In current Navy surface combatant training, new crews are trained using real combat consoles in a classroom environment. This approach has disadvantages that include the considerable expense of supporting, maintaining, and reconfiguring the real consoles used in these facilities. As visual simulation and virtual reality (VR) have increased in capability and decreased in cost, these technologies can provide cost-effective solutions for training. The Naval Research Laboratory is currently using virtual reality, simulation, and multimedia tools to develop a Distributed Synthetic Combat Information Center (CIC) for the surface combatant training. The goal of the project is to create a distributed, immersive virtual reality system to complement current training capability. This will allow surface ship CIC crew members at different geographical locations to perform team training in a virtual ship environment. The virtual environment offers a true interactive 3D view of the interior of the CIC. This system will provide the feeling of real presence for surface combatant crews in a realistic combat engagement atmosphere instead of a classroom-like environment. It also simulates the equipment that the crew can interact with to perform detection, classification and target engagement activities. Information visualization will aid students in learning different tactical doctrines. Intelligent agents will be used to compensate for different educational levels of recruits and to reduce the number of instructors. The system will accommodate geographically distributed sites and provide better system availability. The virtual CIC's network capability will be implemented through a High Level Architecture (HLA) federate: crew members within the Federation Object Model (FOM) will communicate with each other, and a FOM representing the entire ship's CIC can participate in HLA exercises. This paper describes the project requirements, technical approach, system tradeoffs, current accomplishments and future direction.