U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) is committed to providing its Service Component and Sub-Unified Command Commanders a distributed synthetic environment that enables distributed mission training, exercises, and no notice/short notice mission rehearsal.

In late 2016, the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Training, and Logistics (USD AT&L) and USSOCOM began an effort to improve Modeling and Simulation (M&S) systems interoperability that resulted in several standardization focus areas. One of these areas involved the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) launching a wide-reaching project focused on the Open Geospatial Consortium's Common Database (CDB) as the standard for M&S geospatial data support. USSOCOM J3-T&E, assisted by Joint Staff (JS) J6, was tasked to assess the NGA-CDB capability in a USOCOM distributed training context, collecting and providing metrics to show improvement opportunities capitalized using this new terrain capability.

Bold Quest (BQ) 21.1 was the venue for this assessment. Occurring from 26 July to 12 August 2021, BQ21.1 included all USSOCOM components and the Joint Special Operations Command, the U.S. Army, and the Air National Guard. BQ21.1's primary objective was to assess the interoperability of using NGA-CDB, including the Foundation Geospatial Intelligence (GEOINT) Three Dimensional (FG3D) capability, and create run-time databases for the primary USSOCOM simulators. The secondary objective was to support the development of USSOCOM's distributed training and mission rehearsal capabilities across its components. This paper describes the impact of using CDB-based terrain data on simulator interoperability and lessons learned about the process of creating a multi-component synthetic environment.

Marcus Young

Affiliation

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Creating Common Ground: The Impact of Terrain on Distributed Mission Operations