PEO STRI senior leaders discuss organizational updates and challenges in the M&S field

By Shane Klestinski, Associate Editor

 

Army Brig. Gen. Christine Beeler, chief of Program Executive Office Simulation, Training and Instrumentation (PEO STRI), delivered “Updates from PEO STRI” at the Institute for the Defense and Government Advancement’s (IGDA) Military Simulation Training Summit in Orlando, Florida, Feb. 25.

 

IGDA’s two-day summit gathered over 300 senior training commanders, procurement officers and acquisitions leaders from across the military and provided a forum for networking and collaboration. This conference focused on training warfighters with simulation and synthetic training, and it explored how militaries (American and allied) are approaching interoperability with new technology and moving toward competency training.

 

To assist with the more technical aspects of Beeler’s talk, her presentation also featured input from Marwane Bahbaz, chief technology officer for PEO STRI, and Nick Kioutas, senior official for PEO STRI’s newest office, Project Lead for Enterprise Transformation Integration (PL ETI). According to Beeler, “they’re helping PEO STRI navigate where we are and where we’re going in the future,” in their roles that help the organization pull together all the training simulation programs and see the vision the Army wants to achieve from a technology standpoint.

 

She went on to describe an experience early in her career in 1993 of simulating driver’s training in convoy operations in a motor pool, which, due to scarce training resources, consisted of only chairs lined up in a specific configuration. Beeler noted that even under such circumstances, she and her soldiers figured out how to train through simulation, although not with the high-tech solutions that are more common today.

 

“Simulation isn’t just about the really cool, ‘gee whiz’ gadget, but how do we take the things we have available today and combine those with new ways of approaching the same problems,” Beeler said. “How do we make sure each of our organizations… is the most lethal, the most capable and professional in their space to make sure that we can deliver on the promises to the American people.”

 

Bahbaz began by discussing the Army’s work in the synthetic domains and its efforts to include simulation suites to enable different exercises, and in a manner that would be very different from what they have accomplished previously.

 

“It’s going to be re-modernizing the full architecture from constructive simulation by adapting more modern software practices, more modern design that would allow us to scale simulations… in a cloud environment so we don’t have the stagnant type of suite that we always used to have,” Bahbaz said.

 

When Kioutas addressed the audience, he talked about the pace of change, and the inconsistency of that pace in how “it keeps going faster and faster, and we’re trying to keep up.” He noted that today’s systems were not sufficient for the Army’s needs, and while readiness, warfighting capability and lethality were supposed to be assured, the pace of change in so far as new platforms, new doctrine, the changing character of war, and new techniques, tactics and procedures made that challenging.

 

“We have to get together on what has been shown to be very successful with live-training transformation that has saved over a billion dollars, bringing capabilities together and converging them,” Kioutas said. “We now have to do that across all our enterprises so we can get relevant capabilities to the field as soon as possible. The more successful we are as a community, the more money that will come here to provide those capabilities. The less successful we are, the less money there will be… because we won’t be effective as an organization of simulation specialists. It takes a change in culture.”

 

The change in culture Kioutas mentioned involved organizations sharing assets across capabilities, and he emphasized that the problem involved professionals in the field building stove-piped capabilities in their own silos for too long.

 

“Now, we’re looking beyond that enterprise,” Kioutas said. “How are we going to horizontally integrate all these great capabilities? It’s going to take governance… so everybody can work together collaboratively to build our capabilities.”

 

A brief Q&A session followed the prepared comments, which covered the use of game engines in simulation, modular open-system architectures, joint force collaboration in simulations, and the governance of mechanisms and standards that bring modeling and simulation professionals together to collaborate.