The modern battlefield upon which warriors engage in the deadly art of combat is an environment filled with increasingly sophisticated and complex weapon systems. Weapons, sensors, and transmitters utilizing new technologies and the entire electromagnetic spectrum have become commonplace and the knowledge required by warriors employing these systems has grown proportionally. Simulations of today's weapon systems and the battlefields in which they must operate have improved both in fidelity and richness, but their implementations have evolved in isolation from one another. Aircraft, ground vehicle, naval vessel, and dismounted infantry simulations have concentrated on the interactions between soldiers and their weapon subsystems, but this ownship-centric approach often results in battlefield abstractions, modeling only those subsets of the combat environment necessary to train specific tasks.

The current trend in manned simulation is to use vehicle mission computer programs, emitter and signature databases, and weapon systems intelligence in order to use the actual behaviors of the warrior's subsystems. This raises the bar of simulation fidelity and demands real-time data streams reflecting real world information. Simply put, current simulations of the modern battlefield are hard pressed to provide the fidelity required to drive today's manned simulators. Computer Generated Force (CGF) simulations, on the other hand, have focused on high-level battlefield abstractions, simply capturing the general essence of war and associated weapon systems. This approach may employ Monte Carlo methods, ignoring the detailed interactions between multiple weapon subsystems within a natural environment. Typically, CGF simulations have been and continue to be developed independent of manned simulator requirements.

Manned simulators and CGFs are now being asked to interoperate and accurately simulate complex interactions between intelligent subsystems, including sophisticated electronic combat. The limited bandwidth of affordable wide-area network technologies is a major roadblock to meeting this new challenge. Often, compromises are employed to integrate inconsistent data, algorithms, and differing levels of fidelity, making each implementation a customized solution despite DIS and HLA standards. Fair-fight, correlation, and consistency issues are commonplace due to isolated developments of manned simulators and CGFs without a common battlespace framework to work within.

This paper explores the increasing complexity of the modern battlefield and the resultant demands on manned simulators, CGFs, and their synthetic environment as the industry progresses into the realm of distributed simulation. This paper also discusses the limitations of current modeling approaches and proposes a distributed interoperable architecture designed to provide a consistent, correlated, expandable synthetic battlespace across distributed simulations.