Episodes

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 ...

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 diff...

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...

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 t...

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 a...

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 k...

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 repurpo...

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...

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 wit...

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 ...

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 b...

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 machi...

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 del...

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 ...