DSET 2025: Dutch Army update on Training Data Exploitation
The Royal Netherlands Army (RNLA) provided an update on its progress halfway through the second phase of its Training Data Exploitation (TDX-2) project, delivered by the British defence analytics company Cervus.
Major Sander Cruiming, staff officer knowledge, innovation, and policy, RNLA Simulation Centre Land Warfare, posed the lessons learned from the concept capability demonstrator during the Defence Simulation, Education, and Training (DSET) conference in Bristol on 8 July 2025.
TDX-2 aims to improve the way the RNLA interpret military training data in the after action review (AAR) stage, to augment troop performance. But also the project seeks to realise how data analytics at this granular level can be implemented persistently.
“If you’ve been fighting for eight hours, you don’t have the luxury to spend another eight hours talking – minute to minute – [about] what you’ve done and what you could have done better,” Cruiming explained. “But it inherently means that all the data in between those events that we have discussed gets thrown away on a very large scale”.
Cruiming noted Dutch Army priority metrics, including ammunition effectiveness, medical timelines, obstacle crossing times, and live fire analysis.
Bottom-up approach
He also emphasised the “bottom-up approach” the Netherlands is taking, in which the Army can use data extraction tools without waiting on the government to deliver large IT projects, for which Cruiming suggested it did not have a good track record.
This contrasts, he said, with the UK’s ongoing Collective Training Transformation Programme (CTTP). Here, the UK Ministry of Defence directs the programme and defines the ultimate goals.
However, it should be noted that the UK government is working closely with users and industry in a spiral development approach.
Legacy systems
The most significant challenge Cruiming identified is the need to standardise data analytics. However, this is difficult when military technologies evolved in distinct siloes and you have numerous simulators for specific trainign scenarios.
Industry is leading the way in overcoming this pluralism by delivering system-agnostic live, virtual and constructive (LVC) platforms. Cubic Defense has made some strides in bringing all US Air Force assets together based out of the Pacific ocean territory of Guam last year.
“It is very difficult getting data from our current legacy systems, because they were not built for it… We never asked them to be able to extract the data,” Cruiming observed.
However, the Nato military alliance is currently pursuing training data analytics standard under NMSG-234. In the meantime, the RNLA use HLA and DIS – gateways their legacy simulators do have.
