As part of the U.S. Joint Staff’s Bold Quest (BQ) coalition capability demonstration and assessment event, nations, Services and programs pool resources in a recurring cycle of capability development, demonstration and analysis. In the Live, Virtual and Constructive (LVC) domain, BQ provides a venue where participants can demonstrate integrated LVC environments, improve interoperability, and build and maintain joint fires proficiency. Due to the many policy, programmatic and technical issues that limit LVC interoperability, LVC environments are, in practice, almost never “plug and play.� After many years of LVC development and effort, significant challenges still exist in creating and operating LVC systems as an integrated system of systems.
BQ 15.2 in October, 2015 provided the first opportunity to extend the LVC environment to partner nation simulator sites in France and Canada. BQ 16.1 in March 2016 used the U.S. Joint Training Environment Network (JTEN) to connect several new U.S. sites and, in the process, highlighted fundamental LVC interoperability issues, especially at the network level, that are widely recognized, persistent problems that stand as significant barriers to improving multi-Service and multinational LVC interoperability.
Significantly, BQ 15.2 provided the first opportunity to establish and operate a Mission Partner Environment (MPE). Designed to meet information exchange requirements among mission partners (twelve partner nations in the case of BQ 15.2), the MPE concept describes a shared information environment that leverages U.S. and mission partner information technology infrastructures. As demonstrated in 2015, the MPE has significant potential to improve operational and information technology interoperability across all participants. This paper discusses the application of the MPE concept to the LVC domain to help resolve some of the many long-standing LVC interoperability challenges. It offers long term, policy-based recommendations for using the MPE to improve joint and coalition LVC interoperability.