The imperative to build large-scale synthetic environments has been driven by the increasing operational tempo experienced by nations due to political instabilities in many world regions simultaneously. One of the main problems faced by the services and national agencies is the need to compose an environment in time to meet a training, rehearsal or analysis need. During 2001 the US Joint Forces Command proposed the development of a prototype Joint Battle Space Environment (JBE) to encourage discussion as well as provide a baseline vision to the IITSEC community on where and how these environments should develop. An unexpected side effect of the integration of the many models and C4I systems for the prototype was the need to rapidly configure such a system and to demonstrate it live to a critical audience. This paper examines the experience and poses a number of issues that were highlighted by the first iteration of the JBE.