Lockheed Martin U.K. Information Systems & Global Services will provide training assistance and support to Turkish C4ISR company Savunma Teknolijileri Muhendislik Ve Ticaret (STM.)

Working with Northrop Grumman, which will provide specialist simulation systems, Lockheed Martin will deliver services over a two-year period under a $5.9 million contract. Over the following three years, STM will implement the training solutions for the Turkish armed forces.

The training services deal is a subset of a contract that the Turkish Undersecretariat for Defense Industries (SSM) awarded STM to supply a range of Link 16 tactical datalink services to the Turkish armed forces.

The training, which will involve between 12 and 16 Lockheed Martin personnel and twice that number from STM, will be a “train the trainers” solution, providing knowledge and expertise to the Turkish military to develop its own network-based defense system.

“This is all about training the trainers — it’s about 70 percent knowledge transfer and 30 percent hardware and software,” said Paul Casey, Lockheed Martin IS&GS business development manager.

Casey said the training will focus on three major areas: A general introduction to advanced tactical datalinks, their operation and management in the battlespace; more specialized electronic warfare training; and an interoperability management process for the Turkish military.

The interoperability process will be based on Lockheed Martin’s Interoperability Systems Management and Requirements Transformation (iSMART) system. iSMART is a toolset that will allow the Turkish armed forces to develop methods of entering data into its national and NATO datalinks to provide better levels of interoperability with NATO and other coalition partners.

The training will be delivered in three forms.

“Instructor-led training in the classroom comes first — we have just completed the first element of this — followed by computer-based training for advanced datalinks and electronic warfare and then finally a period of one-to-one or one-to-two training in a laboratory-based environment to allow instructors to train the operators,” Casey said.

A suite of real-time and non-real-time systems and tools will also be provided under the Lockheed Martin contract, which will extend over a two-year period. These include TIGER, a scenario generation tool from Northrop Grumman San Diego that provides training in testing datalink integration and MANDRIL, PUMA and CIVET, software toolsets developed by Lockheed Martin to augment and enhance the capabilities of TIGER. CIVET, for example, is a real-time automated analysis tool.

“About seven-eighths of the training will be aimed at how to develop and focus the relevant document suites to enable the armed forces to augment their current capability. It’s a 24-month program to learn how to manipulate and exploit the process before the longer-term implementation and exploitation phase begins,” Casey said.

— Tim Mahon