What is involved in your role at Calian? 

I am the managing director of the Calian’s learning technologies division, which provides integrated training and data exploitation solutions for military training around the world. My team develops Calian’s software systems that enable interoperability at the data level between any system included in the military training environment. In essence, we provide the tools to create custom, end-to-end, immersive training environments that connect training and command and control systems together to deliver training experiences and challenges to prepare military forces for operations.  

Our system-agnostic integration framework allows us to design products capable of meeting any interoperability challenge between various software systems. Our products are designed to enable interoperability across any system. Our products can be adapted to support other environments where interoperability is a problem. We have proven this already in the voice communications domain integrating a plethora of different voice audio systems to interoperate with each other seamlessly.  

How does Calian’s simulation-based “train-as-you-fight” experience provide maximum realism? 

Simulation-based training prepares militaries for the challenges they will face on operations by presenting military personnel and units with a realistic, immersive experience. Leveraging the latest lessons learned from contemporary battlefields and operations, simulation-based training seeks to provide the most accurate reflection of the kinds of challenges military units will face.  

Because the integrated training environment uses the client’s simulation systems to stimulate effects or responses in the client’s command-and-control systems, the training audience trains as they would normally fight using their own familiar tools. The resulting “train-as-you-fight” experience provides maximum learning and realism to prepare forces for modern operations anywhere in the world.  

In Calian’s designed-and-driven training environments, the latest tactics, techniques and approaches observed in contemporary operating environments—including the use of commercially sourced unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and drones, electronic warfare, information operations, small-group tactics, or anything else you can imagine—can be modelled and simulated to provide maximum train-as-you-fight realism. 

How is Calian’s VCCI an advanced interoperability solution for military training and analysis? 

Our Virtual Command and Control Interface (VCCI) is our flagship interoperability product and is 100 per cent Canadian designed and developed.  VCCI is a world-leading system-agnostic product that enables the required interoperability between systems within the integrated training environment. In simple terms, VCCI supports military users by mediating data between simulators and command-and-control applications without which their tactics, techniques, procedures, strategies, planning and wargaming efforts could not be realistically modelled or represented.  

Using a systems-agnostic approach, we integrate simulation and operational systems into a single immersive training environment. VCCI seamlessly integrates simulation data and command-and-control applications, building integrated synthetic environments for complex, multi-agency, multinational training. That is why from concept to execution to after-action review, Calian’s training tools deliver a superior training experience. 

We showcased VCCI at The NATO CA2X2 (Computer Assisted Analysis, Exercise, Experimentation), an event where military, industry, academia, study groups and subject matter experts meet yearly to discuss modelling and simulation (M&S)-related topics. It is the premiere international discussion environment for the design, planning and usage of M&S for defence-related purposes. 

How do Calian’s software systems accommodate multinational military group training? 

The digital training environments we create can be globally dispersed. Therefore, we can accommodate large groups from different countries altogether, or from countries working with a training audience located in different time zones. This favours large joint or multinational coalition level exercises conducted anywhere in the world. The ability to train in large groups offers a significant cost saving compared to training the same large group in a live environment out in the field with a lot more equipment. Even more cost savings are realized if training audiences need to travel with equipment to join an exercise.   

A live training environment is also very complex. By having the whole environment digitized for training, you can augment live training exercises with carefully selected virtual force elements or components to supplement or replace elements that rarely show up at the live exercises because of cost or availability constraints. With our integrated simulated training environments, we can bridge the best from all domains and train any force element size or composition. 

What is Calian’s recently launched audio distribution service (ADS)? 

We launched our audio distribution service this summer and it is currently being used in Latvia with the Canadian Forces. ADS was spun out of VCCI as a separate product to focus on all matters related to voice audio systems interoperability. The requirement initially came from the training domain where we needed to collect all the audio from the command-and-control environment to supplement exercise after-action reviews with more evidence-based data. While VCCI had always been able to collect command-and-control audio, it made more sense to have a product focus almost exclusively on audio systems, so ADS was born. Leveraging existing partnerships, ADS can convert speech to text and can translate numerous languages.  In the near future, we will look to incorporate AI. 

Note that in parallel, Calian is providing direct support to exercise development and delivery for Canadian and NATO forces deployed to Latvia. Calian will deliver brigade and multinational division-level command post exercises focusing on interoperability between NATO partners. ADS is a perfect fit to provide multinational communications interoperability and de facto cross-domain training experience that reflects the complexity of the Baltic operating environment.  

How important is R&D for the Calian learning solutions team? 

First, within our team we have developers working across all software systems on what would qualify as near-term innovations or product enhancements. Second, we have innovation road maps for all our key products and devote considerable effort to pursue those as aggressively as possible. Finally, we have behind-the-scenes R&D efforts devoted to disruptive innovations. In fact, the birth of ADS is the result of disrupting the way communication systems are thought to be.  

With ADS yielding communications interoperability, clients can rethink how they wish to deploy their communications systems in ways unseen or unthought of before.  There are no other products like Calian’s ADS in the market. We are leading the way in the interoperability of operational communication systems. Our systems are a perfect fit for emergency response teams, national disaster responders or any other environment where different intervening units use different communications systems. We can make them work seamlessly together. 

For multinational military training how much value does VCCI and ADS add? 

VCCI and ADS are game changers especially when you are blending live training with simulated exercises. First, they provide additional meaningful data for the after-action reviews. VCCI collects the integrated systems data and ADS collects the audio systems data. Used together they significantly improve the learning experience. Second, referring to the concept of composing the realistic “train-as-you-fight” environment, VCCI links the command-and-control tools including video feeds while ADS links the audio systems. Therefore, any nation can connect to any other nation’s training or operational environment as these nations see fit. Our products work inside the multinational security enclave providing each nation with native ability to control data flows. 

In your view how are military training requirements changing? 

In the last decade customers have been intentional in wanting more and more access to their data, and the ability to exploit it. Twenty years ago, systems tended to be very geeky and operated by specialized technicians. Technical systems data was amply collected for systems health and troubleshooting purposes, but detailed training data to support training objectives and outcomes was mostly absent or too incomplete to derive consistent objective assessments or feedback. This led to training staffs relying on their subjective assessments and impressions which sometimes led to painful deliberations with the training audiences wanting proof. 

Without appropriate data evidence, simulation systems could easily be relegated to military games and risk discrediting the entire training effort. With data evidence, simulation systems would turn into high-readiness performance training and monitoring systems. Thus, just like Formula 1 racing or other high-performance domains constantly relying on data to improve outcomes, military training systems would require going through similar development processes to reach increasing levels of credibility.  

Driven by military training requirements, qualitative progress on models and simulation systems has led to more data being available for analysis and exploitation. In turn, data exploitation is now a recognized military capability in and of itself, providing a decisive edge. The circularity in this data-driven trend is not expected to end anytime soon and will continue to cause changes to training environments, and therefore operational performance.    

For us, the data paradigm, in simple terms, amounts to collecting data, analyzing and making sense of data, and presenting data to support decision making. The centre of gravity is data collection: without that, there is increased risk of subjectivity and disagreement on what happened during training.  

Calian is superbly positioned to improve data fidelity for military training. Our goal is simple. Provide the most realistic immersive training environment you can possibly create, using the respective strengths of the best of breed products together, to professionally design and deliver turn-key training events that are backed by data evidence and supported by coaches, mentors and subject matter experts, to meet high-readiness training objectives and operational outcomes. 

Our products VCCI and ADS each fulfil the critical data collection role brilliantly. Moreover, with other partner products to help clients exploit their data, we can create integrated operating environments that reduce cognitive load and accelerate command decision-making now.