Publication:Sea Talk Winter 2005/Train like we fight - An introduction to the maritime warfare training system

By CMDR Ralph MacDonald Maritime Warfare Training Systems Officer, HMAS Watson

One of the key training challenges facing modern military organisations is their ability to develop and execute rigorous and repeatable training programs that deliver performance assessment and knowledge transfer in an increasingly sophisticated and time-constrained work environment. To address this challenge the RAN, through the Maritime Warfare Training Systems Office (MWTSO), has been developing a new training methodology and toolset known as the MAritime Training and Evaluation System (MATES).

The vision for MATES is to deliver a comprehensive performance assessment facility to support the full breadth of current and future RAN training requirements. Within the MATES project, the Calytrix Mentor performance assessment tool allows the RAN to plan, collect, fuse and present training data for individuals, teams and joint/coalition task units in order to present an accurate, timely and comprehensive assessment of readiness.

Underpinning the MWTSO vision is the motivation to 'train like we fight'. Where the training environment allows an individual or an entire ship's crew to train in a realistic, ship-wide, fully integrated training event concurrently across all mission areas. This means that combat, navigation, aviation, engineering, damage control and medical teams all train together simultaneously, in the same scenario. For example, it means that a simulated missile hit from a hostile aircraft will result in simulated fires, flooding, and loss of support services such as power and water. It means vital electronic, weapons and manoeuvring systems will be affected until actions are made. And finally be able to extend training into large scale joint and coalition training events.

Over the last 24 months our Navy, through the Maritime Warfare Training System Office (MWTSO) at HMAS Watson, Calytrix Technologies and Novonics Oceania, has been developing a proof-of-concept application called Calytrix Mentor.

Mentor is intended to support the planning, conduct and assessment phases of individual and collective training activities within the overarching Maritime Warfare Training System (MWTS) program.

MWTS is a concept used to describe the suite of integrated live, virtual and constructive simulations, live exercises, live firing, learning methods and supporting IT architecture being acquired to support integrated individual and team training within the Navy .

Team training

Team training for the Australian maritime force is currently conducted along traditional lines. Our current team training capability is largely manual and subjective, and therefore it is costly and has limited effectiveness. Current practices alone do not adequately prepare combat units for modern warfare or military support operations, nor do they allow Navy to objectively measure readiness prior to commitment to war fighting or military support operations.

The Service has identified training leaders and sailors to overcome the rigours of battle as its greatest responsibility. To be effective, maritime warfare training must be both rigorous and realistic, through the application of synthetic environments that faithfully represent the operational environment. As far as possible, training should incorporate the enduring features of operations - enemy action combined with the effects of weather, climate and terrain, danger, friction, chaos and uncertainty.The MWTS's mission is to train individuals, teams, total platforms (TP), task units (TU), task groups (TG) and task forces (TF) as combined arms teams for force-on-force combat in a realistic joint environment.

The MWTS mission may be executed by a number of organisations within the RAN including Sea Training Group (STG) and the Maritime Warfare Training Group (MWTG). A secondary MWTS mission is to conduct operational readiness evaluation and testing. A tertiary mission is to support Navy's mobilisation planning and force development activities.

The primary role of MWTS is to provide a realistic training environment in which to conduct warlike activities in order to train, assess and evaluate the RAN's ability to achieve specified mission essential tasks (MET) as directed by the Maritime Commander or Joint TF Commander.

Mentor and MWTS

Within the MWTS, Mentor has been developed to provide performance and capability readiness assessment to the overarching program. It is used to assess performance and for developing training exercises, recording training results and generating the required reports and facilitated debriefs needed to conduct effective training. The goals of Mentor are to capture the whole training life cycle, from planning to execution through to reporting, in a rigorous, repeatable and standardised manner.

In order to achieve these goals Mentor has been designed to:

• Deliver standardised assessment;
• Provide a mechanism to allow continuous post-event training ;
• Reduce the total cost and time required to run training while increasing ship proficiency;
• Significantly reduce the time to do the paperwork;
• Make the data collected useful in analysis;
• Increase the visibility and reliability of ship readiness assessments; and
• Maximize the effectiveness of On Board Training Systems (OBTS) as they come on-line.

Motivation

Mentor was developed in conjunction with the Navy to support the MWTSO's ongoing Maritime Training And Evaluation System (MATES) and Team Training Framework (TTF) programs, which form the basis of the MWTS. The goal of Mentor is to deliver performance based training, after action review (AAR) and analysis capabilities to the training cycle. This has been achieved by introducing structure, rigor and repeatability into the training processes by:

• Automating the development and planning of repeatable and rigorous training packages;
• Enabling rapid and assisted training session debriefs;
• Enabling the distribution of deployable training packages to on-board training systems (OBTS) for personnel and crew training in the field; and
• Facilitating rigorous capability readiness assessment.

Mentor's ability to produce timely and accurate training reports, supports a facilitated debrief training philosophy which actively encourages student participation in the debrief process and is based on the principle that "learning" is much more effective when students realise and recognize ways to improve their own performance. In a facilitated debrief, the instructor guides a professional discussion in which every student can participate. The debrief stimulates discussion. Results, reference material and replays can be called up during the discussion to confirm or challenge participant perceptions of their performance.

In addition to facilitated debriefs, Mentor provides tools, reports and analysis forperformance assessment, trend analysis, capability readiness, course and system assessments; and student examinations.

Vision for the MWTS across RAN

To achieve the vision, the performance assessment subsystem will need to collect, fuse and present data from various repositories and databases (doctrine, tactics, orders, and historic performance baselines), from subjective instructor feedback collected via PDAs; and from 'ground truth' analysis of live data from ship systems and synthetic environments (as well as OBTS as it comes on-line) in order to present an accurate, timely and comprehensive assessment of an individual, team or joint/coalition unit's readiness.

The MWTS and its assessment tools will need to support all aspects of the training activities, starting at the individual student level at one end of the spectrum and progressing through to large joint coalition training exercises conducted concurrently around the globe. The MWTS will need to report directly to individual students, teams and teaching units, all the way up to Maritime Command (MC).

The MWTS will allow the RAN to extend its training into larger-scale multi-platform/multi-service joint, coalition and Network Centric Warfare (NCW) activities.

Training methods and Mentor

The MWTS is designed around three phases of training and knowledge management; namely planning, conduct and assessment.

At the centre of the Mentor process is the structured definition, measurement and reporting of performance objectives.

For example, a naval air warfare officer (AWO) within a team training exercise might be assessed on a set of reusable objectives during a pre-defined training scenario. The AWO may be measured on his or her ability to "Track air contacts", "Report air contacts" and "Control aircraft in an AW role" during a set enemy aircraft flyover scenario. Against each of these training objectives one or more measures of effectiveness (MOE) would be assessed. To ensure a consistent and defendable assessment model, Mentor allows both subjective and objective measurements to be made.

Subjective and objective

Subjective measurements are usually entered using a PDA, a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or directly into Mentor by the instructor. By their very nature, subjective measures can be influenced by human factors and can be difficult to standardise between exercises and instructors.

On the other hand, 'ground truth' or objective measures are handled via software plug-ins that measure and record data directly off the simulation systems or platform. Building from the previous AWO example, using this mechanism it is possible to write a Mentor plug-in to automatically extract and score data from an OBTS to determine the actual distance between two entities (the ship and the enemy aircraft in this case) and automatically score the AWO based on the rules of engagement.

By way of validation, the plug-in may also generate a number of graphical artefacts showing the actual distances maintained during the whole scenario. There are no inherent limitations to what a plug-in can be programmed to achieve given appropriate access to training sub-systems or their data.

By combining both 'ground truth' objective and instructor-rated subjective measures into the assessment processes, Mentor is able to ensure a consistent and rigorous approach to performance and readiness assessment.

Mentor also enables the user to manage students, build reusable training vignettes, apply weighted scoring models and plan training scenarios.

When the exercise is being conducted, Mentor collects and fuses data from the various objective and subjective sources to calculate performance. The reporting engine then allows the user to create various reports and analytical packs from either a top-down perspective (i.e. from the task unit or a ship level down) or from a bottom-up perspective (i.e. from an individual's performance and how it impacted their team's and ship's performance - the student up). The template-driven reporting engine provides a very flexible mechanism to structure and present reports depending on the target audience.

Trials so far

Over the past 24 months the Calytrix Mentor has been successfully trialed in a number of environments:

1. In a multi-national coalition training exercise through the CReaMS program;

2. In a controlled training environment with Command Team Training at HMAS Watson; and

3. In a live damage control training environment on-board ship with the RAN's Sea Training Group.

In each scenario Mentor has grown to support these challenges. Mentor continues to evolve to support the overarching goals of the RAN.