The rapid establishment of the U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) after 9-11 created significant training and education challenges. The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) - USNORTHCOM) (N-NC) needed to swiftly develop requirements for an education, training, and mission rehearsal capability to support both Department of Defense and interagency partners in meeting new homeland defense operational knowledge requirements. Meeting these needs involved developing open architecture tools, processes, and procedures to meet the time demands of a quickly evolving net-centric operational capability. In response, the Office of the Secretary of Defense organization responsible for Training Transformation sponsored the development of a next-generation capability called Immersive Learning Environments (ILES).

ILES is an exercise framework for handling activities associated with the complete training life cycle from initial establishment of training objectives to final After Action Reviews, while capturing Lessons Learned throughout the process. This framework traverses individual, small-team, and enterprise levels of education, training, and mission rehearsal activity.

The proposed standards-based exercise framework consists of five subsystems: Event Sequence that provides time-based exercise activity management; a Common Tools Interface that provides access to tools; Reusable Training Objects for representing training content; a Learning Management System that tracks training-related data such as participant profiles, performance levels, and participant progress, and a Data Repository for exercise database management services. The Event Sequence and the Reusable Training Objects are original concepts that innovatively address unique requirements.

The Event Sequence uses Nodes to represent time-based activity chunks either at the individual or at the group level. Decision, Injector, Observer, and Mentor Nodes are also used for providing a highly dynamic "what-if" experimentation platform. The Reusable Training Objects will be based on specifications in the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) model, with extensions to handle group-based learning activities and High-Level Architecture for linkages to modeling and simulation.