The training events will take place on three sites, more than 250 miles apart, courtesy of a new training platform that creates a synthetic battle environment that's networked in real-time. Combining data from three different simulation systems and from unmanned aerial vehicles into a single virtual presentation will make it possible for a computer-generated armored unit, for example, to engage real armored vehicles and soldiers in mock combat.

The move demonstrates a growing trend among military planners to embrace standards-based solutions that can integrate existing military tools and programs in real-time. The goal is to reduce training costs while improving the efficiency of military programs.

SRI, which won a $3 million contract to develop a statewide combat-readiness training system for the California Army National Guard, is a system integrator for a congressionally supported initiative called the Joint Training Experimentation Program (JTEP). Formerly the Stanford Research Institute at Stanford University, SRI is now an independent contractor for military and civilian government projects.

"The charter [of JTEP] is to use existing structures, link various types of training programs and leverage existing capabilities in order to keep the cost at minimum," Col. John Bernatz, JTEP program manager for the California National Guard, told EE Times.

No talking

That, however, is easier said than done, particularly in an environment where many of the tools now in use were independently developed and often hand-coded in a proprietary manner. "None of these applications were meant to talk to each other," observed Cameron Hunt, an open-source consultant to high-tech companies and the military.

As net-centric warfare gains visibility in the defense industry, new wrinkles like the open-source Linux operating system, standards-based protocols and so-called "publish-subscribe" frameworks are becoming key building blocks for linking such disparate applications in real-time, Hunt said.

The challenge in the California test is to expand the whole training exercise both "geographically and electronically," while ensuring that "the same staff — all [situated] geographically apart — can see the same engagement at the same time, so that they can interact with one another in real-time," explained John Shockley, SRI's senior research engineer and JTEP project director.

In the mid-1990s, the Department of Defense first demonstrated that a large number of "entities" — such as individual combat vehicles and soldiers tracked on a synthetic battlefield — could be displayed in a coordinated manner on a common computer screen.

However, "no successful engagement simulations were ever done between live and constructive systems" until the first live JTEP demo in May, said Shockley. "What we are doing here [in the October exercise] is showing a real training capability that allows entities to interact with each other."

The exercise, which is expected to be a big media event, is planned as battalion-level training. It will involve up to 100 soldiers, compared with just a dozen who participated in the May experiment. Roughly 100 entities will interact, compared with 20 in the May training.

The event will link three training programs — ground-combat and tank simulations, plus command and control — via the National Guard's GuardNet network, and then add one more component: the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). "The UAV assets showing a view of the intelligence on the battlefield will be sent to a brigade commander and then reported to a battalion commander," said Guard Colonel Bernatz.

SRI is being asked to pull together the other three, non-UAV, components. Mounted on a live combat vehicle, SRI's own Deployable Force-on-Force Instrumented Range System (DFIRST) training tool will be used for armored ground-combat maneuvers and gunnery training.

The Joint Combat and Tactics Simulation (JCATS), developed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is a staff-level training program based on computer simulation. JCATS' job is to allow commanders and their staff to alter the battlefield environment by controlling the movement of tanks, planes and other models individually or collectively. Finally, Close Combat Tactical Trainers (CCTT) tank simulators designed by Lockheed Martin will join the "live" armored vehicles.

Under the war game scenario, the exact location of pop-up targets and tanks set up on a "live" battlefield need to be matched and synchronized electronically with images on a simulated vehicle's display or on a general's computer screen. A command post in Los Alamitos, Calif., for example, should be able to send orders to a tank unit training at Camp Roberts, near Paso Robles, while another Guard unit in San Luis Obispo dispatches simulated soldiers to the virtual, interactive battlefield, "which is shared by all participants," SRI's Shockley explained.

SRI is pulling this off by using Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) protocols, standardized as IEEE 1278, and sending the DIS traffic over GuardNet to coordinate the different training programs. SRI will use the DIS-based protocols to transmit fundamentals such as positioning and engagement information, in addition to encoding radio traffic, Shockley said. The training project requires the use of existing systems and programs, many of which are based on DIS.

The DIS protocols will eventually be replaced by a publish-subscribe high-level architecture model, a general-purpose platform designed for simulation reuse and interoperability. Rather than build a new communication infrastructure now, however, JTEP opted to reuse an existing network dedicated to the National Guards and overlaid on top of the Internet.

Swarms and hives

The GuardNet exercise represents the first time fused unmanned-aerial-vehicle intelligence will be available to reserve units in the field. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Air Force Space Command have been pressing for the integration of UAV information into common battlefield intelligence platforms. Darpa, in fact, is exploring the use of "swarms" of UAVs and microsatellites, which can display "hive intelligence" when they operate in unison. That effort is part of the National Aerospace Initiative.

Further, the October exercise will offer a distributed after-action review (AAR) to all the participants, so that each soldier can play back the exercise to view what happened, learn what went wrong and evaluate his own performance. "The AAR is an extremely important discovery process for each private in our training," said Colonel Bernatz. It is critical that the AAR be able to play back the distributed 2-D and 3-D event data, all synchronized, allowing each soldier and commander to see the same events and engagements but in different perspectives, he added.

In the original May demonstration, SRI's Shockley said that the bandwidth used in GuardNet was 180 kbits/second. The October battalion-size exercise is expected to use up three times as much bandwidth. Shockley acknowledged that as training exercises get larger, "the bandwidth will become an issue."

Meanwhile, the open-source Linux OS is quietly, but surely, penetrating military training projects like JTEP. SRI, for example, used Linux in developing a piece of software to direct DIS traffic, Shockley said, and is considering Linux for its DFIRST tool. The Lawrence Livermore JCATS commanders' program uses Linux to run simulations on a number of off-the-shelf commercial laptops connected to a network. Some parts of the CCTT tank simulator software are being converted to Linux now, Shockley said, although the portion that will be integrated into JTEP's October training event is not Linux based.

"The power behind the open-source community is the biggest advantage of a Linux migration," said Shockley. "It makes it a lot easier to develop programs like JCATS." "Open sources are driving the whole notion of 'sharing of data,' " said consultant Hunt. Simulations "written in different data types, different formats and different source points" now must be shared and communicated, he added. The flexibility of Linux used in clusters, its cost benefits in developing programs and the availability of commodity hardware make Linux a perfect fit for designing a powerful interconnected training program like JTEP, Hunt said.

According to Boeing, even such a future combat system as Command, Control, Communications, Computer, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance, or C4ISR in military jargon, will be using Linux as its operating system.

Although some in the industry fear that Linux might be open enough to represent a potential security risk, that is not a factor for JTEP, said Colonel Bernatz, "because we are not running anything classified over the network."