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Simulations much more than games

by derekpa

Appearing in Financial Review, Defence feature, 22 June 2017

 

Game-based computer simulations have become a key element in the training of ADF personnel, underpinning the high performance of troops in the field. There are Battle Simulation Centres in the military bases in Darwin, Townsville, Brisbane, Adelaide and Puckapunyal, and across the branches of the ADF. There is also the Australian Defence College Simulation Centre which provides simulation services and advice on soldier and officer training, and the government recently committed $500 million to fund a major simulation facility in Adelaide to ensure that the ADF’s electronic warfare systems are capable of standing up to modern threats.

“The ADF is in the top tier of military services around the world in the use of computer simulations,” says Pete Morrison, co-CEO of Bohemia Interactive Simulations, a global supplier of software training packages. “The Australian Army was one of the first to grasp the value of this technology and is seen as one of the most innovative in its use and development.”

Training simulations can represent the actual terrain of a combat theatre, such as a plain in Afghanistan or a town in Iraq, and can provide a remarkably realistic combat experience. They can operate at the individual level or commander level, with a range of conditions and limitations.

But Morrison emphasises that the point of theatre simulations is not to re-create reality in every detail.

“It’s a model, an approximation,” he says. “The aim is to give as much information as is necessary to make the training effective. Yes, you can keep adding more and more detail, but that requires more computer power, and we want packages that are not only simple to use but can be loaded onto laptop computers and even phones.”

Morrison points out that Bohemia grew out of the gaming sector, starting with a successful game called Operation Flashpoint. One part of the company still makes games but it was the development of a package called the Virtual Battle Space simulator that moved it into the military training field. ADF personnel have used the VBS simulator since 2005, when VBS1 was used to train soldiers deploying to Iraq.

The package is now in its third generation, and in the ADF it runs on over a thousand desktop computers as well as many other devices. The VBS package, however, is a long way from a shoot-‘em-up video game.

“What it is really about is teaching cognitive thinking,” Morrison says. “It is a way to test tactics and techniques in a risk-free environment. With so much terrain data available – effectively, the whole planet – it allows for detailed scenario training and mission rehearsal.”

Screenshot 1 - ADF vehicle simulationAlthough VBS3 is meant as a model of reality, much greater realism is required in areas such as flight simulators. These need a high level of detail in the immediate environment of the cockpit as well as what the pilot sees when he or she looks ‘outside’. This requires more computing power, although new developments in the technology are allowing a move away from room-like simulators towards desktop options.

Morrison sees a generational difference in attitudes toward training simulations. Younger people, who have grown up with screen-based technology, grasp it very quickly. Older people sometimes find it difficult, often expecting it to be more realistic. But practice with the packages usually helps to bring people up to the required level.

The simulation package starts in a generic form and is then tailored to the needs of each client or situation. Aside from packages like VBS3, there are packages designed for specific task training. One of the packages considered to be most successful for the ADF is an immersive trainer for helicopter loadmasters, called Aircrewman Virtual Reality Simulators.

Integrating virtual reality into simulations is seen as a crucial path forward. It is already happening in flight training and vehicle training, to the degree that tank simulators can create images of ‘enemies’ through the gunsight.Screenshot 2 - ADF copter simulation

But Morrison is aware of the current limitations of simulations.

“You can build any sort of training environment, from a foot patrol to a tank battle,” he says. “But those operations are only one part of the modern combat theatre. They won’t help you much with personal relations, such as winning the hearts and minds of a group of villagers. So we see that aspect of interactivity as a new frontier for us.

“To date, the anecdotal feedback we have received from people who have trained with simulations and then gone into the field has been positive. We see this technology as a highly valuable tool for people who are, in the end, putting their lives on the line. It’s the difference between going in prepared and going in not really knowing what to expect.”  

 

 

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Lost and Found

by derekpa

From the Edge: Australia’s Lost Histories
By Mark McKenna
Melbourne University Press, $35, 251 pages, ISBN 9780522862591

1787: The Lost Chapters of Australia’s Beginnings
By Nick Brodie
Hardie Grant, $30, 294 pages, ISBN 9781743791608

From the Edge

The study of Australia’s early history can be a tricky field. There have been more than a few polemicists who have eschewed true research, instead searching for any bits and pieces that can be spun into a black-armband version of events. But thankfully there are still some historical writers who believe in the value of primary research. There is, indeed, much to say about Australia’s early (white) history, and many important things to understand about the interactions between the new arrivals and the indigenous peoples.

McKenna, with a number of well-regarded books under his belt, finds some remarkable stories. In one, he examines how a group of five British sailors and twelve Bengali seamen staggered ashore at Ninety Mile Beach in Victoria in 1797, after a shipwreck in Bass Strait. Short on luck and options, they decided to walk the 700 kilometres along the coast to Sydney. On the way they encountered several Aboriginal tribes; they would have soon perished without their help. Astonishingly, three of them made it (although they were rescued by a fishing boat forty kilometres from Sydney). It is a remarkable story, and it is surprising that it is not better-known.

Other ventures into the unknown were more deliberate, such as the attempt to found a “new Singapore” at Port Essington in West Arnhem Land in the 1840s. It lasted for a decade but never really had much chance. There are still a few remnants of the site although the main legacy was introduced animals, such as buffaloes, pigs and wild dogs.

At least, there, the white would-be settlers tried to understand the indigenous people. But at the Burrup Peninsula the early relationship, based on the pearling industry, was exploitative to the point of slavery. McKenna acknowledges that gas companies now working in the area try to be sensitive but he wonders if industry and indigenous cultural heritage can be compatible. He points to some remarkable rock art, such as the millennia-old thylacine engraving on Angel Island, and notes that it is entirely unprotected, even while remains of a nearby European settlement barely a century old have been carefully preserved.

Perhaps the most significant chapter in the book deals with Cooktown, established at the place where the damaged Endeavour came ashore for repairs. The event was recorded in detail in Aboriginal lore, and comparing those records with the writings of the ship’s officers illustrates the size of the gulf of between the cultures.

In fact, north Queensland saw some of the most horrific violence of the settlement period. But when McKenna speaks with elders and other representatives of the indigenous people of the area around Cooktown, who are entirely aware of the consequences of the Cook landing, he finds little bitterness. Instead, there is an admirable desire to cast aside victimhood and look to the future.

This shows something significant about the methodology of the book: McKenna’s willingness to get down to the roots, to get his hands dirty and his skin sunburned. He certainly did a huge amount of academic research in libraries, working through old journals and musty records. But he also walked through the area along the south-east coast and hiked through difficult country to get the feel of the places he writes about. He is sympathetic to indigenous people and the bad historical hand they were dealt but he also recognises the values of Euro-Australian culture, and he appreciates that there has been a sustained push for better understanding in the past several decades.

How far that understanding can go is an open question: reading this book, there is a feeling that perhaps the chasm can never be truly bridged. But digging into stories beyond the official history is a way forward, and can provide an important extra layer to the national consciousness.1787

In 1787, Brodie challenges the notion that European history in Australia began with the British, although he is looking in a different direction, to pre-Cook discoveries and encounters. It is not new to say that Cook was not the first white person to see and land on the Australian shore but Brodie provides a far richer picture.

The Spanish were among the first to reach the area, with a small fleet sailing west from their colony in Peru in 1605. Their aim was to reach the Spanish colony in the Philippines but they were happy to explore, giving islands and other features names as they found them. In fact, one of the ship captains was Luis Vaes de Torres, after whom the Torres Strait was named.

This fleet found indications of a vast – and inhabited – southern continent but it was the next wave, sailing eastwards and southwards from Asia, that started to fill in the blanks on the map. There were Dutch entrepreneurs looking for trading opportunities, French explorers looking for adventure, and English seafarers looking for, well, whatever wasn’t nailed down. Ships from Asian countries also visited the islands around Australia and the mainland, pushing the known frontier forward. At the same time, other explorers were finding the southern and eastern edges of the continent. But it became clear, when indigenous peoples were encountered, that the new land did not offer much in the way of economic opportunities, at least not the type being sought. One cannot help but think that Australian history could have turned out very differently, if there had been a little nudge here or a small accident there.

Taken together, these two books offer a more expansive version of Australia’s history, and both authors deserve credit. If there is an obligation to understand the past as a means of interpreting the present, this is good place to start.

Batteries to aid renewables transition

by derekpa

Appearing in Australian Financial Review (Energy Future feature), 15 May 2017

 

Grid batteries can offer a smoother path

Power generation from wind and solar systems has been steadily increasing as a part of the national grid but for a long time the issue of variability has been a stumbling block. The problem is obvious: when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining, there is no power to feed into the grid. But a new solution, large-scale batteries, has emerged as a viable technology.

Large-scale battery systems are often located with renewable energy plants, either to smooth the power supplied by intermittent output or to alleviate pressures on the grid at times of high demand.

“Batteries have unique strengths that complement different attributes of pumped hydro storage and demand management, including the capacity to respond to fluctuations in price or frequency very quickly,” says Ross Garnaut, Research Professor of Economics at the University of Melbourne and the chairman of Zen Energy, a company specialising in renewable energy and storage solutions. “And grid-scale battery storage is ready for immediate deployment. Decisions made now could have large impacts in six to nine months.”

In fact, techno-entrepreneur Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, tweeted in March that his company could build a 100 megawatt battery storage farm in South Australia within 100 days. This was not an idle promise: Tesla completed built a farm of comparable size in California last year in just 90 days, and others have been constructed even faster.

“There are scores of battery farm systems in operation in North America as well as in other countries as a means to balance increasing volumes of wind and solar energy,” says Garnaut. “What is holding development back in Australia is the regulatory framework, which actually gives generators opportunities to profit from actions that destabilise prices. Much of this is connected to the peculiar Australian practice of averaging settlement prices over half-hour periods. We need to move towards a national wholesale market that operates with a competitive spot or contract market, to take account of the stability provided by a grid battery system. This would be a market where providers respond to consumer price signals.”

Garnaut believes that reform has been hindered by the established players of the energy sector even though there is a broad recognition of the need for change in principle. In hindsight, the power problems experienced in South Australia last year might be a hidden blessing, insofar as they focused attention on the shortcomings of the existing grid system.

There are already some small-scale battery systems operating and several large-scale battery projects are in development. The first large-scale system to be rolled out is likely to be a farm planned for South Australia, on private land in the Riverland district. It is to be built by Lyon Group and Downer EDI, with backing from Mitsubishi and hedge fund Magnetar Capital. The $700 million project will involve a 330 megawatt solar farm and a 100MW battery capable of providing four hours of storage. Operation is planned to commence in December. It is touted as the largest solar-battery hybrid project in the world to date.

But the cost of grid battery systems remains an obstacle.

“At the moment, most of the battery systems operating or planned in Australia require some form of government subsidy or assistance,” says Professor Tapan Saha, an energy systems specialist from the University of Queensland. “But the prediction is that development and operating costs will come down as economies of scale emerge and the knowledge base increases. That is the pattern we have seen overseas. Costs will decline, and efficiency and operating safety will improve as well.

“But when we look at the long term we should also bear in mind power storage systems such as pumped hydro. Hydro has the advantage of a much longer operating life.”

While grid-scale battery storage is an obvious direction another option is also being explored. With domestic installation of solar systems growing, it is theoretically possible to link them together, with battery support, to create a ‘virtual power plant’ to supplement the grid. Power company AGL says it has so far signed up 175 households for a trial in Adelaide, with battery storage installed in 31. It hopes to complete a thousand installations by mid-2018, although there market design issues and technical issue to be overcome. If the problems can be overcome, the project could provide five megawatts to handle periods of peak demand.

Garnaut agrees that there is strong potential in de-aggregated systems for both generation and storage. He notes that Zen Energy is engaged in a pilot program in Adelaide, in partnership with the SA State Government and Adelaide city council.

“The energy future is about going outside the traditional parameters,” he says. “It is more likely to be a portfolio of options than a single centralised solution. It is about new thinking, to utilise new technology.”

Office politics

by derekpa

Appeared in Australian Spectator, 11 June 2016, http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/06/office-politics-2/

 

Office politics

Credlin & Co

Credlin & Co: How the Abbott Government Destroyed Itself

By Aaron Patrick

Black Inc, pp.320, $30.00, ISBN: 9781863958097

 

Settling the Office: The Australian Prime Ministership from Federation to Reconstruction

By Paul Strangio, Paul ‘t Hart and James Walter

Melbourne University Press, pp.312, $50.00, ISBN: 9780522868722

 

This book is not about what the title suggests. Yes, as Tony Abbott’s chief of staff Peta Credlin held a position of great influence and reflected power. But if Aaron Patrick is somehow implying that she ran the government, and that therefore the blame for its failure – and it did fail: regrettably, unfortunately, but undeniably – rests with her then he has misunderstood the nature of employment. Ultimately, the responsibility goes to Abbott and he alone.

This is not to deny the dynamic between them. Interestingly, Abbott inherited her when he rolled Malcolm Turnbull to become Opposition Leader, although it appears that they clicked early. They shared a world view and a perception of politics as based on ideology, conflict and control, even though their backgrounds were very different. Credlin came from rural Victoria and had worked her way up through the party machine, although she was never one of the backroom number-counters and conciliators.

There have been some very effective pairings in Australian politics, between PMs and senior ministers and also between leaders and staffers. But in most cases they have involved opposites that balanced each other’s strengths and compensated for weaknesses. With Abbott and Credlin, there was the opposite effect, mutually reinforcing the tendency for centralisation, personalisation, and meddling. Patrick devotes a good number of pages recounting how ministers had important decisions taken out of their hands by the PM’s office – the Minister for Defence in particular must have started to wonder what his job actually was – as well as the growing number of ‘captain’s picks’. Media management was centralised in the PMO, which might have worked, except that even senior journalists were treated as enemies to be controlled and, if needed, bludgeoned.

The problem with reading this is that none of it is particularly new. Patrick (a print editor with the Australian Financial Review) appears to have done his research by going through the Fairfax pile of press clippings, and as a result the book has an Age/SMH take on events (his 2013 book, Downfall: How the Labor Party Ripped Itself Apart, suffered similiarly). He airily dismisses the achievements of the Abbott government as ‘doing nothing to improve the lives of ordinary people’. He has little to say about the block-everything strategy of the opposition parties in the Senate, even if it meant voting against their own policies.

In the middle part of the book Patrick seems to lose the thread of what he is talking about. Why, for example, is there a chapter about Bill Shorten in this book? Why is there an excursion into the history of privatisation in New South Wales? There are long sections of the book in which Credlin and Abbott are hardly mentioned. It smells suspiciously like filler.

He is on stronger ground when he discusses the failure of Abbott to cultivate the backbench of his party, and to communicate with Senate crossbenchers. He notes that Howard, by contrast, spent a good deal of time talking with people, constantly testing the wind. Abbott played the role as quasi-presidential, and so was astonished when a chunk of the party expressed their dissatisfaction in the first spill-that-wasn’t attempt. He said he would learn from the experience, and for a while he did, but he soon reverted to type. And he made many decisions that were simply wrong. Significantly, it was a symbolic move, the award of a knighthood to Prince Phillip, which convinced many people that he would never get any better. Maybe he would have, if Credlin had not been there to assure him that everything was fine, but that is speculative.

When the Turnbull challenge came, it was a surprise that Abbott retained a measure of support. The tragedy of his leadership was that he was never able to make the transition from party chieftain to national leader. This is, mind you, a very difficult thing to do, and in recent memory only Howard and Hawke achieved it (the returns for Turnbull are not yet in). Yes, it was deeply unfair that the Left gave him no leeway, no respect of mandate, no benefit of the doubt. But it’s politics; fair doesn’t enter into it.

Patrick goes through these events in a workmanlike fashion but he never really digs deep. Why did Abbott raise such hatred amongst his opponents? One important case is when his daughter’s receipt of a scholarship was used as a weapon to attack him. This was a new low: an unwritten rule, to that time, had been that you never dragged in the family. Patrick describes the event but does not analyse it – presumably, he has no problem with this sort of tactic.

Likewise, he notes that the commentariat endlessly repeated the allegations over a wall-punching incident from Abbott’s university days but went very quiet when Shorten was accused of rape, a much more serious charge. Why? Why did the Left hate Abbott so much? It went beyond policy differences, beyond party antipathy, beyond rational explanation. And why did the Left (and, for that matter, the Right) so vociferously attack Credlin, when they might have been expected to give a strong-minded woman who had risen to the top a little praise, at least? Something else was at work, but Patrick backs away from asking the tough questions.

Despite all this, Credlin & Co is not an entirely bad book, despite the rather misleading title. It would have been much improved by broader sources of research and a willingness to delve more into root causes. Think of it, like the Abbott government, as an opportunity missed.

 

In case anyone was under the impression that being Prime Minister was easy, there is Settling the Office. It examines how the role developed through different leaders from Barton to Chifley, in a political environment that had not yet crystallised into a two-bloc system.

A key point is that the PM did not have a department of his own, and only a small office, so the job was more about co-ordination and management. Nevertheless, the outlines of the position as it would later operate started to emerge fairly early, especially in relation to Cabinet. But for the four decades after Federation, the PM role was a unique (and uniquely Australian) mix, a combination of muddle-through administration and get-it-done pragmatism. This book is a significant contribution to political history, and a reminder that everything has a beginning.