Inzpire Limited’s (Inzpire) Maritime Division has successfully designed and delivered an updated training scenario and the supporting Operational Staff Work (OSW) documents to the Royal Navy’s Fleet Operational Standards and Training (FOST) Ships organisation. The scenario has been designed to support varying levels of complexity for different training audiences in several locations: from patrol vessels through to aircraft carriers.

In order to modernise the scenario, Inzpire’s maritime training experts – many of whom have recent operational Royal Navy experience – conducted an extensive phase of face-to-face consultancy sessions to truly understand the operator perspective and to capture real-world feedback from unit to 2* organisation level.

This consultancy phase included a four-day intensive “sprint”, which set out to understand the FOST team’s experience and ambitions for the scenario development. In addition, Inzpire personnel engaged with almost 20 frontline defence stakeholders from across the RN and MOD. This approach resulted in over 300 data points and overwhelming evidence themes supporting the case to modernise the existing scenario.  

Two detailed working groups were also conducted with the FOST team to incorporate feedback and refine the documents in line with customer demands.

The result created an immersive and realistic training scenario which will allow FOST to better train warships to conduct high-end, task-group-centred warfighting as a principal warfare commander, against a peer or near peer adversary. The new, modernised scenario means FOST will be able to challenge its training audiences – including UK, NATO and multi-national warships – in a more diverse and demanding manner, across the full spectrum of constant competition, crisis and conflict.

However, the modernised scenario extends far beyond just maritime training: Inzpire’s Maritime Division was able to draw on wider subject matter expertise from the company’s cyber and space divisions, as well Inzpire teams embedded within 92 Sqn and the Air and Space Warfare Centre to produce realistic scenario hooks in non-maritime domains.

This scenario modernisation project is the latest in a long line of maritime projects in which Inzpire has supported the Royal Navy and wider defence stakeholders with. In the last twelve months, Inzpire has worked on the Platform Enabled Training Concept distributed synthetic concept demonstration for The Carrier Strike Group; and Exercise Sharpshooter, which involved the firing of live ammunition from medium and close-range weapons against remote controlled surface vessels.