The Services currently have very limited opportunity to conduct live joint urban operations training and testing due to facility limitations and range safety and environmental concerns. Since the US military is increasingly likely to conduct operations on urban terrain, this deficiency must be addressed. Developing a distributed range capability for urban operations appears to provide the best solution to this problem. The Services have separate initiatives totaling over $200M beginning in FY04 to build separate Service-unique urban operations facilities. At this time, the plans for these facilities are not well integrated and no concept currently exists to integrate live, virtual, and constructive training assets in a way that provides meaningful training.

The Defense Modeling and Simulation Office (DMSO) is conducting research into integration of simulation technology and distributed range capability for urban operations. The overall objective of JOUST is to allow the joint warfighter to conduct training and testing for urban warfare using distributed live test and training capabilities as well as distributed simulation technology. JOUST will integrate Naval, Air Force, and Army assets in a mixture of live-fire ranges, military operations urban terrain facilities as well as, vi rtual and constructive simulations.

This paper focuses on the challenges of creating a cost affordable solution for distributed joint urban operations testing and training. The keystone issue here is to define a distributed system component architecture that will leverage DoD investments in both live-fire ranges and simulation technology. Our approach, to develop a prototype Joint Urban Operations Distributed Synthetic Range (DSR), is based upon working through various architecture alternatives and defining fundamental assumptions. We will also present our near term JOUST objectives along with a set of defined use cases for FY03 experimentation. The results of our efforts will be valuable in defining a reusable joint urban operations test and training envi ronment.