News From USJFCOM: USJFCOM, ACT host 6th CD&E Conference in Greece

USJFCOM, ACT host 6th CD&E Conference in Greece

U.S. Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) and NATO's Allied Command Transformation (ACT) have brought together military innovators from around the globe to discuss the latest developments in military thought.

By MC2 Tyce Velde
Allied Command Transformation Public Information Office

(ATHENS, Greece - Oct. 30, 2006) -- U.S. Joint Forces Command’s Joint Experimentation Directorate (J9) and NATO’s Allied Command Transformation’s Joint Experimentation, Exercises and Assessment subdivision joined today in Athens, Greece to host the sixth annual Concept Development and Experimentation Conference, with the assistance of their co-host, the Hellenic National Defence General Staff.

Though the two-day conference won’t begin until Tuesday, several workshops preceded the event. During one of the pre-conference events, Wayne Buck, of ACT’s Future Capabilities, Research and Technology subdivision, and James Blank, an experiment engineer with USJFCOM’s J9 hosted a workshop to discuss the importance of modelling and simulation in CD&E.

Most concepts for capabilities are developed in a static environment, a laboratory, for example. When these capabilities are fielded in an operational environment, however, the conditions are anything but static.

Conditions exist that may change or even dampen expected effects caused by the new capability, leaving the operators no better off, or even hampered by the new capability.

How, then do capability developers foresee the reactions caused by these dynamic environments? By experimenting. In the past, prototypes were manufactured, test units were trained, and experiments were conducted in a physical environment similar to the possible conflict zones.

In the new security environment, physical experiments can no longer be the primary method of testing new capabilities.

It is too expensive to test prototype capabilities and units in the varied operational environments in which NATO may be operating. A capability tested for desert operations may fail in a mountainous or riparian environment.

Also, units developed for more stable, peacekeeping operations may not be useful for more mobile counter-insurgency operations.

The solution to reducing risk in fielding new capabilities before holding physical experiments is modelling and simulation.

According to conference speakers, this technology continues to improve, having grown in the last thirty years from using scale models of battlefields with model tanks and strings for line-of-sight, to powerful computer simulations driven by complex logarithms and super computers.

Modern simulations are capable of creating realistic environments in kinetic models, or models of the physical environments in which military forces operate. They are also making advances in the realm of non-kinetic models, which approximate the socio-political environment.

Combining the two gives commanders a realistic environment in which they can drastically improve their experiments and training, said USJFCOM J9 Director Navy Rear Adm. James A. Winnefeld Jr.

“Modelling and simulation is a key enabler of everything we do at USJFCOM,” he added. “When we link kinetic and non-kinetic modelling systems together, as we did in Urban Resolve 2015, we end up with a powerful set of tools with which you can do experimentation.”

There have been three breakthroughs in the last decade which allow this surge in modelling and simulation.

First is the debut of high-level architecture, which determines an overall framework within which different models are created. This allows models developed separately to be federated into one comprehensive model.

Secondly super computers have allowed modelling capabilities to break through a ceiling, giving the models a useful level of complexity, similar to real-world environments.

Finally, the models’ scope has been expanded, thanks to the power of the supercomputers, to enfold all aspects of the battlespace, including military, political and economic influences. These breakthroughs have made modelling and simulation a primary tool for experimentation, said David Ozolek, executive director of USJFCOM’s J9.

“With the environments we’re able to create with modelling and simulation, we’re able to reduce the cost of experimentation by a factor of ten,” said Ozolek. “We’re able to compress the preparation time, we’re albe to reduce the number of people required and we’re able to expand the amount of information we’re able to include in the experiment by a factor somewhere between 50 and 100. When you look at the value per dollar, you can see that we’re getting hundreds of times more value for our investment by being able to apply the computational environment of modelling and simulation.