Critique and review are critical to the training process. When the training audience is scattered geographically, as happens with distributed simulation based training, new challenges are faced to provide commonly expected review tools. One important feature of military simulation-based training is the ability to play back the action from a just completed training event to support review and evaluation. Playback capability is common in virtual simulator facilities, but presents new challenges in a distributed training environment. Retransmitting recorded data to all sites from a recording site is subject to several criticisms: cost of bandwidth; special configuration of the playback site, potential security issues; and problems maintaining privacy of "local" data. Voice coordinated playback across sites suffers from distractions due to human error and communication problems often resulting in reduced synchronization and wasted time. To overcome all these drawbacks, the Combat Air Force Distributed Mission Operations (CAF DMO) program is pursuing a solution to distributed playback based on the Distributed Debrief Control Protocol (DDCP) recently offered to the simulation community by The Boeing Company. This open protocol is designed to enable the synchronous playback of data recorded in a simulation based event while not requiring recorded data to be retransmitted. CAF DMO is standardizing on the application of the DDCP protocol, tailored toward ensuring interoperability of control programs and playback device programs developed by different vendors. Software conforming to the tailored protocol has been developed and demonstrated that allows centralized, remote control over devices playing back video, simulation data and other information in any combination. This paper summarizes the CAF DMO decision to use DDCP and the tailoring done to achieve standardization.