Aimpoint

Aimpoint

The Red-Dot sight offers intuitive aiming with both eyes allowing rapid engagement of targets. The Aimpoint COMP5 Tube Style Red-Dot (shown), one of their latest, is designed as a more compact sight suited for short and medium ranges.

The open reflex red-dot sight offers a wide field of view that enhances the shooter’s situational awareness. These red-dots are lightweight and rugged making them suited for rifles, pistols, SMGs, and shotguns.

and reveal the shooters position. They are particularly obvious viewed through night vision devices, so, they are best employed briefly.

FUTURE COMBAT

Despite technologies that allow engaging at extended distances military history reflects that combat at close quarters is inevitable. Armies, in pursing long range engagement, should beware of neglecting the CQB which can be not only vicious and personal but also decisive. It is, therefore, critical to provide soldiers every advantage in fighting these type of fights.

ACRO P-2™

EXPERIENCE THE ACRO ADVANTAGE

• Professional grade pistol optic • CR2032 battery – 5 year life, constant-on • Fully enclosed optical channel • Compatible with night vision • Withstands extreme

G-force vibration & temperature changes • Legendary Aimpoint ruggedness • Submersible to 35 meters

www.aimpoint.com

M03551

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter full mission simulators provide live streaming and recording during simulations benefiting pilots through after-action-reviews.

SYNTHETIC TRAINING FOR COMBAT AIR: PANACEA OR PIPEDREAM?

While there seems to be a general agreement that more synthetic flying is a good thing (cost-effective, environmentally better, and broadly more inclusive), will it ultimately result in better, more confident and motivated pilots.

Jon Lake

Military flying training is already heavily reliant on the use of simulators, operating in the so-called synthetic environment. The Eurofighter Typhoon’s synthetic environment has already allowed the Royal Air Force (RAF) to achieve a synthetic training-to-live flying ratio of close to 50:50, and No.617 Squadron is achieving a similar ratio for operational Lockheed Martin F-35 training. But a number of senior officers in the RAF (and in other air arms) are ‘betting the farm’ on dramatically extending the scope and extent of synthetic training. Air Chief Marshal Sir Mike Wigston, the Chief of the Air Staff (CAS) recently said that “I do not exaggerate when I say that I can see a future where almost all training, force generation, and mission planning and rehearsal is done in a synthetic environment, preserving our real-world activity for live operations or strategic signalling.” Others have predicted a synthetic v live ratio of as much as 90:10.

THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH

Today’s air domain is becoming increasingly contested and information-dominated, with a rapidly evolving and ever more complex threat environment. A potential peer-level or near-peer clash is becoming increasingly difficult to train for using traditional methods. It is hard to amass the size of force that might be engaged, and harder yet to adequately emulate a realistic peer-level threat, even given adequate funding. But more importantly, even the most life-like exercises (such as Red Flag) cannot allow participants to use their sensors and simulated weapons to their maximum potential, if they are to avoid compromising tactics and exposing weapons’ performance parametrics to enemies who are always watching. If simulated in the real world, a realistic MBDA Meteor BVRAAM shot will give those enemies useful data and could allow them to develop better tactics and countermeasures. No-one wants to fly their F-35s in full-up ‘go to war’ configuration and risk an enemy learning at exactly what range ‘fighter X’, or ‘SAM guidance radar Z’ can detect them, or lock on to them.

The synthetic environment, using a complex ‘grid’ of networked simulators offers a solution to conducting this kind of realistic operational training, though it has limitations. Even when ultra-realistic and highly immersive, many pilots feel that synthetic training never feels like the real thing – that dangerous scenarios never feel risky, and that dropping a weapon (for example) never presents the same brief ‘pause for thought’. Moreover, to be really useful, the synthetic environment has to encompass the fast jet combat air platforms, but also the enablers and force multipliers. This is the thinking behind the RAF’s new Gladiator distributed flight simulation system which will be linked to the NEXUS combat cloud. Gladiator is intended to have an initial operational capability by the end of 2021, and will include Typhoon and other RAF and UK platforms including the Type 45 destroyer, the Boeing E-7A Wedgetail, and even the unmanned General Atomics (GAASI) MQ-9B Protector, allowing large scale virtual training to take place.

The RAF’s F-35 Lightning force uses a Lightning Integrated Training Centre (ITC) at RAF Marham, which includes four FMS (full mission simulators) with 360 degree domes, helmet-mounted displays, and full cockpits. The simulator has been accredited by RAF test pilots to be a direct and exact representation of how the aircraft performs and handles in the air, and is said by some to be like having four extra dedicated training aircraft on the line. When embarked on the carrier, the Lightning force can take with it