The United States (US) Department of Defense (DoD) has modeling and simulation (M&S) offices to manage M&S policies and coordinate complicated enterprise technologies across subordinate organizations such as live, virtual, and constructive (LVC). The US Marine Corps M&S Office (MCMSO) operates under a Marine Corps Order that established the office but does not provide guidance and direction for effectively managing or coordinating diverse M&S communities across the Marine Corps. Since there are no unifying policies, individual commands and program managers develop unique and often competing policies which create both confusion at the senior leadership level and technical interoperability challenges at the engineering level. This paper will provide an overview of the current USMC governance and discuss the issues that have arisen from the lack of unifying policies, such as conflating LVC for training uses and M&S capabilities for analytic uses during formal requirements documents production, and individual program managers selecting technical standards that may not be compatible with an interoperability requirement of a future system of systems. This paper will then discuss the analysis that was performed to determine the policy required to effectively manage M&S across the Marine Corps. The analysis consisted of reviewing relevant DoD policies, interviews across the Marine Corps M&S communities, and conducting initial action officer review. This paper will describe the five lines of effort that are necessary to implement M&S enterprise management within the USMC, covering a wide range of topics including policy implementation, workforce management, and research coordination. Finally, this paper will provide an overview of the new draft USMC M&S policy. The merits of the draft policy have been well received by the USMC and DoD M&S communities, and several existing DoD level M&S challenges are beginning to reference the ideas within the Marine Corps draft policy as potential DoD solutions.
Policy, Standards, Management, and Acquisition
Overview of USMC Modeling and Simulation Office Policy Lessons Learned
18 views