About

Ken-Tore Saade Eriksen is a defence training and simulation leader with more than 38 years of service in the Norwegian Army, including over two decades dedicated to training systems, simulation capability and institutional governance of military readiness.

In April 2026 he joined OneArc as Business Development Director – Nordics & Baltics, working at the intersection of defence institutions and industry to support the development of modern training capability across the Nordic region and NATO.

Before moving into industry, he served as Head of the Norwegian Army Training & Simulation Centre from 2018 to 2026 — the Army’s senior national position for simulation policy, training governance and Live-Virtual-Constructive capability integration. In that role he held institutional responsibility for the Army’s simulation portfolio, linking procurement, doctrine, operational training and readiness measurement into a coherent governance framework.

Throughout his career he has held responsibility for:

• National simulation portfolio integration across Army structures
• Governance design for Live, Virtual and Constructive training environments
• Brigade and Division-level constructive training structures
• Alignment of simulation capability with doctrinal evolution
• Institutional transformation of training ownership models
• NATO engagement and multinational training coordination

Rather than managing isolated systems, his leadership has focused on structuring training as an institutional capability tied directly to operational output and readiness.

Alongside national leadership responsibilities, Ken-Tore has contributed to international dialogue on defence training and synthetic environments.

• Author of the Chief of the Norwegian Army’s keynote address at ITEC 2025
• Panel speaker at ITEC 2025 in Oslo
• Invited panel participant at ITEC 2026 in London on Training Transformation
• Active engagement with NATO and multinational training and simulation communities

These engagements reflect a professional profile shaped not only by national leadership but by active participation in the international conversation on how military training must evolve to remain operationally relevant.

Operational deployments to Lebanon, Bosnia and Syria provided first-hand experience of decision-making under uncertainty and multi-domain operational complexity. That experience shaped a principle applied consistently since:

For more than two decades Ken-Tore worked within the Norwegian Army at the intersection of training, simulation and operational capability development. That experience produced a perspective that is difficult to acquire from either side of the institutional boundary alone. He has seen where synthetic training ecosystems deliver genuine operational value, and where they fall short — not because the technology fails, but because the requirements, governance and integration decisions that surround it are inadequate.

The recurring pattern is not a technology problem. It is a requirements problem: connectivity, interoperability and the ability to operate across a coherent training architecture need to be designed in from the outset, not negotiated at additional cost after delivery. That argument runs through the analysis published on this site and reflects a view formed over decades of working with these systems from the inside.

Ken-Tore publishes analysis and professional commentary on defence training, synthetic environments and capability governance using eriksenlsc.com as a professional insights platform — sharing perspectives on synthetic training integration, defence capability governance and the evolution of large-formation training in NATO and the Nordic region. All views expressed here are his own.