The U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) have recognized the need and benefit of the DoD High Level Architecture (HLA), and have taken a proactive role in pursuing HLA Compliance for their Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) legacy devices. The SOF have teamed up with the U.S. Army Simulation Training and Instrumentation Command (STRICOM) and the Advanced Distributed Simulation Technology (ADST II) program to migrate these devices to HLA, and have begun paving the way to leverage this new technology to advance their distributed simulation capabilities.

This paper highlights the SOF migration strategy to HLA compliance for each of the following five SOF training devices: the AC-130U Navigator/Fire Control Officer Testbed, the MC-130E and MC-130H Combat Talon simulators, and the MH-47E and MH-60K Combat Mission Simulators. In addition, the migration strategy for other supporting federation components such as stealths, computer generated forces, simulated radios, etc. will also be presented. The paper also includes HLA implementation issues such as the use of middleware and gateways to achieve RTI connectivity, development of Simulation and Federation Object Models, and HLA compliance testing. Lessons learned with regard to federate development, as well as the construction of the SOF federation, will be presented.