Episodes

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 and competencies, whilst exploring the real world capabilities of FPV drones. We also discuss recrui...

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 use of these drones, as well as working out how to counter them. Karl Eze formally served with the Br...

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 this season, including Jenny McArdle on the future of Land Training, Andy Gales discussing TES, and Ethan ...

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 contentious subject, (which we’re sure is the start of some mess brawls), we don’t hold back from the difficult ...

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 works with deep-tech startups across diverse markets. Owen has had two successful careers to date: F...

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 applied human–systems scientist, with an emphasis on human cognition and learning, instructional tech...

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 as ‘activities by a state that are harmful to another state and are sometimes considered to be acts...

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, from his time in the British Army, as well with his current company Cubic Defence, which supports ke...

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 Interactive Simulations. During his tenure, BISim was one of the few companies to successfully repurpose ...

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. Not dodging the hard questions, this interview gave us the chance to ask a burning question - Is the M...

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. Combining skills and experience from his time serving with the commercial realities of doing business with...

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 challenging programme from its early inception through to full Initial Operating Capability, something not...

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 who is their CTO for Global Public Sector and so has a special interest in dealing with large data problems across government and defence. Winston is himself a West Point graduate, so brin...

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 IBM. Rob provides an explanation of what generative AI means, and how it differs from other machine ...

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. Matt also reveals the members of Team Crucible and describes what they each add to the training deli...

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 exciting lineup of guests. We might even try another Live event or two. All will be revealed in the next ...

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 pizzas and Mountain Dew, and asked to develop a novel simulation service that is scalable, agile, and su...

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 - Scientific Advisor at NATO Modelling & Simulation Group There is currently lots of discussion in the Simulation &...

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 far. It is held at the Ashton Gate Stadium in Bristol, and features exhibitors from virtually all the l...

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). There is a lot of discussion about common or ‘single’ synthetic environments these days. To understa...

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 about his experience of driving innovation and change through large organisations. Luke could speak on many...

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 applications for serious training and decision support applications. Coining the term ‘Horizontal Scaling’....

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, during this fireside chat. From his lake cabin in Sweden. We hope you’re sitting comfortably. We cove...

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 were part of the motivation behind the setting up of the UK Battlelab , and we are grateful for Ed Ebbe...