Meet Calian's Defence Experts: An interview with Jay “Hoss” Ballard
Learn more from Jay about how Calian’s training solutions are shaping armies of tomorrow.
Learn more about Calian defence solutionsWhat is involved in your role as Calian’s Vice President of Defence Learning?
I was promoted to Vice President of the Calian Learning business unit’s Defence division last year and am responsible for Calian’s global military training delivery. My role includes overseeing training and education delivery for several training establishments in Canada with our biggest effort being supporting the Canadian Army Simulation Centre, where we design, develop and deliver collective and individual training to the Canadian Army. We also have a large presence at NATO’s Joint Warfare Centre (JWC) in Stavanger, Norway, where we support major, annual operational level exercises. I’m also responsible for the Calian Learning technology and innovation team, which develops and evolves our interoperability applications that make all major simulation systems talk to each other and drive several different command-and-control systems to create an immersive synthetic training environment that lets the client train like they’re going to fight.
How is Calian expanding its military training solutions across Europe?
We continue to expand across Europe due to the demand for our military training services that deliver no-fail, end-to-end, immersive training and educational experiences that efficiently maximize unit and organization readiness to fight and win wars. In Europe, we have taken two and a half decades of proven military training expertise and developed that into exportable models that are modified to accommodate European market requirements. In other words, we take the best, proven techniques from our existing model and then adjust it to provide a bespoke, exceptional training experience for each nation or organization outside of Canada. We are growing our European Calian team through strategic acquisitions, most recently with the acquisition of a great UK company, Mabway, which specializes in live training, role players, actors and battlefield effects simulation for the British Army. Mabway has a long track record of support to large military exercises with role-playing environments that simulate real-world situations, but they also deliver technical and engineering education to maritime forces. The acquisition of Mabway brings new capabilities and new possibilities for Calian in the British, European and Middle East defence markets.
Calian is also organically growing contracts with existing clients that build on successful exercise and training support. Recently, the Calian team expanded our presence at the NATO Joint Force Training Centre in Bydgoszcz, Poland, to support increased training requirements. We also have highly experienced battle staff training teams that help NATO operational command staffs prepare for major exercises and deployments. Our extensive NATO work requires deeply experienced individuals and teams to provide a cutting-edge, war fighting advantage to the Alliance. That can be demonstrated by the tasks we support, such as providing teams to develop master events list (MEL) and master injects list (MIL), incident/event development and scripting workshops, and providing direct support to the exercise control training and execution phases. Calian provides subject matter experts with experience from a range of backgrounds including government, non-governmental organizations (NGO), and international organizations. To highlight a few examples, Calian has delivered the LOYAL LEDA exercises since 2020 and we are pleased to be continuing this legacy of delivery. Calian also expanded into new areas of work for NATO in 2024, winning a contract with the NATO Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) to develop and conduct chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) training, with evaluation and training support components. This project supports NATO’s CBRN defence capability by improving their ability to continue operations during a major conflict after an opponent has used a weapon(s) of mass destruction.
With leading-edge technology solutions, Calian has expanded training offerings to meet the evolving needs of NATO and its member countries. Calian has consistently worked alongside NATO at the JWC, Allied Command Transformation (ACT) and across ACO to find solutions that offer the best value to NATO; adapting to changes to ensure the right services are provided in the most effective and efficient ways possible.
As “mission partners”, the Calian team has seen an increased demand for end-to-end, realistic and immersive military training across NATO and NATO member nations–which is something we have decades of experience delivering.
Within the Calian team there is a wealth of military expertise. Did you also previously serve in the military?
Yes, I had a 23-year career in the US Navy. I retired as a Commander and finished my career with almost 4,000 hours in fighter jets, five international deployments and held every possible advanced qualification as a naval aviator to include US Navy Fighter Weapons School (Topgun) Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor, Adversary Instructor Pilot (Topgun) and Carrier Air Wing THREE Combat Strike Leader. I have an extensive background in defence, especially in air operations and joint warfare.
Once I retired, I moved to Canada as an independent contractor and worked with the U.S. Navy Postgraduate School for defence institution building in Central and Eastern Europe, which included many workshops in Ukraine. Additionally, I spent 13 years as a directing staff at the Canadian Forces College, six years as a directing staff at the RCAF Aerospace Warfare Centre and then four years ago I was hired by Calian to run the Canadian Army Simulation Centre contract. Over my career I have been involved in many different aspects of military training.
The majority of the Calian team are ex-military and that is important when working directly with the military. Almost all of our team have a career’s worth of going through military training as the trainee, so they understand how to make training resonate with the client to provide an exceptional training experience.
Does Calian’s military training within NATO continue to expand?
Yes, Calian has been delivering training for, and with, NATO for 15 years, delivering over 75 large-scale exercises. The Calian team continues to support large, complex NATO exercises, providing subject matter experts, scenario developers and master events lists. Given NATO’s increased focus on readiness after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, these exercises are crucial for joint and multinational operations, including the integration of air, land and sea forces working together in all domains including space, cyber, electromagnetic and information domains. We seek to reflect the current operational and tactical realities in the battlespace and try to anticipate how things might continue to evolve so that NATO can prepare forces that are ready and adaptive to the accelerated pace of combat.
How does synthetic training enhance military training to shape the armies of tomorrow?
Our synthetic training replicates realistic units and effects in simulation and command and control systems. We do this so the training audience is immediately immersed in the training environment, which will improve the transfer of training, and they will learn more, faster. You can put trainees in highly hazardous situations so they can experience a “worst case scenario” and work through those situations without losing personnel or equipment. Then you can pull out lessons learned, rework the plan and try it again.
Because the units and organizations train in simulation, there is no requirement to move hundreds of vehicles to a training area, burning massive amounts of fuel and firing costly ammunition until you are ready for the live field training confirmation exercises. Processes, procedures and tactics can be practiced and refined in simulation so when the troops hit the field, they are starting from a high level of competence and can immediately begin integrated operations instead of standing around with their hands in their pockets waiting to start training from the basics.
What are some of the things we at Calian do to support synthetic training?
Well, we create an immersive synthetic training environment which includes a region for operations which may or may not be real. The synthetic training area may look a lot like a particular nation with real-world terrain and population centres or it could be completely fictional depending on the training objectives and desired outcomes. We create interactions within that simulated world, so that the trainee is talking with and interacting with the same supporting organizations and agencies they would expect in real life. This supports immersion.
Immersive training in virtual environments
Immersing the training audience in a virtual environment provides a very cost-effective alternative to relying on live training alone and does so with much lower risk of injury. Immersive environments allow trainees to make mistakes and learn from them, increasing the learning value of training.
How are you integrating recent lessons learned into military training?
Depending on the training objectives for the exercise, we integrate the best examples that will trigger the training audience to respond to stimulus that takes them through those training objectives. For instance, for an exercise focused on major combat operations, we would select the war in Ukraine and pull current lessons learned from that conflict to use in the training experience. For counter-insurgency training, we would use examples from Afghanistan or Iraq. Then we would determine how best to reflect those lessons learned injects in the synthetic training environment.
From concept to execution to after-action review, Calian’s training tools provide us with the ability to deliver injects using a variety of methods. We can use virtual or constructive simulation systems to show the training audience the inject or we could push it via message traffic or phone calls–or even have a role player show up with bad news.
The powerful Calian technology provides us with the ability to integrate simulation systems, drive different command and control systems and extract data for analytics in our Virtual Command and Control Interface (VCCI). VCCI is our advanced interoperability solution for military training and analysis that lets up deliver the highest level of realism to the client. VCCI seamlessly integrates simulation data and command-and-control applications, which builds integrated synthetic environments for complex, multi-agency, multi-national training, while capturing data for real-time or post-event analysis–which is key for learning lessons and training retention.
How is Calian meeting NATO’s requirements for more multinational military training programmes?
As a global military training leader, Calian uses a blend of technology solutions, modelling and simulation, and the experience and expertise of its international team to design, develop and deliver training to meet NATO’s training objectives. Calian’s proven technology makes developing and delivering computer-aided exercises in a common synthetic training environment possible. Using NATO-standard methods and approaches for training development and delivery, Calian integrates subject matter experts with deep military experience and industry-leading simulation technologies to design, develop and deliver cost-effective training experiences.
Calian has a large presence in NATO and we are delivering numerous multinational training programmes which are effective and cost-efficient. Multinational group training is representative of how NATO wants to fight because, in recent years, most nations have reduced the size of their military, so it’s truly collective defence, in name as well as in practice. At Calian we have training experts from almost every NATO nation, which means we can accurately replicate multinational units and organizations to improve realistic interactions. Our targeting specialists help the training audience shorten the kill chain, which is a critical requirement that we see on the battlefield in Ukraine. We also offer specialist training courses in a broad range of tasks like chemical, biological and nuclear.
Bottom line, these capabilities result in better trained, adaptive and more lethal forces that will be able to operate and succeed in this increasingly uncertain geopolitical reality.
Why does Calian combine virtual and live military training?
Live field training is essential for unit-level readiness training. Before being deployable, you have to verify that your forces can advance to the field, support and sustain themselves during a fight, and can manoeuvre and project power. Unfortunately, this is an increasingly expensive option. Simulation training can help forces maximize their training budgets by providing realistic, immersive training in synthetic environments. Simulation-based training allows units to work as a team in a synthetic environment, in preparation of deploying to the field for live training. This allows for joint and multinational training at a fraction of the cost.
Commanders need to make decisions much broader than a battlegroup in a small area. So, the Calian team wrap the synthetic training around the live training to give the commander a much broader problem to work with. By combining virtual and live military training we are enabling them to practice warfare at a higher level. The training audience goes through all the procedures that you would expect for a much larger force fight.
