Live, Virtual and Constructive Training: What’s Next?

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This transcript was generated with the assistance of AI. Please report inconsistencies to comms@afa.org.

Tobias Naegele:

All right, good morning. This panel is titled, Live, Virtual, Constructive training. What’s next? We’ve got a terrific group of experts here, left to right. We have Colonel slip Smith five, oh, fifth combat training group commander, who’s a late addition to our to our panel, and a really good one. Next up, we have Jenn Serra, General Manager of simulation and training solutions at Collins aerospace, which is an RTX company, and then Iain Ferguson is Chief Technology Officer for Air Force and combatant commands at SAIC. He’s also an Air Force veteran. So I thought that we would start slip with you. You’re actually the only person here who actually does Live, Virtual and constructive all at the same time. Tell us about what you do at the five. Oh, fifth. And I have one request of all of you, and that is one acronym, per sentence.

Col. Robert S. “Slip” Smith:

Thanks Tobias, I appreciate it again. I’m honored to be here. Thank you. So I think I want to start with a problem statement that kind of underpins what we’re really trying to get after in the five, oh fifth, command and control wing writ large, joint coalition readiness at the for the pacing threat must be underpinned or underwritten by operational violence environments at scope, scale and speed of relevance, live range limitations, scarcity, lack of mass in the DoD inventory, and challenges in replicating things like contested logistics and really challenging our command and control infrastructures in an exclusively live environment does not meet our our training demands, and really that drives increasing investment in the Virtual, Constructive environments. So we can have a fully synthetic and blended training environment for the battle space for major theater war. Now that problem statement within, you know, really drove within the five, oh, fifth combat training group in our community control wing and our portfolio, things that we’ve done for quite a few years, whether it be at our distributed Mission Operations Center at Kirtland operating virtual flag, which is a joint and coalition training environment utilizing multiple five I and US networks, 31 systems, 15 plus locations, along with our AOC and a four focus,

Tobias Naegele:

You’re really blowing it on the acronym.

Col. Robert S. “Slip” Smith:

Yeah, I’ll try better air operations center and Air Force forces replication via the Blue Flag exercise. And you know, we were really challenged, in concert with the United States Warfare Center to help develop some concept of operations for an exercise called Bamboo Eagle. Many of you probably have heard of that and and what we really wanted to do is take all of the goodness of what we do at Red Flag through live fly events, and then utilize a virtual and constructive wrap around to really create the scope and scale of what major theater war will really be like for not only us members, but for our coalition Five Eye partners. And so that’s really what we’ve been trying to get after day to day. And look forward to answering some of your questions on that. Thanks.

Tobias Naegele:

Great. So I want to kind of switch gears for just a moment and talk about, you know, simulation for to most people is, you know, really like video games on steroids. But the reality is kids who have grown up with really high fidelity games may be a little disappointed when they actually see what what their training devices are. So this is kind of a multi part question. I’ll start with you. Jen is, how much is realism? Is the right amount of realism?

Jenn Serra:

So that’s a really fantastic question, and probably something that I think everybody up here and probably in the audience can relate to. I would say that, just like a lot of the words that go with training today, simulation is kind of taking on a little bit of a life of its own. We see really beautiful pictures in the unreal game engines and all of those wonderful things that come through, and the products and the different systems that we put into the field. But then there’s the piece of it that I think slip was trying to get at, is it’s the high fidelity models that really get in there and allow the war fighter to experience what they’re going to see in the platform when they sit in that simulator. And getting to the point. Where, I mean, the absolute best we can absolutely do is when they sit in their simulator, if that platforms got a bug, a light or something, that’s going to go off, because, hey, we’re going to get there. The simulator does the same thing. And that’s really where we’re shooting for on that, that high fidelity piece, and then partnered with it, we’re going to make it look really great with some great images, some great feelings that they have, trying to make sure that the contested environment is well modeled. It’s it’s just really great where things are going, and we’re going to keep rising to that challenge, bringing those two together.

Tobias Naegele:

Okay, Iain, so you pick up on that, but talk a little bit about the trade offs, because realism has different pieces to it, right?

Iain Ferguson: 

Yeah, absolutely, and that is really the challenge, especially for our requirements developers and our procures. How do we develop the right amount of simulation at the right cost? What we can afford in that as well? One of the things that we at SAIC, with our work in the modeling and sim community, have really tried to do is help our customers start with the end in mind. And really what that starts with in a training environment is, what is the learning objective? What is the thing that we want to accomplish for the student to train them? And that gets into things like learning engineering and competency modeling, and how do we understand what it is we want the student to come out of that training with, and then we back into the device or the method of training from that and that allows us to really work across different tiers of fidelity and consequently, cost and and sometimes we actually will find that lower fidelity may actually improve the learning outcome, allowing a student to really focus in on the thing that you want them to learn from that event. Can you give us an example of that? One of the examples was given to me by one of our cognitive scientists. Was talking about teaching softball to students and and when she was teaching softball, and a lot of times you think of it, it’s got to be realistic. It’s got to be the whole pitch coming at you, and they actually used different methods of of blocking out other information so that this the softball player that was learning to hit, could actually the only information given to them was the actual pitch that was came at them. So they could then focus on exactly how to read the pitch and the spin of the ball, and all the other things I don’t know about softball, but that by actually giving them less information, they were able to really focus in on what they were trying to teach, that hand eye connection for the softball player. So plenty of tactical applications for that same type of approach to learning.

Tobias Naegele:

So all three of you have some connection. Have touched the joint simulation environment. The Air Force and the Navy are spending billions on the joint simulation environment. So JSE is sort of where things are going, and it’s a it does everything it does really well, but it does not integrate with the live so talk a little bit about JSE and how JSE fits into the future of Live, Virtual, Constructive and slip. I’ll let you start because what you were telling me yesterday, I thought was really relevant.

Col. Robert S. “Slip” Smith:

You know, the Jedi Nellis joint Integrated Test and Training Center Nellis, which is host the Air Force’s JSC platform right now. I mean, it’s about 200 yards from my from my group, so we go over there, and the JSC is an amazing, amazing environment generator for really high fidelity fifth generation, plus tactics, techniques and procedures, and so, you know, that is the future. There is no doubt. What I would say is right now, because of certain limitations on distributing that high fidelity physics based modeling to not only joint coalition. And then, you know, outside of night, one type combat training is that we see that the things that we are doing in the Virtual, Constructive, more low fidelity environment, it’s a complimentary approach to what the JSC brings to the Air Force and the the DoD writ large. So when you’re talking scope and scale, all platforms, all of our five eye partners, plus that are going to be fighting with us if we do have to execute combat operations in a major theater war, we’ve got to be able to train our forces in both so the investment in JSC absolutely required, but also invest investments in the other, lower fidelity, larger scale, and then trying to bridge those together in the future. That is, that is exactly where I think we need to go,

Tobias Naegele:

Okay, jump in.

Jenn Serra:

Okay. I was gonna say, um, I think the JSC, I agree with everything you said. I think you. What JSC is doing for training is really fantastic. I think what it what it’s doing is it is bringing to light how training and thinking of training early really gets at the heart of, what do we really need to do? What are those different devices to what Iain was saying earlier? What’s the right fidelity in the right place for the right cost? And it’s a great place for industry to partner with the US government as they’re working through it, because we are so excited to help solve the problem, and I really think that we have a lot to offer. So from a Collins perspective, we’re taking a step back and saying, How can we help you increase the fidelity here? How can we help you take the concurrency of the platform that you’re going for and get that into the right device, the right size, the right fidelity, to make sure that we can take advantage of all those training opportunities that before war fighters were sitting stagnant on deployment, unable to do those, those tactics, and then at the great at the great time. We’re also trying to accelerate solutions to the war fighters. So if we think of the JSC early and how that simulation can be pulled to the left in the training environment, or the development of a platform, it’s just going to be so much more seamless as the war fighter goes and sits in their simulator and they practice those different things, and then they get into the platform, and it’s going to be really positive training for them as they work in those environments. So I’m very excited for the JC. Yeah, I was just going

Tobias Naegele:
So one of the challenges that you you face in a in any training environment is that you know things change. New capabilities come along, new you know us, capabilities come along, but also new tactics emerge, new weapons belonging to the adversary emerge, and you’ve got to keep up with that cycle and start. We’ll come back this way for this talk about the speed and the challenges of getting those new models in and making sure that they actually do what they’re supposed to do.

Tobias Naegele:
Is that, is that, like the Red Force injection that you’re talking about, or is,

Iain Ferguson: 

I’m sorry, that could be an upgraded capability to the Blue Force that we might need to do. And then, of course, yeah, definitely designing your simulation systems so that they have the flexibility of, you know, integrating new red threats, or whatever it might be that really needs to be a part of the overall architecture of the system, so that you can, you can rapidly change the parameters of a red threat. If you intelligence reports, there’s a new capability, or a change in the capability, or add a new one when it shows up or becomes relevant to your fight.

Jenn Serra:

So I would say it’s all about being at the table to help solve the problem is probably one of the biggest things that we have to keep working to do together. There’s a lot of really great things, you know, as industry works really closely to solve and bring forward solutions. We can do it faster if we work together. Understand what the you know, what the war fighters trying to solve, what each one of the different events are trying to solve with the simulators trying to do to Iain’s point, we can understand, hey, we’re headed into a new environment. We need to look at, you know, weather services and all the. Other great things that you don’t think about when you think about in a platform, per se, but in the JSC, it becomes very real about flying in a similar environment and then also concurrency with the with the platforms as well. The more that we’re sitting alongside each one of those platforms, bringing in the different challenges that they’re solving, the faster we can get that simulator upgraded and we can be right alongside you, roll out a block of a of a platform, and we want to roll out the next, the exact same block of the simulator alongside it. And there’s a lot of collaboration that takes place to do that. And I would say that there’s definitely a need to sit at the table and solve that problem together. Is going to be how it’s how it can be done. It’s pretty amazing what we can solve when we’re sitting there saying solving the same problem at problem at the same time.

Tobias Naegele:
So slip you, you’ve been doing, you’ve been at the five, oh, fifth for three years, almost two years, almost two years. And with bamboo Eagle, you kind of pushed the edge in terms of how you were, how much you were, kind of try to integrate and press now you’re going to be that’s you’re sort of getting ready, I believe, for the next iteration, which will be a major exercise this year, talk about what broke, what your problems were, and how, where, what you’ve what you’ve been Doing to fix the breakage.

Col. Robert S. “Slip” Smith:

No, I appreciate that question. The one thing that our Warfare Center leadership has done a really good and in my boss, Colonel Ryan Haight, at the five of fifth command and control wing, is, is really as we were developing bamboo Eagle, is we’re not. We’re encouraged to fail. We know we’re going to fail. We’re we know, when we’re talking about executing agile combat employment, that it’s it’s difficult business. How do you command and control forces from the operational level all the way down to the tactical edge, with new units of action coming online. Wing Commanders that have mission generation forces that they have to launch, sometimes with, with with with an ATO or I did an acronym, again, with air tasking orders or orders that that may be cut off and not updated. And so we have been really challenging ourselves that we created an environment where we go five days straight, 24/7, environment. And so we can really, especially from a command and control perspective, you know, in a live fly environment where you have two to three hour live pulse and you come back and debrief, you can’t really understand what the consequences of decisions are over time, and then also seeing those, those decisions, those command and control decisions, seen all the way to a logical conclusion, bamboo eagle is one of the only environments and exercises that provides that type of platform. And so we, you know, we get a lot of of lessons learned, and we have, you know, we’ve really focused on capturing those, utilizing option operational research analysts to really provide that feedback. And then, because we’re on a two cycle a year, all the the red flag, attack one and TAC three iterations, we can rapidly iterate and improve the CONOPS for the next iteration. So we have already, are, we are wrapping up the last iteration of bamboo, legal, the lessons learned, and we’re already incorporating those into the planning for the next event that will happen in August. What’s

Tobias Naegele:

What’s your single biggest need? If you could look to your left and say, Hey guys, this is what I need. What would that be? Yeah,

Col. Robert S. “Slip” Smith:

We always talk about multi layer security, and that’s where things like JSC having high fidelity fit Gen plus physics based environments, but being able to bring that down and incorporate that type of training into fourth and third gen networks, coalition networks and and being able to really incorporate that into the unit of action, Con Ops, to be able To execute ace operations in in the Indo Pacific Theater, that’s what we need. We need to be able to share that information to go from the high fidelity to the low fidelity, and having, you know, a full immersive battle space, synthetic and blended experience.

Iain Ferguson: 

Yeah, yeah. I was gonna say that we see that as well in a lot of our work too. This multi level security challenge for simulation is very, very important. It’s important that we can train with our coalition partners without losing the fidelity of the training for our enforcement train how we’re going to exactly. One of the interesting things about that is, I would argue that in some ways, the simulation in. Environment is harder than real life. In real life, if you go and fly with coalition partners, there’s certain things you may expose or not expose to them, and you make certain decisions, but you don’t have to recreate that. The effects all the way down into, say, a simulation engine. And you can have potentially multiple simulation engines that now have to agree how those across different security levels. And there’s and we could talk all day just about the levels of complexity that that can introduce into a simulation environment, as well as just the problem of the data itself and what you’re protecting, as well as the inference of the data to the simulations, as well as the humans and and so it gets really interesting, really fast. However, I would add this, if we solve it in the simulation world, we are breaking down the barriers to solving it in the real world as well. And so as we define the things we can, share the things we can as we simulate it and work through these challenges, we are preparing to go to war with our allies and partners, and that’s super important, and I think it’s well worth the effort that we, that we go after it.

Tobias Naegele:

So when we’re when we’re simulating these different security levels, we it’s not just saying, I’m not going to send you this information. It’s I have to create whatever is happening on the other side of that equation, right? Potentially,

Iain Ferguson: 

Potentially, yes.

Jenn Serra:

Yeah, I was gonna say, I’d like to add, I mean, I 100% agree. I think it really does go back to the sitting down and understanding how we’re going to use it, and what the what the event with the exercise, with the war fighter is going to experience. Because multiple levels of security is a vast, broad term, and there’s lots of different ways to solve that problem. And I would say one of the biggest challenges that I know my team and I work on every day is we do have live training in one of our p6 product, and then we also have these great opportunities with the joint simulation environment to do it. And one of the biggest barriers to break down, like Iain is talking about, is really getting to the heart of what is it that we need to do, even starting from the simplest thing in the simulator and then going all the way up to the most complex thing, and trying to break down those barriers every step of the way up, definitely one of the biggest challenges that we probably need to overcome together.

Tobias Naegele:

So, Iain you said something interesting about if we can solve it with the in the simulation environment, then it will be able to solve it in real life. JSE started as an operational test environment, right? It was a model designed to prove that the systems could do what they were supposed to do, because they couldn’t really be exposed in the outside world. So you’ve got this kind of feathering in both directions. It seems like, does the physics make that? Does the physics of the models make that harder or easier?

Iain Ferguson: 

I think it’s probably neither. I think it just really depends, kind of to Jen’s point. It depends on what problems you’re going after from the multi level security perspective, are you? Are you trying to certainly, if you have a high fidelity physics based simulation environment, you’ve got a lot of data, and you’ve got other challenges, like latency that are now in how do I actually then manage this data and maintain the necessary low latency to get the necessary training objectives done and and if I’m sharing with partners, I’m probably sharing over distances, which means now I have other challenges, more latency, right exactly, and then also might have other networks that one of the important things about multi level security is it’s a full stack problem. It’s it. We have to think about sharing it across to other people’s networks as well, and what your network, you know, trust boundaries between different networks, and how that will fit into the equation and and so there’s definitely a lot of technical challenges, regardless of which kind of environment you go after which is why I think it’s that’s actually kind of good, because then you can use some of these low fidelity environments to really knock down a lot of these technical challenges and be ready to then apply them at higher levels. I would say a couple things up front that you got to do to get after. One is, we’ve just got to get towards a zero trust, data centric approach to modeling and simulation, and that is, that is going to lay the foundation for how we’re going to solve it at scale, and so that just starting with that approach.

Tobias Naegele:

So, you know, for people who are not IT people, yeah, talk a little bit about zero trust and what that what that means, because it’s counterintuitive, yeah,

Iain Ferguson: 

I’ll say that from two perspectives. One is zero trust in general, is the idea that I want to make, I don’t want to make a network or an IT system, whatever it might be, where I assume that I’ve protected the wall around my network, but everything inside of it is trusted as long as I protect the wall. We’ve found that that’s really just not an effective way to protect you could think of it as like the security guards at. A major sporting event, right? They’re checking your bags as you’re going in the door, and then everything inside is just castle and moat. Yeah, Castle and moat? Yes, exactly. Whereas really want more of like, what zero trust is, let’s take more of like, a secret service agent perspective. We don’t trust anybody. We’re always on the lookout. We’re always watching all the time to protect the thing that we value the most within our network, which usually is our data, right? We want to protect that. And so we’re going to use all a number of different principles to apply that for that. But starting with the idea that I just have a assume entry, assume you can’t trust anything inside the network, and then protect what’s important to you within it. That’s really, if you will, a simple way to describe the zero trust. Digital trust. However, taking that then with the data centric approach says, Well, I really need to develop a way to have an enterprise level data layer across my simulation that I can then provide both access to that data based on who’s getting the data from a role perspective, but also the attributes of that data that might reveal whether it’s the security level of an individual piece of data, as opposed to saying this entire network is cleared secret, no foreign or secret collateral, but rather getting down to the individual attributes of the individual pieces of data. And now you’ve got options when it comes to multi level security. And the other thing I might add, for our simulation, folks who are out there is, I think there’s a natural tendency in the community of modeling and simulation to see ourselves as unicorns. And like every one of our networks is special. It was built for a special purpose. And and that is true, they have very specific mission functions that are that drive very specific IT requirements, and that’s very important. But we also got to understand that enterprise IT and mission it have the same last name. It’s it. And so we got to bring in the principles that we are learning that we use both in commercial enterprise, it in federal in federal enterprise, it the same security and cyber approaches that we use in those systems can apply to our especially our complex simulation environments.

Tobias Naegele:
All right, so, slip, did you have any idea when you started this that we were going to be talking about just it,

Col. Robert S. “Slip” Smith:

It’s, it’s half my world right now.

Tobias Naegele:

So the transition from between that realistic training your customers, people you’re working with, mostly are consumers of this, right? They’re trying to learn, but you’re navigating the the world between them and and these guys trying to solve solve problems. Are the people on the in in your role? Are you equipped to do that? And is there how much learning curve is there when you land in a job like yours, to suddenly find, okay, well, I’m really interested in latency between this level of security and that level of security, and how do I overcome it?

Col. Robert S. “Slip” Smith:

Yeah, that’s a yes, it takes time, especially if you don’t have a engineering background. But you know, I will say, especially, you know, part of my portfolio is the shadow Operations Center at Nellis. And you know what we really get after is experimentation, mostly of the ABMS portfolio

Tobias Naegele:
and advanced battle, advanced battle management system, yes, sir.

Col. Robert S. “Slip” Smith:

And you know, the timing was perfect as we were building these type of things like bamboo Eagle, our senior leadership has also encouraged us is we need to get kit and capability to our in the hands of our war fighters as fast as possible. So they have accepted a little bit of risk in saying, Hey, we’re going to bring some of these technologies, some of these software packets, and we’re going to incorporate those into the exercise environment. Get those in the hands of our war fighter. Now we have different type of Capstone events within the shadow operations center that allows us to experiment and get feedback and refined with industry to be able to do that, but, but when we’re talking about a lot of these technical challenges and types of software and hardware that we need to get into the hands of, specifically our command and control enterprise as we’re, as we’re, you know, revolutionizing that, I think we have a really good infrastructure and to be able to Do that. And we could always use more resources, manpower funding, just like everybody else. But I think, you know, there has been a really big emphasis from our senior leadership on command and control, because we understand that whoever command and controls this fight is. You know, most efficiently, especially when we’re talking about executing something like agile combat employment, will be the most successful. And so there’s been a huge emphasis, and with that, has been advocacy and the appropriate round of funding.

Tobias Naegele:

Jen, Iain talked about unicorns. And really, when you talk about unicorns, I think you’re you’re talking about silos or systems that don’t talk well to each other. And there’s a lot of talk about open systems or open architecture, but there’s also natural business incentives not to. How do you wrestle with, with that within, within your business, and also you to be effective, you’ve got to integrate with stuff that Iain’s doing anyway, right? So you’re navigating two tracks.

Jenn Serra:

I think it really still very much comes down to the understanding the problem and working through it, right? So the joint simulation environment, and working really closely with the groups who are, who are leading, that has been really important. Exactly to your point, right? There’s always going to be those things that industry wants to bring forward, needs to bring forward, because those are the things that were, were the experts in right? We’re bringing forward capabilities. We’re bringing forward those Capstone opportunities with the software in order to try to fail and get the information back that says, Okay, great. We’re going to go make these changes together, along with helping the speed to the war fighter. I mean, we really need to keep that at the forefront. As Iain has said many times, the cost efficiency to get there, to get there quickly with the right product. It might not be the product that we the industry are really pushing to get to but it might be good enough, and we might learn a lot through it. And that collaboration, through those the bamboo Eagle events and other ones, they’re just they’re so important for the learning there and and for us to push forward, to keep bringing that into our investments, into our road maps, into our simulations, into making sure that we don’t become those silos. It’s very easy to do, and I think we have to hold ourselves accountable, even in the industry, to say, hey, why don’t we partner together and work? You’ve got something really great. I’ve got something I could offer, and it’s going to better this event.

Tobias Naegele:

So good enough is also another good enough is often not good enough for somebody, right? So all the people at the table, you’ve got to decide what’s good enough for everybody, or how complicated is that discussion.

Jenn Serra:

I think it really goes back to the communication. I think the day to day of the Hey slip, this is what I’m going to bring this is what it’s going to do. I know these are going to be the areas that it’s not going to good. Well, we’re going to bring that in the next one. You know, we need feedback here so we can get better. It’s, it’s, it’s a little bit of a vulnerability to work together to figure out what that really looks like and how far we can take it. I don’t know if you have a, yeah,

Iain Ferguson: 

I think that’s a, that’s a good answer. Jen, it definitely is about working together. I think, going back to my previous comment about learning objective, right? Ultimately, we have to keep that in mind. The issue is, what do we need to teach our students, to prepare them for combat? And if we, if we start with that and then we work backwards, we’re going to make trades. We’re never going to have enough. We’re always going to wish we had another hour to train, another hour to prep for our check rides, or whatever it might be. We’ve all been there and so but, but we’ll make those trades smartly between the fundamentals of cost, schedule and performance that we all live with and and we’ll do that as a team with a with an open communication path to do that

Tobias Naegele:
really well said so yesterday, in his keynote, General Alvin put up some kind of surprising. There are statistics that I think many people are familiar with, but we don’t. We’re not used to seeing the chief of staff say, Hey, we’ve got some readiness holes that we haven’t taken care of. One of those was the inability to have to accomplish the flying hour program. So last time the Air Force actually executed the whole flying hour program, I think was 2017 simulation obviously plays into that, and something like JSE allows you to train things that you could not train without it. But it’s not, right. It’s also got to be good enough, right? It’s not, it’s not going to be everything. If, if we could do more, where would, what would we do more of slip? I’ll start with you. I mean, you so you’ve got both the I mean, because command and control requires the people to be controlled and commanded, but also for the people in the in the operation center to follow all the tracks and see what’s there.

Col. Robert S. “Slip” Smith:

Yeah, it’s, it’s, I think it’s, it’s very basic. It’s, it’s, we need more reps and sets from, you know, we, we kind of. Classify the type of this type of training at the you know, 100 200 300 400 level, right? So bamboo Eagle, think of that as a 400 level mash, calm and above organized exercise that. And then the difference between four and 300 is really just scope and scale.

Tobias Naegele:

And then from scope and scale, when you say scope and scale, tell us what you mean by that. Yeah.

Col. Robert S. “Slip” Smith:

So major theater war, the amount of assets, the amount of coalition and joint partners, those, that’s what I mean by scope and scale. So bamboo Eagle would be a 400 level where virtual flag, which is smaller, maybe doesn’t have a live component. It’s just virtual and constructive, but it’s still larger scale with joint coalition members. That’s about a 300 level. And then you have at the 102 100 level, that is wing and below, kind of organized reps and sets. You know, that is where, at all levels, we need more opportunities, and we need to continuously improve the opportunities that we provide our Wing Commanders and below, and then, of course, our joint coalition war fighters at large. And so how do we do that? Well, we’ve got to, you know, sometimes we have too many, maybe if we have too many exercises that aren’t focused and people don’t have the bandwidth to actually plan and execute those. So we need to be smart about how we organize and then, you know, collaborate and then execute together. But at the same time, we’ve got to just like that iterative approach of making those scenarios more combat, realistic and really stressing the system and in being able to fail. And when we fail, you know, be okay with that, learn from that, and then keep getting back on and executing.

Tobias Naegele:

And so when you talking about failing, you’re not talking about the system failing. You’re talking about the trainees. The wing comes in and they’ve got to execute. And maybe it doesn’t work.

Col. Robert S. “Slip” Smith:

Sure, you know, we may execute in all domain, combat power, pulse, post operations, and maybe the objectives are not met. Maybe, maybe it is software, a software system that we are integrated into our air operations center that we think works in major theater war type stressing environments, and it doesn’t, because now we have at least created an exercise environment to where we can actually get to that point exercise in the past, and I’m sure people in the crowd have experienced this a lot of times the operational command and control level, we usually hand wave that, or we white force that, or we replicate that. You know, the things that we need to continue to do that bamboo eagle is really trying to get after is we’ve got to do that for real with the actual air operations centers, the real Air Force forces, Air Force Staffs that are going to be supporting the war fighters, you know, down Echelon and above echelon, we’ve got to exercise that with the real training audiences, and then, you know, then get that feedback and see if our TTPs are valid, technique, tech, team, tactics, techniques and procedures.

Tobias Naegele:

You know, I only said one, so you’re free to have 1% that’s fine.

Iain Ferguson: 

Yeah, if I could put my ex warfighter hat on for a minute to answer your question, when I remember back to both being a formal training school instructor, being a combat operator and and and a trainer, I think that one of the things that makes our airmen and guardians so special is their ability to adapt to unique and changing situations. What we thought we were going to experience isn’t what we experience, and we have to make the decisions to change and adapt in that environment. And so if I were to like to see our war fighters have one more thing, it’s more flexibility in the training, more opportunity for them to see different types of presentations of the problems, and more opportunity to make their brains practice that skill that has made us a successful war fighting force for so long. So one of the ways that plays out is in things like white forces properly resourced white forces to develop scenarios that’s different from what they saw last week. There have been times we’ve all gone to the SIM and it looks exactly like it did last year when we did our currency sim. And if we fall into a little bit of complacency on that, right? No, we want to be able to have new scenarios, new situations, new problems to solve. Sometimes that’s not, that’s not new tech. That just may be the work of putting in the training, planning and prep to enable that kind of experience for our war fighters. I think that’s what’s especially going to be important as we think about things like agile combat employment, we’re asking airmen to do jobs that they were never formally trained for, and asking them to think about problems that they may never have seen before, and that flexibility and adaptable and problem solving mindsets. To be as important as our ability to, you know, point rounds down range. So

Tobias Naegele:

I’m curious, and we’re going to run out of time in a minute. But something you said, maybe want to ask about the opportunity to use AI to do that. Right? AI is especially the large language models are by definition there, they don’t give you the same answer every time. So is, can we leverage that capability to do what you’re talking about? And that’s for both of you. Jen, too, you’re nodding. Either one of you can jump in, and the other can follow.

Jenn Serra:

I think, absolutely, I think it’s actually our duty to continue to look for ways to do that, because every time we take the time to put somebody in a simulator, we need to learn from what did they do? Well, what did they struggle with? There’s also even a piece of it, you know, we have to think about what’s the best use of their time and how to get them trained quickly. Maybe they don’t need to go through all of the different levels of the training, because they we can, we can look at, based on the last you know, 50 students who came before them when they had this type of results, we could go ahead and accelerate them through the training, because some things just we could capture through it. We’ve got to think about that.

Tobias Naegele:

We’ve also got to think about tailoring the training, really, to the to the individual. Yeah, absolutely right, exactly.

Jenn Serra:

We’ve also, because time is money, right? The longer the we put them in those simulators and hold them to things that just really aren’t beneficial. It’s not really doing the justice to the student as well as to where we need them to get I think we also need to think about it from the simulation perspective too, not only the training perspective in the curriculum, we’ve got to think about the simulators also taking that if we’ve got to have something in there that says, Okay, the last couple times this happened, we can give them this other experience. That’s world, you know, real world, or other things like that. We’ve got to constantly be looking for those ways to grow what we’re offering and to challenge the students that we’re putting through our simulators.

Iain Ferguson: 

Yeah, great answer. Jen, that was really good. I would just add to that, yes, we need to be using these new technologies, absolutely, but we will not get there effectively if we don’t solve the data problem first. That means the right architectures of our simulators, the right data collected on our students while they’re going through the simulators, or whatever training event it might be, could be, even in their academics before they go to the simulator. So we tailor their simulator based on what we experience from them, or the ability to adapt based on what we learn about our training and so, but we got to solve the data problem, so really build that into our plan.

Tobias Naegele:
Okay, we’re going to finish with with, with the data problem this you guys have been great, and you’ve you’ve taken curveballs that I didn’t tell you I was going to ask, so I appreciate that. Maybe a little round of applause for our panel. Thank you very much. Applause.