This article explains the reasoning behind that decision — not as a press release, but as a clear account of why I chose to accept the offer and join OneArc in this role now.

Why the Nordic and Baltic region

Finland and Sweden’s accession to NATO has transformed the strategic landscape of Northern Europe. NORDEFCO now operates as a unified entity within NATO. The demand for integrated, interoperable synthetic training environments that can sustain multinational readiness — not just facilitate periodic exercises — is becoming an operational necessity, fostering regional collaboration and modernisation.

Defence budgets across the region are increasing at rates not seen since the Cold War. Norway is expanding its Army from one to three brigades. Denmark is an established market for OneArc, with significant upsell potential. Finland has a strong simulation culture and a clear understanding of the threat environment. The Baltics are not marginal. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are among the highest defence spenders in NATO relative to GDP — Estonia committed to 5.4% from 2026, Lithuania aiming for 5–6%, Latvia moving towards 5% by 2028. These budgets are not aspirational; they involve funded procurement pipelines that, for the most part, have not yet been fully addressed by the market’s current integration solutions.

Beyond the immediate military clients, the systems integrator sector — including Kongsberg, Patria, BAE Systems Hägglunds, and the growing Baltic defence technology industry — offers additional opportunities with growth potential. These organisations understand simulation and interoperability and seek partners with credibility and product expertise to deliver at scale.

The market conditions, procurement timelines, and the strategic importance of regional defence simulation are aligned, making this the ideal moment to act and build credibility for our regional initiatives.

The LVC integration problem

Live, Virtual and Constructive (LVC) training has been the primary framework in defence training doctrine for the past twenty years. The concept is well recognised across the region and worldwide. However, the execution is not.

The reason is structural. LVC integration requires interoperability among fundamentally different simulation domains: instrumented live training systems, virtual simulation environments, and constructive simulation platforms. Each domain has its own data models, federation protocols, and vendor ecosystems. Making them work together — reliably, at scale, across national boundaries — is genuinely challenging.

Most organisations in this field address part of the problem. The integration layer — the architecture that connects those domains into a coherent training environment — has historically been left to the customer to solve.

I spent eight years on the customer side of that issue. As Head of the Norwegian Army Training & Simulation Centre, I was responsible for the Army’s LVC capability architecture. I know where integration fails in practice, how that failure manifests in training outcomes, and which governance decisions determine whether an LVC investment delivers operational impact or leads to institutional complexity.

What OneArc brings to the conversation

The 2025 merger of Bohemia Interactive Simulations and Pitch Technologies into OneArc combined a portfolio that contributes meaningfully to the LVC integration challenge — not as the sole solution, but as a substantial one.

VBS4 is in enterprise use across most Nordic militaries, supported by a training culture and scenario library built on years of institutional investment. Pitch Infrastructure provides federation architecture that connects simulation systems across domains and national boundaries using HLA and DIS standards — the open standards that enable interoperability across vendors and nations. TerraTools provides the terrain and environment foundation that underpins both, while Mantle simplifies managing geospatial data across simulation systems.

What matters to me about this portfolio is not that it replaces the ecosystem — it is that it works within it. The standards OneArc builds on are the same standards that enable other vendors, integrators, and nations to connect. Building a regional synthetic training capability requires components that integrate well with others and industry-wide thought leadership that unites us all.

I was a customer of these products before I joined the company. I led the Norwegian Army’s enterprise adoption of VBS4, Blue IG, TerraTools, Mantle, and Builder from the buyer’s side. I understand what the technology needs to deliver and the institutional realities of organisations that have to make it work. That experience is what I am bringing to this role.

From customer to colleague

The relationships I am bringing to this role were not formed at trade shows. They were built in operational settings — through training and exercises, procurement processes, and governance discussions where the focus was not on which product to buy but on how to develop a training capability that would genuinely improve how soldiers fight.

I spent much of the last decade arguing, from the customer’s perspective, that Norway, the Nordic region, and NATO needed a permanent LVC training infrastructure — not a series of ad hoc exercises with temporary setups. That argument is documented in my writing on this site. The market conditions for establishing that infrastructure are now in place.

Joining OneArc is not a departure from that work. It is a continuation of it — from a different seat.

The conversations I am about to have are ones I have, in many respects, already been part of for years. The only difference now is the perspective from which I engage with them.