News From USJFCOM: Initial trial of Urban Resolve 2015 wraps up

Initial trial of Urban Resolve 2015 wraps up

The first phase provided U.S. Joint Forces Command the opportunity to work with its partners during the initial trial of Urban Resolve 2015 aimed at improving the warfighters’ ability to operate and control the urban environment and isolate the adversary.

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By Robert Pursell
USJFCOM Public Affairs

(SUFFOLK, VA. - Aug. 18, 2006) -- U.S. Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) and its partners wrapped up the first trial in a series of experiments here today to help improve the warfighters' ability to operate in an urban environment.

Urban Resolve 2015 (UR 2015) consists of a series of experiments that look at solutions to close joint urban warfighting capability gaps. Once researchers look at the solutions, they pass them along to the warfighter to help improve their capacity to maintain the urban environment in which they are fighting.

“It’s an experiment to help us adapt to the changes that are taking place in the battlespace of the long war, more specifically addressing the challenges of the urban environment,” explained David Ozolek, executive director of the Joint Futures Laboratory. “There’s also considerable work going on to do experimentation better and adapting the way we do experimentation.”

Ozolek added that there are two elements that play a major role in guiding the effort of UR 2015.

“The first is we are assessing our current capabilities to determine what gaps we have to fill immediately, and secondly we’re looking at the 2015 situation to determine what capabilities we need to build now so that we can adjust and be ahead of the threat that we’re anticipating we’ll have to face in the urban environment in 2015,” he said.

Participants included USJFCOM, Special Operations Command, the Joint Staff, the Institute for Defense Analysis, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the services, and other U.S. and multinational agencies.
Ozolek explained that UR 2015 “is truly a joint experiment” and that the experimentation environment is evidence of it.

“What we have here are about 1200 players participating from 18 sites around across the country in which all of the services are participating and very important combat support agencies along with players from 14 different nations,” said Ozolek. “For the first time, we’ve wrapped a set of really important service experiments into the joint experimentation environment.”

USJFCOM's Air Force Col. Terry Kono explained that the productivity of the past two weeks will allow participants to focus on integration.

“The good thing about the first trial is that it allows us to stress or really make the federation of models and sims work,” said Kono. “It allows the organizations, the joint task force, the component commands plus the outside players to get a sense of integrating in an experimentation environment versus a real world environment.”

Kono also explained the advantage of having everyone confined in an experimentation environment.

“What we’re doing is trying to make a play at reality without requiring a real world joint task force. So it’s a focused environment, refined for the experiment. You can look over your shoulder and see what’s going on,” he said. “We’re trying to create that virtual reality of a joint task force, that virtual reality of the component commands, responding within the virtual environment and proceed from there.”

According to Kono, the first trial of experiments ran smoothly. “For the base case, the architecture of the modeling and simulations is working very well,” he said.

“All areas of the personnel, from the joint task force to the component commands as they’re involved at this stage in the game, and the coalition support. All of the pieces are coming together nicely in the experiment.”

The next trial, Sept. 11-22, will focus on the integration of the future capabilities.

“You’ll see those new tools being put into what was originally a base case and now we have something to measure against,” said Kono. He added that the same thing will take place in the third trial, Oct. 16-27, where organizational changes will be added to the experiments.