What is involved in your role within the Calian Defence team as Emerging Technologies Leader?

I began this role in early 2024, to focus on the integration of emerging technologies into Calian’s products and services. My responsibilities include establishing and maintaining potential partnerships and investments in emerging technologies. I help enable technology teams to leverage cutting-edge tech, such as AI, to drive innovation and efficiency. In my previous role, I developed military training products to help our training delivery teams deliver large, complex training events.

Innovation is very much embedded in the Calian defence team in everything that we do. This keeps what we offer relevant to our customers, and we are known to find solutions for our customers. It is very much an innovative team culture, and we are constantly looking at what is next when it comes to our product and service offerings for the defence industry.

Are you involved in the evolution of Calian’s technology for military training?

I have worked over 17 years in the defence industry, building software to improve training and so I have the expertise and understanding to help create a technology vision. We are constantly developing MaestroEDE, Calian’s exercise management platform, which allows the Calian team to develop and deliver training more efficiently for our customers.  Technology is evolving fast and even more so with AI. Our goal is to bring these advancements to our customers in a way that improves the training experience. Calian is constantly making improvements to our solutions to deliver a more realistic training experience, and accelerating how quickly training can be developed and configured.

How does Calian utilise synthetic training environments to simulate operational scenarios?

Synthetic environments provide exercise participants with a detailed context to simulate real-world battlefield situations. Calian delivers high-readiness training for militaries around the world, bringing realistic, immersive training exercises to prepare militaries for operations. Military training scenarios need to reflect complex and dynamic real-world situations. Calian provides a common synthetic environment for military training, integrating battle management, visual simulation, constructive simulation and data evaluation. By integrating the battle management systems of the training audiences, the actions they take based on exercise scenario, objectives and constraints are reflected in near-real time in the synthetic training environment. Tools like MaestroEDE allow us to release exercise traffic, and track the actions taken by the audience so that it can be reflected back into the synthetic environment.

Using existing battle management systems delivers a real “train-as-you-fight” experience in a simulated environment, preparing military leaders and decision-makers for the challenges they will face on operations.

Interoperability enables forces, units and/or systems to operate together. How does Calian deliver interoperability for military training?

Calian uses a system-agnostic approach to design and develop training. This means we can integrate any participant into a simulated environment. We use the right tools to provide the right level of fidelity needed to meet training objectives. Calian can develop training exercises that synchronize inputs across a range of systems, creating a more in-depth experience for the trainee. The distributed nature of simulation-based training is a powerful feature for delivering outcome-based training. Calian’s exercise development tools are user-friendly and intuitive, allowing the team to generate the desired training experience.

How does MaestroEDE, Calian’s innovative exercise design, development and delivery software platform, deliver flexibility for customers?

Delivering realistic training means getting the design right from the start—understanding your aim, scope and training objectives. From there, you can build out the necessary exercise plan to design, develop and deliver effective training.

When it comes to delivery, exercise controllers can slow or accelerate the pace of injects if required and can manually insert new injects in near-real time if the exercise requires it or quickly reschedule existing ones. Whatever the tempo, there is full traceability across the exercise on when injects were released to the training audience. Calian provides a common synthetic environment by integrating battle management systems, constructive and virtual simulations, and voice/chat communications. By integrating the battle management systems of the training audiences, the actions they take based on the injects are reflected in near-real time in the synthetic training environment.

Calian’s training technologies allow us to capture data throughout the delivery of the exercise to allow for an evaluation that is focused, specific and evidence based. The Calian tool suite provides training leaders and evaluators with specific data on how well the training audience performed at each step of the training journey. These outputs allow military exercise leaders to identify the specific activities and actions where the training audience has reached high readiness and identify areas where more training is required.

Calian is constantly developing new features and applications needed to provide the best and most cost-effective training. Budgets are often tight, and the nature of conflict is always evolving, so we evolve.

How is Calian incorporating AI into military training exercises?

MaestroEDE allows the Calian team to manage the exercise planning from start to finish and execute training with all the information in one place.  With our new AI assistant, teams can quickly write events and injects based on our experience. You can query and summarize information using AI. We are even experimenting with being able to engage simulations using AI in MaestroEDE.

We have been leading the charge on incorporating AI into Calian’s military training software systems. AI can allow us to rapidly develop and adjust training scenarios in support of evolving developments and changes on the battlefield. We are looking at incorporating AI into the Calian Virtual Command and Control Interface (VCCI) tool suite. VCCI has access to a lot of rich data as it provides interoperability between systems, so we are looking at how we can use AI to provide insights to both those who conduct the training and also the trainees.

What type of after-action military training reviews does Calian provide?

Evaluation is important to understanding how training was effective in meeting the objectives, and whether there is room for improvement. Every exercise has stated objectives, and measuring performance towards those objectives is the purpose of the evaluation. This happens during and after an exercise and happens in a variety of forms and mediums.

The support we provide varies based on the customer requirements and our experienced employees using the data captured by our tools. Calian has ARAMIS, a dedicated military after-action review (AAR) tool that collects simulation data during the exercise. Where MaestroEDE shows the outcome of injects and observations made by the exercise controller, ARAMIS captures simulation data to provide a visual representation of specific actions to clearly show the outcomes. ARAMIS allows Calian training leaders to quickly identify where the training audience did not respond to exercise action as anticipated.

How has military training requirements and delivery changed in recent years?

Calian has delivered realistic, immersive simulation-based military training for over 25 years for more than 250,000 military personnel at over 30 locations across NATO countries. The Calian team continues to provide solutions to meet customers’ ever-changing requirements. I think AI will profoundly impact how training is designed, developed and delivered. It will change the operational environment for the military. However, you will always need experienced and knowledgeable humans to guide the system. We will need to create clear boundaries on what or who makes decisions. So, for us, it’s how can we support our employees to achieve greater levels of success for the customer and how we can alleviate our customers to do the same.