The future operating environment is expected to become increasingly complex, lethal, and ambiguous. The operational tempo in high-intensity operations is expected to increase, and effects will be increasingly cross-domain and contemporaneous. An essential question is: How can our forces conduct successful military operations in the envisioned future operating environment?

The proposed solution is multi-domain operations (MDO). MDO is an operational concept where the underlying idea is seamless integration of capabilities and activities in all the operational domains (land, maritime, air, space, and cyberspace), to present the enemy with multiple simultaneous dilemmas and achieve overwhelming superiority in time and space on the battlefield. MDO will, however, be inherently much more complex to execute than current operations of the same scale, due to a higher diversity of combat elements and capabilities (from all operational domains), higher requirements for synchronization of capabilities, activities and actions, and higher requirements for operational tempo.

Modeling and simulation (M&S) and wargaming will be essential in experimentation with, and further development and detailing of, the MDO concept. However, M&S of the future operating environment and MDO will also be correspondingly more complex. In addition, very few, if any, of the simulation tools currently available are able to represent combat elements and capabilities in all operational domains at a balanced level of fidelity throughout the combat model.

In this paper we first give a summary of how the future operating environment is envisioned to be like in a 2025–2045 perspective and what technologies are expected to dominate on the battlefield, based on recent literature. Moreover, we provide a description of the concept of MDO, including definitions, historical origin, characteristics, and challenges. Finally, we discuss and outline a set of overall requirements for simulation of the future operating environment and MDO for concept development, experimentation, and analysis.

Daniel Tveit

Affiliation

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Requirements for Simulation of the Future Operating Environment and Multi-Domain Operations