April 2020 · 2020. 7. 13. · A data-grounded, Soldier-centered strategy for 21st Century US Army training Readiness is a whole-Army objective. Training for readiness requires a

© Raydon Corporation 2020 VTX Infrastructure Brief 1

A data-grounded, Soldier-centered strategy for 21st Century US Army training

Readiness is a whole-Army objective. Training for readiness requires a mixture of live and virtual training in which every hour contributes to readiness as an integral part of the whole-Army objective. This mixture of training capabilities is an infrastructure.

Raydon has been intently studying Army simulation-based training for three decades. We believe strongly that a training infrastructure approach is the best way to lay the groundwork for the future. VTX (Virtual Training Exercise) is a training infrastructure strategy.

Our goal is to deliver multiple capabilities -- fidelity, platform, content, mission – open to anyone’s innovation and completely free from vendor lock.

One of Raydon’s mottos is “Think Up”. We challenge our team to imagine they had a senior official’s job. We ask: Knowing everything you know about our market and technology trends, what would you do on day one if you were a senior leader? What would you do to unleash the modern possibilities of simulation technology?

We are dedicated to building pragmatic and electrifying visions, strategies and plans that will help the US Army ensure readiness. With this presentation, we will lay out Raydon’s well-considered vision for the Army.

We hope this technology vision informs your perspective and initiates a discussion about the best way to implement the concepts presented here.

Electricity + Time = Work

Raydon was founded by GE engineers who worked together on the Army’s Conduct of Fire Trainer (COFT) program in the 1980s. COFT was the first ever, physically accurate, fully synthetic environment designed to deliver gunnery proficiency for tank and armored personnel carrier crews. These were delivered to every armory and mechanized infantry battalion across the Army.

April 2020


Nearly 40 years after the US Army invented the first two ground (gunnery and maneuver) electric training infrastructures, this technology is well understood. The work of a simulation training infrastructure is to deliver the energy and hours, at smart fidelity and wattage, to the point of need. The US Army has been using technology to train Soldiers electric energy and hours since 1981. This capability has saved money and time every day for four decades.

Developing combat-critical cognitive and psychomotor skills is a lot of work and requires a lot of energy. Electricity-based training environments are always ready to deliver the energy to help train Soldiers and units to become more lethal and more survivable, to the point of mission overmatch. Its accessibility makes an electricity-based training infrastructure inherently safe, efficient, and easy to access and operate.

The Physics of Simulation

Raydon’s founders each led teams that installed the first COFTs across the US and Germany. The job of installing and testing came with a lot of down time, which gave them unlimited repetitions on all three original COFT-supported platforms: Abrams (M1), M60A3 and Bradley.

They became simulation gunnery experts. There were no doctrinal restrictions like Soldiers have, so they tried things Soldiers were never allowed to try. Whichever platform they practiced on, the worst gunners among them were orders of magnitude better shots on the COFT than almost any Army gunner.

Unlimited trigger pulls = psycho-motor acuity = hand-eye-trajectory fluency.

The Raydon founders became convinced that good gunners are good gunners on any platform. The electricity was a constant, since the same wattage was available to everyone. Adding more reps – more time – was the variable that made a big difference in the end result.

Raydon’s founders used simulation training to become lethal. They learned the value of time in driving human performance well beyond basic proficiency. They came to believe in the untapped power of more electricity-based simulation hours.

A New Paradigm for Future Overmatch

In 1988, Raydon was born under the premise that the efficient use of time is critical for Soldier training. The training systems the company has created were designed to maximize every


minute of Soldier time and we developed measures of performance that reflect this: Average Soldier Hours to Proficiency and Cost to Proficiency. Time + Money + Training Effectiveness.

If we measure the effectiveness and the efficiency of training, we can improve beyond the accepted range of performance-based outcomes. Under this new perspective, we have to admit that in 2020 we still have no objective recipe to precisely measure combat-critical cognitive and psychomotor skills, nor can we identify the fidelity mix required to optimize performance (we equate hardware fidelity with energy use). This is not a criticism. This is a 21st Century opportunity to build a new paradigm for future overmatch. We can turn training data into a weapon!

Beyond Proficiency

Measuring training economics, effectiveness, and efficiency turns a training infrastructure into what science calls “grounded theory”. We will be able to measure and understand how time and fidelity impact training quality. We will be able to categorize the data by a Soldier’s profile, including previous training. We will be able to gauge the levels of performance beyond proficiency. Over a two- to five-year force generation cycle, there would be no more guessing.

Another motto we have is: Do the most on that which costs the least; only do what can only be done on that which costs the most. This new perspective causes us to value all forms of training because skill development is not platform-dependent. There is as much intrinsic value in the training available on a cell phone as there is on big powerful systems and on anything in between. The best form, fit and function for every training requirement is discoverable with data.


High-fidelity (high-energy) simulation environments are thrilling and physically challenging toward a purpose in a balanced 21st Century training strategy -- but not without statistical measures of performance. What are the hours to proficiency? How many Soldiers need to be trained? What is the lifecycle cost per training hour? The tradeoff between money and time, between cost and accessibility, is a critical decision point. Bounding across rugged terrain in a vehicle is physical. Controlling even a stabilized system is challenging on the move. A high-fidelity experience can be even better than live in certain ways. Yes, we said that. You can practice high-risk, high-reward precision maneuvers over and over again. A strong, well-controlled body is essential in these environments to simultaneously stabilize your core and execute a precision lay of a reticle on a target while bouncing toward a mission objective. But for basic skills training a high-fidelity system is not practical.

A Dialectic History of Raydon Throughout our history, thinking as an Army leader, we asked ourselves a lot of hard questions. Our answers on behalf of, and with the assistance and expertise of, our customers have resulted in many industry firsts. They form the foundation of our technology platforms.

How can we make training more accessible?

We were first to shift to PC-based technology in 2001 on the M1A1 Abrams platform to the National Guard’s AFIST XXI upgrade program.

How can we reduce cost? Modular design shifted component control through hardware API to easily replace COTS starting with the first release of the VCOT in 2004.

How can we standardize our software so it can run on multiple systems, multiple fidelities?

Virtual Bullets (later SimCore GT) was our first iteration, in 2001. Many releases and improvements later, this baseline is still running!

How can we interoperate multiple training platforms in one virtual battle space?

With CAV-T in 2005, Raydon combined ground and aircraft gunnery training systems to provide combined arms maneuver training within the same exercise, using platforms of multiple fidelities.

How can a simulation system train both gunnery and maneuver simultaneously?

VCOT v3.1 was first, in 2010.

How can we modify our reconfigurable hardware platform to simulate more than 100 ground vehicles and rotary-wing aircraft?

Incorporating decades of lessons learned, Raydon’s Mission Reconfigurable technology was adopted by the Army in 2019 as the Reconfigurable Virtual Collective Trainer (RVCT), the hardware component of the STE program.


Think Ahead!

We believe, in 2020, leaders want simulation training capabilities that are:

• Owned by the Government

• Cost-effective over their lifecycle, with minimal obsolescence

• Simple, uniform, flexible

• Quickly and easily accessible

• Transportable

• Measurable

• Interoperable

• Utilized and accepted by Soldiers

• Cloud-, Haptic-, biometric-enabled (future-proof)

• Cybersecure

Saving money and time have always been, and will always be, the bedrock concerns that drive military and government leaders’ training decisions. But these other concerns have become pervasive over the past few years.

VTX is fast, versatile, flexible, virtually future-proof. Multiple fidelities. Multiple platforms. Multiple software packages. Multiple Army missions. And multiple procurement options – purchase, lease or rent.

Raydon has been building, coalescing, and refining a body of work that allows us to rapidly adapt reconfigurable training seats with scalable fidelity for the US Army’s STE program. Our VTX strategy proved itself by how quickly we provided multi-fidelity, reconfigurable training seats in a way that makes 30 years of study seem simple.

Interlocking Scheme

For the most elite land force on the planet, everything changes constantly with training technology. In a training infrastructure, software technology has a much faster rate of change than hardware. We invented a way to keep up.

VTX is a three-part interlocking strategy. The core is a standardized technology framework that accommodates any platform, any fidelity, and any training mode.

“V” represents the fifth generation of a core software technology, SymVantage, that Raydon has cultivated for the last 20 years.


“T” represents TEMPO technology (Training Enterprise Management Performance Optimizer). Big data. Big math.

“X” represents Xtreme Combat, a working title for our training software package, including a plan to introduce structured competition into the Army’s training strategy.

Data is protected, accessible only to the US Army training enterprise. Our training infrastructures have been able to collect raw practice and training data for every trigger pull and every Soldier. Truth is hidden in this data. In the future we will understand how to rapidly develop and maximize human performance and infuse precise combat skills based on this data.

Every Soldier training hour is capable of offering data insights for the Army. We will come to see data-collecting training capabilities as cognitive/psychomotor gyms -- gunnery and maneuver and so much more. Soldiers of the future will be able to move seamlessly across different missions, equipment sets, and combat platforms.

Performance. Guaranteed.

Our three-part strategy for the US Army is to combine our successful core technology, SymVantage, and our TEMPO data modeling tools with our hyper-efficient training drills. From crawl to walk to lifetime mastery, this is not some future technology that will take years to develop. We can get started today.

For Raydon’s entire history we have studied any data our customers could provide (force structure, equipment, unit geographic distribution, force generation path, and weapons systems). We built study models to fill in the gaps with averages and statistical estimates to project future cost and demand profiles.

We helped our customers articulate modern methods of delivering effective and blended cognitive and psychomotor simulation drill sets. These were designed for gunnery and maneuver, with mission-oriented measures of effectiveness.

The Pathway to Targeted Innovation

A single publishing platform is the pathway to targeted innovation. VTX delivers six main user experiences: • Training Experience Designer• Instructor/Operator• Observer Controller for gunnery playback and maneuver AAR• Training Manager (site and enterprise levels)• Service Technicians and Logistics Staff (site and enterprise)• Training Enterprise Analysts across all the Army branches


The goal is to guide each user to move seamlessly between SymVantage (engines and tools), TEMPO (science, money and logistics data), and Xtreme Combat (competitive “symnasium”). If we were in charge, on day one we would invite every Army simulation contractor to publish their tools, technologies, frameworks, and components – establishing the expectation of competitive collaboration. But they would be collaborating on a common hardware platform that is software agnostic. The enabling piece is Raydon’s Hardware API (HAPI).

Core Infrastructure Framework Raydon is one of the only companies to have invested seriously in the vision of scalable and configurable simulations-based training infrastructures. Others talked about it. We did it. We have identified and adapted our infrastructures to five areas of constant change:

(1) Mission. (2) Equipment. (3) Enemy Tactics and Doctrine. (4) Attractive COTS. (5) Science of Human Performance.

Our core framework has been upgraded five times over the last two decades. SymVantage is a mature software framework. It is the only one of its kind to deliver nested training (individual to combined arms) in a multi-fidelity network.


Big Data. Big Math. The US Army can realize the gains of future overmatch possibilities through training telemetry. The more we know about the correlation between hours, fidelity, proficiency, mastery, and the individual Soldier, the more we will be able to streamline training progressions -- saving time and money. Precisely collected training data can offer a whole new combat multiplier to future leaders.

Accelerate. Over Raydon’s long study of training systems, we have been honored to deliver fully integrated electro-mechanical simulations training to Soldiers in a time of war. The Soldier feedback we received -- that our science-based strategies saved lives in high-intensity combat -- gave great meaning and value to our entire workforce. We want to do more. We believe elite human performance is best revealed through competition. The US Army training infrastructure can provide a safe environment to try something dangerous in pursuit of

feats of excellence. Raydon envisions this will be the future of training. Competition builds acceptance, builds utilization, increases Soldier training time, and accelerates readiness training beyond proficiency toward lethality.

Imagine every minute of every Soldier’s virtual practice, across every platform, collected remotely, scored, and available for the Army to publish internally. Imagine force-on-force competition revealing best practices, bringing the best out of every Soldier. Can the next great Army weapon be a quantum leap in human performance? Thinking up, we say yes!


HAPI: Infrastructure Enabler

Raydon can help the Army establish a standard, multi-platform, multi-functional, multi-fidelity baseline that will enable an interconnected training infrastructure with the power and flexibility to sustain itself for decades.

Raydon’s Hardware Application Programming Interface (HAPI) enables the transfer of information between software applications and a wide variety of hardware devices. It eliminates the need for reprogramming by allowing modifications to be incorporated with simple changes to configuration settings.

HAPI comes with a sizeable library of pre-built hardware device plugins and data converters and a software development kit that allows end users to create their own hardware device plugins and data converters.

The important thing to know about HAPI is that it is the secret behind Raydon’s performance guarantee. It ensures we can quickly design, configure and integrate a wide variety of virtual training capabilities – from handheld to full-motion institutional – without having to reinvent

the wheel.

HAPI means the Army will never be stuck in vendor lock and can continue to adapt to changing technology and changing requirements over time. For the Government, there is an added benefit – the ability to test competing software on the same hardware in real time.

Performance Optimization

The US Army can only have the strategy it can afford. That means business cases still rule. The Army Futures Command must reconcile out-of-the-box modernization capabilities and costs against long-term priorities.

We are proposing the first generation of a revolution in combat training tools. Training Enterprise Management Performance Optimization (TEMPO) is designed for the US Army by a team of committed problem solvers. Team Raydon.


We want to simplify all US Army training enterprise business cases. We think daily remote monitoring can, and should, feed modeling and what-if analyses with reliable and reconciled training data.

Strong, provocative, and inciteful language follows: We need to retire the OPTEMPO mile.

Tracking cost per soldier-training-hour and average hours to mission proficiency can greatly simplify resource planning and allocation. FORSCOM and DA G3s want to assure the best resources are in the right locations at the right time, cost-certain. FORSCOM needs freedom and latitude to change and adapt force-wide resources based on projections of possible missions and realigned priorities.

In the new paradigm, TRADOC studies precision data from elite combat performers and compares to Army-wide averages. TRADOC can study operational force training across time to identify effectiveness improvement practices and opportunities.

But the commander is the one truly transformed. All prior training strategies and outcomes are in play. Strategic training plans with empirically proven hours and outcomes will forever change how Soldiers of the future experience electricity-based training. The commander will have dozens of prior studied training TTPs that can be adapted to current threat arrays and missions.


For Leaders, Solutions For 32 years, Raydon has been building toward a Soldier-centered vision for the Army, cultivating and curating our technology toward a differentiated capability that is grounded in data and able to quickly adapt to never-ending change. It is a whole-Army vision with a holistic view of an integrated, vendor-agnostic training infrastructure. Raydon is committed to giving the US Army tools to train Soldiers beyond proficiency on all the battlefields of the future. Thinking up, Raydon believes this training infrastructure approach, VTX, will address many of the simulation training needs and concerns of Army and government leaders.

Leader Concerns Raydon Solutions Owned by the Government Government’s Choice. Lease/Rental options available.

Cost-effective Yes. Standardized infrastructure design ends stove-piped systems; HAPI enables direct competition, on both capability and cost.

Simple, uniform, flexible Yes. The RVCT hardware framework can scale to multiple fidelities

Quickly and easily accessible Yes. RVCT is portable to the point of need, sets up in 5 minutes

Transportable Yes. Packed in self-contained cases, loaded on pallets, ready to go

Measurable Yes. TEMPO accesses data hooks, serves as a repository, translates and reconciles data

Interoperable Yes. In every sense, since the SIMNET XXI program in 2001

Utilized, accepted by Soldiers Yes. Through rapid prototyping contributions and structured competition.

Cloud-, Haptic-, biometric-, enabled

Yes. HAPI simplifies the addition of any hardware functionality regardless of the source

Cybersecure Yes. Absolutely


A Challenge

Raydon’s objective is to initiate a dialog about the future of Army simulation training. The principles presented here are valid and important; the methods are open to debate.

Time is of the essence. The disciplined measurement of efficiency, effectiveness and time is the key to unlocking the performance optimization potential behind every Soldier hour, every taxpayer dollar, and every whole-Army skill required for readiness.

Competitive collaboration, within standard hardware and software frameworks, will direct innovation toward human performance improvement objectives – prioritizing future-focused solutions over risk mitigation.

Acquisition itself becomes a direct competition. While time to proficiency informs the quantity of training systems required, cost to proficiency can become the objective equalizer in acquisition decisions.

Raydon is not afraid to compete. This VTX infrastructure concept carries with it the underlying assumption that we will have to compete every step of the way.

Raydon can start delivering and recording hours today. We gladly offer these capabilities under an evolving risk-free service. Challenge us.


Don Ariel Founder & CEO Raydon Corporation [email protected] (386) 295-7474

Cory McAndrew Director, Business Development Raydon Corporation [email protected] (386) 871-0953

mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]

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April 2020 · 2020. 7. 13. · A data-grounded, Soldier-centered strategy for 21st Century US Army training Readiness is a whole-Army objective. Training for readiness requires a