Modeling and Simulation Support for System of Systems Engineering Applications

Chapter 15Joint Training

James Harrington¹, Laura Hinton¹, and Michael Wright²

¹ The MITRE Corporation, McLean, VA, USA

² US Army Project Executive Office for Simulation Training and Instrumentation, Orlando, FL, USA

15.1 JOINT TRAINING INTRODUCTION

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) performs specific and measured training at all levels from individual airman, sailor, soldier, and marine to the training of small units such as Army platoons or companies and up to the training of general officers commanding large complex organizations and operations. For example, though it’s relatively straightforward to construct an environment to train rifle marksmanship, it can be daunting to create a training environment that replicates conditions, situations, and stimuli faced by the commander of a large military organization executing a complex Joint task force mission.

In the marksmanship example above, trainers can create an actual rifle range and target array or, increasingly, computer-generated virtual environments like gaming or virtual ranges augmented by computer-generated imagery. However, moving up the scale of unit size from individual soldier to Army platoon, company, battalion, etc., it becomes increasingly impractical to build and manage physical training environments. So, virtual environments are becoming more prevalent.

In the days before widespread use of computerized modeling and simulation (M&S) for training, several rudimentary modeling approaches approximated the environments ...