Ukraine War Informing Army's Synthetic Training Environment.

• Author: Luckenbaugh, Josh

ORLANDO, Florida--Russia's war against Ukraine--and the resistance to the invasion--has provided the U.S. Army with several observations it could incorporate into its training systems, service officials said.

The Army is currently working on the Synthetic Training Environment, which will "provide a collective, multi-echelon training and mission rehearsal capability for the operational, institutional and self-development training domains" by combining "live, virtual and constructive training environments" into a single platform, according to the Army's Acquisition Support Center website.

The service has outlined four tenets as it builds the STE--it must be efficient, effective, easy to use and encompassing, said Brig. Gen. William Glaser, the director of Army Futures Command's Synthetic Training Environment Cross-Functional Team.

"This is actually the first time that we've looked at a holistic training strategy, from individual soldier, from squad, all the way up to [Army Service Component Commands]," Glaser said during a panel discussion at the National Training and Simulation Association's annual Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference in Orlando. NTSA is an affiliate of the National Defense Industrial Association.

"In the past, a lot of times these systems... were siloed," he said. "We had to achieve some sort of interoperability using interfaces and bridges and so forth, but going forth with a single, holistic, synthetic training environment, we'll achieve a lot of these objectives for our goal."

As the Army undergoes a "transformational change" to modernize and maintain its status as the "dominant land force in the world," the conflict in Ukraine is informing many aspects of these modernization efforts, Glaser said.

Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth recently outlined six objectives the Army of 2030 needs to accomplish, several of which coincided with characteristics of the war in Ukraine, Glaser...