Simulation Based Acquisition [SBA] offers increased long-term effectiveness, improves acquisition cycle time, and reduces the total ownership costs [TOC] of new weapons systems.° Technological advances allow procurement professionals, using operations analysis linked to modeling and simulation [M&S], to leverage mechanisms successfully deployed in training exercise environments.°

Office of Naval Research [ONR] has sponsored development of an SBA process, called WARCON (Warfighting Concepts to Future Weapon System Designs), which integrates Operations Analysis, Systems Engineering and Integration and Alternative Engineering Design processes to support the acquisition decision maker.° M&S tools are employed to determine operational performance measures and TOC for future systems, and provide trade-off analyses among future design options and concepts for the military acquisition decision maker.° WARCON guiding principles ensure that models realistically represent valid doctrine and operations and address the customer s acquisition issues.°

More than two years of WARCON development has resulted in a mature process that provides the flexibility to be tailored for a particular warfighting application while providing enough structure to be applied across a broad spectrum of platforms, systems, and scenarios.° Employing many of the same M&S federates that the Navy Warfare Development Command [NWDC] uses for Fleet Battle Experiments [FBEs] and Joint Forces Command [JFCOM] uses for Joint Experimentation, WARCON has demonstrated that analysis linked to M&S can provide quantifiable Measures of Effectiveness [MOEs] and Measures of Performance [MOPs] to support acquisition decision-making.