NATO Moving Toward Interconnected Simulators.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew

LONDON--NATO's 30 members are working toward a day when they can link their simulators and carry out virtual exercises to make training more efficient.

"What we want to do is connect the national synthetic training systems so that we can train together on a daily basis," Robert Siegfried, chair of the NATO modeling and simulation group, said in London at the IT2EC conference, Europe's largest training and simulation trade show.

NATO members see many benefits of using simulators to replace live training. It is more cost efficient, there is less wear and tear on equipment, vehicles and aircraft, and it can be conducted out of the range of spies who want to learn the treaty organization's tactics, techniques and procedures, he said.

"It's not about replacing one with the other. It's about finding the right balance--how much training can you afford to do live and how much training will work in simulated environment?" he said during a panel discussion.

U.S. Army Col. Mark Madden, chief of NATO's modelling and simulation/training technology branch within joint force development, Allied Command Transformation, said "COVID has really opened the eyes [of] senior leaders to the use of technology to train."

Currently, "what NATO uses in their training environments aren't really able to rapidly adapt to the complexities of today's ever changing world. We believe the development of a next-gen simulation is the answer to the needs of today's changing world. That's what we're really targeting," Madden said.

NATO's Distributed Synthetic Training vision calls for a "coalition-wide federation of national synthetic mission training capabilities powered by coherent architectures and security procedures, common standards and training objectives and shared data; delivering regular and frequent access to high quality, secure, immersive operational training opportunities at team, collective, joint and coalition levels," according to Siegfried's presentation.

One glaring inefficiency NATO wants to address is the amount of time it takes to prepare for a multi-national exercise --normally 12 to 18 months, Siegfried said.

For each major exercise, the organization always starts over--scrapping everything from the previous event --and pulling together again the infrastructure, network and security, he said.

The ultimate goal is to drastically reduce the organizational lead time to where a French and German pilot, for example, could agree to jump on their simulators at a...