW) and airborne surveillance and control (ASaC) operations.
The 30 helicopters in the RN’s Merlin force are employed to provide ASW and ASaC protection for key UK strategic assets, including its two aircraft carriers that contribute to the UK conventional deterrence, and its submarine-based nuclear deterrent. In the current operational environment, threat levels against these deterrent capabilities have increased, meaning that the capabilities provided by the Merlins are consequently in greater demand. Merlin aircrews rely increasingly on synthetic systems to provide training capacity and to simulate the nature of the threat.
“The only place we can practice and rehearse for high-end threats is in the synthetic environment,” Cdr Jones explained. “I strongly sense [that] where Navy Command and where the maritime warfighters want to take training is to take more [of it] into the synthetic environment.” This is important in offsetting the lack of enabling assets available to conduct live training, but also provides efficiency and accuracy in training capability, he added.
Using synthetic systems does create some challenges for higher-end operational capability training, for example in disciplines like ASW. ASW operations onboard an aircraft, submarine, or surface ship are underpinned by very high classification levels for sensors, communications, and data, making it difficult to replicate such high levels of classification in shore-based synthetic systems.
Training Types
Live, Virtual, and Constructive (LVC) training tools are increasingly seen as the three primary definitions for the different types of training. Live training involves real ships and real sailors. Virtual training involves real sailors operating simulated systems. Constructive training consists of simulated systems being operated by simulated sailors, with real sailors providing inputs into the simulation process without being involved in determining the outcome.
The US Navy (USN) leads the way in developing training across the LVC types, and close allies like the RN will be increasingly keen to engage with the USN in interoperable LVC training, especially to maximise benefit from use of each training type. In turn, to achieve maximum benefit, the increased focus on high-end operations may require increased use of synthetic technologies from amongst the three training types.
However, the increasing focus on interoperability in naval operations can also create challenges when using synthetic training technologies as a multinational training tool. To increase realism, navies are using real-world data in their national training, enhanced for example with the use of artificial intelligence (AI). This raises the question of to what extent countries are prepared to share AI-enhanced data with each other in simulated multinational training scenarios.
While allies are looking to integrate even more closely on simulated training, there is an argument too that integrating with close allies to build high-intensity, real-world capability is best done through live rather than simulated training. Talking to the MRST conference, Captain Bryan Hager – the USN’s Commander Task Force 67, Sigonella NAS, Sicily, Italy (and responsible for operating the USN Boeing Poseidon P-8 maritime patrol aircraft squadron operating there) – said that, in terms of integrating with alliance partners, “I don’t believe that synthetic training is how we’re going to achieve this.”
Interoperability needs operational, rather than simulated, practice, Capt Hager argued. “You have to have the real-world exercises, the real-world opportunities to make the real-world communications in order to actually be able to do this,” he explained. “You can maybe get the fundamentals – ‘blocking and tackling’ – through synthetic training, but to actually be able to operate in the real world, you have to do it real time.”
High-level Interest
The need to integrate simulation-based training to improve operational capacity and outputs is well recognised at the highest levels in Western navies. While many Western navies are starting to re-build force levels alongside continuous efforts to build new capability, the return of state-based rivalry – including conventional conflict at sea – is leading major navies to prepare for combat in the near term, and to fight with the force levels and force structures they have today (not as they aspire for them to be in the longer term).
This in turn is driving such navies to introduce technologies that will revolutionise the way they fight, including in terms of training for that fight. Whether such training is live or simulated, the operational and asset pressure is bringing a clear direction from senior leaders to conduct a greater proportion of training at sea, including simulated activities.
“We will spend less time in schools and less time for education, and more time training on the ships,” Admiral Pierre Vandier, the French Navy’s Chief of Naval Staff, told the inaugural Paris Naval Conference, hosted by the French Navy at the IFRI (French institute for international relations) think-tank in Paris in January. New platforms that are incoming to the fleets will be designed and equipped to meet this requirement, Adm Vandier explained. “Our new ships will be our simulators. It’s on these ships that we will be able to train our people …. The proper courses, the proper training, adapted to what they are actually doing on the ship, and not what they are supposed to do from a school point of view.”
The use of simulation technologies at sea will be integral in enabling navies to improve operational output from current force levels and structures.
“Given the fact that we’re going to fight with what we have, it’s important that we make investments now in those game-changing technologies and training aids that will make us more capable and more lethal. That’s how we improve upon what we have today,” USN Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Admiral Michael Gilday said, at the Paris conference.
Indeed, for the USN, fleet training – including simulated activities – is a key priority for developing warfighting capability and readiness. One key technology programme is the surface training advanced virtual environment combat systems (STAVE-CS) training construct.
STAVE-CS provides individual and unit simulation training capacity, including at the waterfront, not just for combat system operation but for core ship operation tasks including damage control, engineering, navigation, and seamanship.
Talking at the Surface Navy Association (SNA) annual symposium in Arlington, Virginia in January, Vice Admiral Roy Kitchener – Commander of US naval surface forces – discussed the role of STAVE-CS in the context of how training is underpinning efforts across the surface warfare community to ‘get ready’ for warfighting. Here, Vice Adm Kitchener explained, concepts such as STAVE-CS are part of what he referred to as “ready-relevant learning”.
The increasingly complex operating environment and new fleet capabilities that are arriving require a parallel re-alignment of training to meet this new complexity. “We cannot rely on outdated training environments or ‘on the job’ training to produce the knowledge and wherewithal needed for significant readiness growth,” said Vice Adm Kitchener. Instead, the admiral continued, “Sailors do now receive higher quality watch station training with their teams to solve the challenges they’ll face at sea. Investments in STAVE remain a core component of this effort.” Since 2013, the USN has invested over $5.5 billion in courseware, trainers, and simulators, said Vice Adm Kitchener, adding “We will continue that trajectory.”
Vice Adm Kitchener noted too that network architectures onboard ships similarly must be updated to provide capacity to enable sailors to train effectively across the full breadth of the ships’ systems.
Rear Admiral Fred Pyle, the USN’s director Surface Warfare, told the SNA symposium that the STAVE-CS initiative, alongside the wider focus on fleet training wholeness, underpinned professional competency that was key to preparing sailors and building wider readiness in the contemporary naval operating environment. “We’re going to continue to drive hard, and I think as a community we’re leading in that training area,” said Rear Adm Pyle.
Introduced in 2015, STAVE is delivered by the Surface Combat Systems Training Command (SCSTC). According to a USN article published in the wake of the SNA symposium, SCSTC provides system- and platform-specific combat systems training to give sailors the tactical and technical proficiency across the spectrum of operations, with STAVE itself aimed at increasing training quality to deliver more rapid qualification. This latter point again underlines the need to adjust training to ensure its benefits can be seen more quickly at sea. “How we train our warfighters directly impacts combat readiness,” Captain George Kessler, SCSTC’s commodore, said in the statement. “Strategic competition at sea is not an amorphous concept but an everyday reality,” Capt Kessler continued. “Training must pace combat systems modernisation, and therefore SCSTC is adapting and implementing innovative ways to train our future warfighting force, such as delivering STAVE training systems to the waterfront.”
The focus on delivering constructs like STAVE-CS to the waterfront and increasing the amount of training to be done at sea underlines requirement to build operational training capacity at sea to enable greater platform availability.
by Dr. Lee Willett
