Warfighter Podcast

We didn’t get enough out of him the first time round, so Karl is back to dive a bit deeper into the challenges and opportunities around the FPV capability. And not least how FPV racing can support a lot of the lines of development required by militaries to successfully adopt this emerging technology. In a wide ranging conversation, we get down into the weeds of how defence needs to develop skills...

The Warfighter Podcast is back for very special mini-season looking at FPV (First Person View) drones and their impact in the modern battlefield. Even the most casual observer of recent conflicts will be aware of the impact that low-cost, consumer drones and home-built FPVs have been making across conflict zones. It’s likely that their impact is here to stay and militaries are mobilising for the u...

We are pleased to invite two heavyweight guests for our final episode of the season. Coming out of the shadows, we speak to Matt Chuter - our sponsor at Babcock. We were keen to learn more about how the latest evolutions in the battlefield are shaping the Crucible Teams thinking about the future design for Army collective training.  Matt also reflected on some of his personal highlights from...

Strap in. For our penultimate episode of the season we tackle what might seem like a simple question, but proves to be expansive - What does it mean to deliver realism in Training?  We are joined by Anthony Pittman who, as well having a lengthy service in the British Army where he lived and breathed training, is currently the Director for Development & Optimisation at Babcock. Always a co...

We’re coming back to our favourite topic - how do we get innovative ideas off the ground and into the market for exploitation by the frontline. In past episodes we’ve discussed the ‘Valley of Death’ and the challenge described in the book ‘Crossing the Chasm’. This episode we speak to Owen Thompson, who deals with this every day in his role as CEO at Cambridge Future Tech - a Venture Builder that...

This week the Warfighter Podcast takes a small tangent - it’s not all running around with a dagger between our teeth. We are pleased to welcome Sae Schatz, who has an extremely diverse career so far, formerly serving as the Director of the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative, a published author and expert in learning sciences. Before joining the civil service in 2015, Sae worked as an a...

Yet another guest that we’ve been dying to get on since last season. We are pleased to welcome Ethan to the podcast to talk about the work he’s been involved in to understand and model the ‘grey zone’ in modern warfare. Ethan previously served as an Intel Analyst with the US Navy, and now works for Plexsys Interface Products, supporting the simulation and modelling of complex environments. Defined...

On a subject we’ve wanted to cover for a while, we are pleased to welcome Andy Gales, who kindly agreed to come and give us all the details about the British Army’s Tactical Engagement System. Which isn’t a single system at all, but several systems integrated together to deliver critical Instrumented Live training for the British Army. Andy has lengthy experience with the various flavours of TES,...

Virtual simulation has been around for a while now, and there has been some great leaps and bounds in its fidelity - mainly through the adoption of commercially available technologies that run on standard (albeit high-end) computer hardware. One person who was there during the early emergence of these technologies was Pete Morrison - previously CEO and now Chief Commercial Officer at Bohemia Inter...

In the run up to I/ITSEC 2023 we are very grateful for Hadean agreeing to sponsor a special episode in two parts. Firstly, we are very pleased to introduce Royal O’Brien, Global CTO for Hadean. Royal has a considerable track record with the likes of Amazon, The Linux Foundation and a host of games related companies, including foundational work on the O3DE platform and Open Metaverse Foundation. No...

As a former Special Forces operator, Gareth Collier has had an impressive career to date, including responsibility for the development of the training and capability development of over 2,300 in the Australian Special Forces Command. While a successful military career does not automatically translate to being successful in business, Gareth provides a text-book example of how it can be done. Combin...

Following on from the trend of finally getting some of the guests we had shortlisted for Season 1, we are very pleased to introduce Ruari Henderson-Begg. Ruari was previously SO1 Synthetics in Air Capability, and was also the Programme Manager for Gladiator - a distributed synthetic training system for Air Combat Training for the Royal Air Force. Ruari has lived the experience of bringing a challe...

While Tom has been battling an annual occurrence of “Flymageddon” on his farm, the team have been busily lining up exciting guests for Season 2. We plan to pick up on many of the themes from Season 1 and start pulling those threads! This episode is no different, and we are pleased to be joined by Winston Chang from Snowflake who is their CTO for Global Public Sector and so has a special interest i...

Well, we said we’d come back to the topic of AI and do a deeper dive into the subject. Since Generative AI sprung into our collective consciousness earlier this year, the hype hasn’t really died down. So we are pleased to explore the impact of the technology with someone who has direct experience of implementing AI into defence projects - Rob Albritton from OctoLab, which was recently acquired by...

Today’s the day the Warfighter Podcast get to announce its new Sponsor - Babcock International, who have very kindly agreed to back our exciting schedule for the Season 2. To kick things off we are joined by Matthew Chuter who’s the Campaign Director for CTTP at Babcock. We start the discussion around the CTTP Programme recently launched in the UK and what it means for transforming Army Training....

The Cultural Challenges for International Training & Collaboration You thought you’d heard the last of The Warfighter Podcast? We’ve been taking a short break - Tom’s been working hard on the farm and Colin has been off sailing (OK, not much sailing but the fish weren’t going to snorkel themselves). We are now pleased to be able to say that Season 2 is GO, and we have a shiny new sponsor and e...

In another first, the Warfighter Podcast are very pleased to be able to work with NATO Modelling and Simulation Working Group to cover their latest initiative - the MSaaS Jam, hosted at the Tech Grove, Orlando, Florida. For those that don’t know this is the spiritual home for Modelling & Simulation across the US DoD. Over a weekend in June, teams were invited to a ‘hackathon’ style event, fed...

Our first foray into the real world, Warfighter Live hosted its first panel discussion at DSET in Bristol and kindly sponsored by VRAI - more about them below. We were joined by a highly experienced guests that brought a diverse range of views to the discussion: Lucy Walton - Head of Training at BAE Systems Neil Curren - R&D Lead at VRAI Adam Easton - CEO of SimCentric Wim Huiskamp - Scientifi...

In advance of the very first Warfighter Live event at DSET Bristol, we speak to Tess Butler (CEO of Ruddy Nice Ltd), who has been delivering DSET with her team since 2016 - so now in its 8th year. For those that haven’t heard of DSET it is one of the fastest growing Defence Training & Simulation events in Europe, with attendees from over 41 countries and well over 1,000 attendees registered so...

In our final education episode for this season, we are very pleased to welcome Len Granowetter, CTO for MAK Technologies. For those that don’t know Len, he has been at the forefront of some of the most demanding simulation challenges and applications on large scale projects. Most notably MAK’s software is integral to the UK Gladiator and Australian Army’s Land Sim Core projects (to name but two)....

This episode we are very pleased to be joined by Luke Shabro, a former Intelligence Analyst and US Navy veteran, he is now the Deputy Director at Army Futures Command TRADOC and jointly runs the US Army Mad Scientist initiative.  We don’t mind saying that the US Army Mad Scientist podcast provided quite a bit of inspiration for the Warfighter Podcast - so it was great to hear more from Luke a...

Following on from our previous episode with Joe Robinson, we are joined by Jason Kennedy who is the VP of Engineering at Improbable. Jason has an impressive background in, having previously directed large teams of engineers to push the boundaries of simulation technology for defence and space applications. In a full and frank discussion, Jason describes the challenge for scaling simulation applica...

Continuing our Education series we are very pleased to Welcome Björn Möller who, whilst serving as the President of Pitch Technologies, is also one of the leading authorities in distributed simulation standards. Bjorn has been deeply involved in shaping the HLA simulation standard for the past 30 years. Bjorn expertly breaks down what can be a complex subject into easily understandable concepts, d...

We know we talk a lot about innovation on this podcast, but this week we look into an interesting initiative to stimulate and grow ideas across all arms of the UK Armed Forces. The military relies on harnessing the latest technology in order to gain an advantage of it’s adversaries, however this is often hard won. The pace of technological change is only increasing all the while. These factors wer...

This episode is a different take to our normal subjects. We are joined by Christina Balis, Global Campaign Director for QinetiQ, who looks at the non-technological aspects to tackling the challenges of Training Transformation. Christina brings broad experience to this problem, from outside defence as well as within. Christina argues that the challenges in training for a multi-domain battlespace ar...