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An Interview With Andrew Gales, Senior Director of Business Development Global, and Martyn Armstrong, Vice president UK/European Operations & Ground Product Line
> An Interview By Murielle Delaporte
Cubic was founded seventy years ago in the United States and is known for its innovation in both the transportation and the defense sector. Cubic is in particular the largest provider of Live Training Systems (LTS) to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization members, having “fielded more than a quarter million systems at over twenty-five fixed and mobile combat training ranges in thirty-three countries” (1). : Its European branch, Cubic Defence UK “delivers technology-driven solutions to Command, Control, Communication, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance & Reconnaissance (C4ISR) and training ”. It also “delivers a tactical Live, Virtual and Constructive (LVC) indirect fires ecosystem, improving live firing competence through immersive training solutions” (2).
The interview below focuses on the latter and the challenges of training in the context of the transformation of ground warfare and artillery given the combination of the return to high intensity warfare and new ways of using innovative and game-changing technologies. Andrew Gales and Martyn Armstrong discuss these issues, but to start with, here are their respective background in short:
- Andrew Gales is a retired British Army infantry officer. His military career started in 1997 when he first served as Communications and Information Systems Officer, and then as a commander and a future operations planner. In 2002 he also received a Master’s degree in the design of information systems from the Cranfield University. “While in the British Army doing combat and infantry training roles, I spent a lot of time working in technical areas in simulation and comms”, he says. Building on this experience, he joined Cubic Defence in the United Kingdom in 2012 as a training development manager and is now Senior Business Development Global Director since 2021.
- Martyn Armstrong also joined Cubic Defence UK in 2012 and is today its vice president for UK and European Operations and Ground Product Line. Before that, he spent most of his career in the British Army’s Royal Artillery as chief instructor and commander of the field army. As a result of this “training portfolio”, he held “a number of high level simulation expert experiments”: “much like Andy,”, he explains, “I spent twenty-three years in the Army during which when I was not on operations, I was training people to go on operations. Along with other training, simulation, and operational background, I brought all of that experience to Cubic when I left the Army, and now I run the ground product portfolio for Cubic globally ”.
Given your common Army background, what is your perception of the major shifts in the use of artillery and the training necessary to master it between your combat experience in Afghanistan and Iraq and today’s battlefield in Ukraine?
From counter-insurgency back to high intensity warfare: allied supremacy challenged and the return of artillery as the battlefield leveler
For Andrew Gales, operations in Iraq and Afghanistan brought a major transition in the training necessary to sustain operations in that part of the world: “ when we moved to counterinsurgency, there was a deliberate and intentional move in training, in order to be theater-specific, and that meant to move away from high intensity maneuver warfare ”. Training had to adapt to a new type of warfare characterized by:
• Being based in FOB (forward operating bases);
• having persistent total air supremacy;
• having all electronic spectrum supremacy;
• having ISR supremacy.
“However”, he explains, “ whenever you were on the ground, you always had to overwatch fires: your main threat came from an enemy that often you could not see, mostly from improvised explosive device, which of course, were very lethal.”
“It is not what we see now in Ukraine: what we are seeing goes back to the principles of high intensity maneuver warfare, where you do not have neither information supremacy, fire supremacy, nor air superiority.
You have to try and create that in a limited way, in order to allow you to have your targeted effect. The principles of high intensity maneuver remain the same, but what has fundamentally changed is the technology which is being used to implement it, as well as the speed at which those decisions are made.
We are back to the importance of observation, information, surveillance, reconnaissance, and fight.”
“Indeed, we transitioned from what was a fairly constrained carrying operation in Afghanistan or Iraq towards the end of it into something where, now, there is a high intensity of warfare, and the pervasive capability that indirect fire brings to bear specifically in an environment where throughout the winter, it is very difficult to move. But you can still move your fires around. So whether it be indirect fire from an anti-tank weapon, or an artillery piece, you are seeing the absolute power of ammunition consumption across infrastructure and personnel ”, says Martyn Armstrong.
“When you then link that with modern technology – such as drones and target acquisition systems that have been used in novel ways -, you fundamentally change how warfare happens from Afghanistan to what we see now”, he adds.
For him, “ the sheer weight of ammunition that has been expended through the artillery and indirect fire systems in Ukraine at the moment, brings us back (…) to Second World War, or any of the previous large-scale wars, where artillery is often the thing that actually levels up the battlefield ”. It is not about “worrying about positive ID of targets before firing”, as there is a whole line of enemy troops. And “if anything moves beyond those lines, then they are getting identified by drones and engaged by indirect fire, because that is the most effective way to actually destroy those objectives.”.
What are therefore the major training challenges for today’s infantrymen and what solutions are you working on to help solve them?
The Range as a key change of paradigm on the battlefield and the Invention of LVC as a solution
According to Martyn Armstrong, the comparison between the conflict in Ukraine and World War I and II stops with the evolution of the range of the weapon systems being used nowadays: “ range is a major issue, since if you have a weapon system that can reach out to one hundred kilometers for example, then you are able to concentrate fire over a much greater area than we could ever achieved during World War Two or World War One. And the rocket systems Ukraine and Russia are both employing have ranges in excess of that. “
” From a training perspective, the consequences are obvious since many nations only have “limited amounts of range space”, while “the complexity associated with modern indirect fire, and the scale of that way to fire is really difficult to replicate”, he explains: ” historically, my budget at the Royal School of artillery was around one hundred million pounds a year for training ammunition. And the only way I could train with my systems was to actually use live ammunition. There was at the time no simulation system that was credible for deploying those systems in the field and to go through the tactical handling of artillery. (…)” (…)
“So inventing simulation systems that allow you to train any system was one of my focuses when I joined Cubic. The only way that you can realistically do this was to create a Live, Virtual and Constructive [dit LVC]) simulation system that allows you to fire up synthetic ammunition from real platforms, real ranges, and over a really representative, operational area. So for example, the British Army’s major training in the UK is in the South West of England near Stonehenge. But our rocket launchers would actually range out as far as Birmingham. So we have to have a way of being able to actually deliver that sort of training ”. The way to do so is to build a virtual and constructive exercise mixing a live battleground training in an area and “a version of constructive exercise running at scale”.
The intensity of fire seen in Ukraine at the moment is also impossible to replicate for training purpose, just from a cost point of view: “ even with one hundred million pounds of live ammunition, I had to constrain how they fired that ammunition. I could not afford to do that today ”, Armstrong stresses.
Removing safety barriers without “diluting the training”
The question of training in the most realistic combat environment is at stake and the paradox is that training for real has become less realistic than using new simulation tools. One of the reasons has of course to do with safety rules, as Martyn Armstrong explains: “ It is worth noting that firing live ammunition comes with a significant amount of safety constraints, because inevitably, it is dangerous. These constraints slow down how you can fire your howitzer or rocket launcher, because it takes about fifteen to twenty minutes to clear the safety every time you move it, ” whereas ”we know a rocket launcher, or a gun, in Ukraine needs to move every several minutes, because it is being located as soon as it fires,
” therefore becoming a target for the enemy to destroy it. “Those safety constraints have diluted the training to such an extent that it bears very little resemblance to what you will do for real. So what we ended up doing is actually creating a synthetically enhanced live virtual constructive capability, which meant that we could remove those safety constraints. We could deliver the training at scale and at the tempo that the soldiers are seing today in Ukraine. And as a result, we drove more realism into all the training that we deliver. (…) We are actually improving realism by removing the safety constraints which are justifiably in place for live firing ”.
Sustaining the tempo of fire: preparing the ground for live training through “consequential training”
“The rates of fire are having a major effect on the industrial base, whether ammunition, microprocessors or fuses”, Andrew Gales points out stressing that “ one of the key lessons people are beginning to learn is actually the weight of fire that you have to be able to sustain in order to maintain the operational effects you want. And as a result of that, everywhere across Europe and America governments ramping up their industrial base to go back to what we used to do ”.
This is going to take time and nations need all the ammunition they can without overusing it for training while such an industrial base is being built back.
“I am not suggesting you go away from live fire at all”, Gales cautions, ” what we are suggesting is that the simulated fire comes into place to get individuals to a standard where we know they are safe and competent, so you get the best value from firing the live round. And then when you get to collective training, where you are bringing numbers of platforms together with soldiers running around and you are going to realistic warfare rates of fire, at that point, you move back to digital fires to prevent wear and tear on the weapon systems and provide maximum safety for the exercising troops ”. .” One of the issue is overheating while “the rates of fire that exist today in Ukraine will make most guns inoperable, after less than a week’s worth of firing.”
The same type of constraints goes as far as drones are concerned in the sense that using drones in training have to meet civilian aviation authority legislation, while“in Ukraine, they are not too concerned about that right now. So trying to actually fly a level of drones similar to those commanded by the soldiers is very, very difficult. We cannot find them in the UK in the way that they do in Ukraine, but what we can do is fly synthetic drones. (…) We are indeed able to create a system which allows you to actually fly swarms of drones ”. LVC training can in that sense safely replicate the pervasiveness of the drone war that is going on in southern Ukraine with a synthetic capability.
Sustaining such a heavy pace of weapon consumption requires a strong logistic support, which has often been underestimated in past wargaming calculus. As Martyn Armstrong recalls “historically, logistics is a dirty word: if you speak to somebody who is a soldier, because they think it just happens.” It is even worse when one just exercise for two weeks as “it all sort of works”. But in the case of a sustained operation and a war of national survival, “then the logistics become absolutely crucial. (…) if you want to fight, then your logistics has to work.”
That is the reason why Cubic has started developing “logistics scenarios that run alongside the combat scenario.” As Armstrong explains, “ if they do not get the logistic planning correct, then the combat scenario will fail as a result. So there is now a term that we are beginning to use quite a lot across our training scenarios which is consequential training. This means that there is a consequence about doing something right or wrong and that consequence has to play out ”. This was historically not in the case before as the training would not take such consequences into consideration.
“Now, we allow the consequence to play out, because you learn more from actually having that consequence run throughout the whole exercise than actually stopping it.” Logistics is a major issue that cannot be ignored. For Andrew Gales, ” the key point is that there is now a system that allows to instrument those indirect fire systems, to bring them into the training environment and, to instrument the logistics tail that goes with it. And all of that is done in an environment which allows the militaries to train as they would fight, so that when they do have to use a live round, they are in a good position to do so. (…) What our system is allowing to do is bringing all of these complexities that we are talking about – issues of ammunition consumption, logistics, movement, electronic warfare, unmanned aerial systems to detect targets, and so on – into an integrated fires training system that is quite unique in the marketplace. “
Besides training in a realistic environment via LVC, what other key issues would you emphasize as Eurosatory is fast approaching?
Protecting networks via redundancy and standardization
For both former Army officers the other fundamental issue that they are looking forward to debate and examine when attending the upcoming Eurosatory next June is the ability to process and protect the networks the warfighter needs in today’s environment: using digital solutions to protect targeting information is one key aspect.
For Martyn Armstrong, the ability for the Ukrainians to purchase thousands of drones and using mobile phones to communicate shows an evolution towards “a much wider acceptance for COTS [Commercial Off-The-Shelf]-based technology rather than specialist systems”: “ yes, they are vulnerable. Yes, they are time sensitive. But I think many of the capabilities that you will see evolving now will be much more able to exploit that COTS technology. You will not necessarily see large, expensive, long, protracted procurement cycles, as I do believe it will fundamentally change how defense procures many of these complex systems, juts because the shlef life of a mobile phone is significantly less than the shelf life of a submarine, for example ”.
Reflecting such an evolution and crossover, Cubic’s synthetic training system indeed relies on a COTS-based communication architecture (4G, 5G, SATCOM delivered by Starlink, etc). ” This allows us to replicate military capability at range and to federate an exercise whether the guys are in Kenya or the UK, or whether they are training in Australia, all countries participating in the same exercise using secure internet connections and using COTS-based technology. ” For Armstrong, when looking specifically at the” Comms architecture piece”, the future lies in COTS-based technology.
Redundancy and hybridity are however crucial in case “somebody is going in and denying that infrastructure”, recalls Andrew Gales who believes that “comm systems need to be smaller, more deployable, and go across a broader electronical spectrum.” Martyn Armstrong compares comms networks and the “Internet of Things” to an ants’nest: “if you put your hand into an ants nest,”, he explains, “ then everything forms around that hand as it goes in. So what you are seeking to do is constantly recreate your mesh communications network , so that where a jamming appears, or where something falls down,” using a layered communications network allows to maintain the required level of communication despite the threat.
Joint connectivity among allies has been a challenge, but progress has been made since Afghanistan as far as standardization is concerned: ” the greatest step forward is an understanding among allied countries of what needs to be done. It is up to the manufacturers to build equipment conform to the NATO standards which are being developed “concludes Martyn Armstrong.
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(1) Quote from >>> https://www.cubic.com/cubic-awarded-us-army-contract-modernization-combat-training-center-ctc-supporting
(2) Sources: Cubic website and LinkedIn