Training An Army That Is ‘Ready for War’

Perhaps more crucially, however, the report noted that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 “has fundamentally changed the threat – demonstrating that Russia has both the capability and intent to prosecute a war in Europe”. The HCDC added that this “requires a wholesale shift in approach towards warfighting resilience, both in the UK and its allies”.

Training for adaptable advantage

A major challenge to delivering readiness – as most recently demonstrated by the Ukraine conflict – is adapting to the unpredictable volatility of the military-geopolitical climate. The UK armed forces, for example, recently geared to decades of counter-insurgency operations, have inevitably been challenged by the need to again prepare for high-intensity warfighting.

The British Army’s Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Patrick Sanders, was quoted by the HCDC as noting that “tailoring a force for everything from peacekeeping operations right the way up to warfighting operations requires a level of investment in training”.

Indeed, it is the quality of an armed force’s training regime that – beyond issues of sheer numerical strength or quality of equipment – can bring a significant advantage on the battlefield.

High-quality training, meanwhile, can produce as much of a deterrent effect as the expanding of equipment inventories. As the Roman author Vegetius once wrote in his Epitoma rei militaris, ‘If you want peace, prepare for war.’

Collective training: on mission

The British Army’s Collective Training Transformation Programme intends to provide an Army Collective Training Service (ACTS) under which the Director of Land Warfare, Major General Chris Barry, has called for “the world’s best training engine for our soldiers”.

Alliance is on a mission to provide precisely that: a transformational, integrated, expeditionary and digitalised training programme for the British Army that is agile and adaptable for future threat driven change and will ultimately contribute to delivering the levels of readiness the army must possess in an uncertain world.

The Alliance solution for ACTS will embrace cutting-edge technology to transform the British Army’s training capabilities, delivering realistic, engaging and challenging training across the LVC domains that will not only enhance the Army’s operational and warfighting capabilities but also improve personnel retention in doing so.

Alliance is ideally positioned to exploit data like never before, from personal soldier performance metrics to the monitoring of instrumented platforms across the exercise area. Data exploitation will not only deliver unprecedented feedback and after-action reports, but will facilitate exponential enhancements to the training serials they monitor.

The Alliance solution will additionally be truly expeditionary, rapidly delivering tailored training at the point of need, whether that is an established training centre or a deployed location across the globe. 

In the decades to come, achieving the required level of readiness in a volatile geopolitical climate for every challenge the service could face will depend upon many things. Alliance, however, can ensure that the provision of a world-class, transformational training service for the British Army is not something the HCDC will need to be concerned about.