Delivering Cultural Competence

[nichols]

Unfortunately, the British Army is only a little over 100K strong (and likely to get smaller in the 2010 Strategic Defence Review) and so there is no spare capacity to enable our personnel to target their learning in this way.

This is where the UK acquisition bubbas need to get together when they are developing new training devices. Your total active duty manpower for October was just under 180k. I've seen contractors deliver training systems to individual units and being paid by those units for use only in those units. Specific to the Corps' language and culture stuff, we contract .mil wide licenses but pay USMC only license costs. UK MOD hould probably look aty contracting for the total force which in the long run will bring the price down.

We are beginning to get the Operational Language & Culture Training System (OLCTS). This consists of an initial language/culture acquisition via desktop of server, a sustainment piece for the iTouch, and a mission rehearsal piece for the first person shooter game. I was briefing/demonstrating these capabilities to members of the UK Army 2 weeks ago at I/ITSEC. It could have been just a drive by from the Brits but they were saying that they intended on getting this capability to thier units.