News story

£2.8 million available for innovations that help deliver a realistic human training environment

This Themed Competition seeks innovations that will help deliver a realistic and credible representation of the real world to train British Army personnel in the land environment.

An image of a British Army soldier looking out into a crowd of people
  • DASA has launched a new Themed Competition: Populating the World of Training
  • The competition is funded by the British Army in support of the Future Collective Training System (FCTS)
  • Up to £2.8 million in funding available for innovations that help transform the Army’s training systems to deliver a more realistic and credible representation of the real world

The Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA) is pleased to launch a new Themed Competition, Populating the World of Training: Phase 1. Run on behalf of the British Army in support of the Future Collective Training System (FCTS), this competition seeks to help the British Army transform its training systems to deliver a more realistic representation of the real world.

Key dates and funding

£2.8 million (Exc. VAT) funding is available for this Themed Competition.

The deadline to submit a proposal is midday 2 May 2023.

Do you have a disruptive idea or concept? Read the full competition document and submit a proposal.

The importance of representing the human terrain

The British Army is transforming its training systems to deliver a more realistic representation of the human terrain.

What is the human terrain?

British Army doctrine describes this human terrain as A3E: Audiences, Actors, Adversaries and Enemies.

  • Audiences are those groups and individuals whose perceptions and interpretation of events and subsequent behaviour contribute to the success or otherwise of military action.

  • Actors are those individuals or groups who take action or directly exert influence. They include British forces and allies, as well as others who are friendly, neutral or hostile.

  • Adversaries are a hostile sub-set of actors; those groups and individuals who seek to prevent friendly forces from achieving their objectives.

  • Enemies are those who seek to oppose friendly forces through armed, lethal means.

This Themed Competition seeks innovations that deliver scalable, configurable, consistent and seamless representation of A3E behaviours across the Live, Virtual and Constructive (LVC) environments.

This challenge does not anticipate proposals that only focus on the provision of live “players”.

Populating the World of Training: Challenge areas

This Themed Competition has five challenge areas.

Challenge 1: A flexible human terrain

This challenge area seeks innovations that represent the human terrain, such as threat representations that are consistent, both within and across the LVC environments.

Challenge 2: A credible suite of players

This challenge area seeks innovations that enable the capability to test the training audience against a broad range of differentiated threats, from hostile civilians to organised insurgents and traditional state actors.

Challenge 3: Representative threat systems

This challenge area seeks innovations that help represent different threats, from peer + threats, to threats below the threshold of conflict across the physical, digital, political and social environments.

Challenge 4: Remote and Autonomous Systems

This challenge area seeks innovations that help represent increasing autonomy in the environment, such as Remote and Autonomous Systems (RAS) and layered intelligence.

Challenge 5: A credible Information Environment

This challenge area seeks innovations to help represent a realistic and contested cyber and electromagnetic environment.

Learn more about the five challenge areas in the full competition document.

Supporting events

Webinar

17 March 2023

This webinar will provide more information on the challenge areas and how to submit a proposal. There will also be an opportunity to ask questions in the Q&A.

Register now

One-to-one sessions

21 March 2023 & 23 March 2023

A series of 15 minute one-to-one teleconference sessions, giving you the opportunity to ask questions.

Industry Collaboration Survey

We encourage collaboration between organisations for this competition. If you are interested in a collaboration, please complete the survey and your details will be circulated among other potential suppliers who have completed the survey and are interested in collaborating.

Register now

Submit a proposal

Do you have a potentially disruptive idea or concept that will help the British Army transform its training systems to deliver a more realistic representation of the real world? Submit your idea and help Defence deliver more realistic and credible training representative of the human terrain.

Learn more and submit a proposal.

Updates to this page

Published 7 March 2023