The evolving live, virtual. Constructive (LVC) simulation training environment reflects the emerging battlespace. It is highly connected and the people and systems that are working simultaneously as information collectors, forwarders, and consumers generating hundreds of thousands of information exchanges a minute. The ever-growing number of sensors and the associated demand for peer-to-peer, real-time information exchanges is compounding the effect suggesting the need for a zero-barrier exchange environment.
The emerging environment challenges legacy the simulation & training construct, which has largely been built on stacks that provide a self-contained operating environment specific to a location. These legacy characteristics are limiting because when there is a change to underlying data sets and applications, as will be the norm in the future LVC environment, implementation across the full range of weapons systems is carried out on independent schedules via independent approaches that may alter the representation due to system-specific design limitations. The impacts are realized as concurrency gaps emerge and, in some cases, differences among system representation techniques create a non-level playing field.
Over the past two decades, those local assets have been linked via connecting environments that minimally serve up common elements of the scenario to each participate via standards-based interfacing system but, the legacy model is characterized by platform-centric systems that operate on a self-contained computational environment to represent core platform and weapons system performance. The future of simulation & training will be characterized by development & delivery of scenario-specific, vendor agnostic data and applications.
Getting to the objective state requires: a fundamental shift adopting a framework that eliminates barriers to exchange and collaboration across the entire simulation & training lifecycle - planing, preparing, executing, and assessing, incorporation of a rapid innovation capability; and an architecture to support cross-enterprise access from the labs, to the system program offices, to the intelligence centers, to simulation and training centers, to deployed mission rehearsal environments, to the units and to the individual.
Achieving the objective of full spectrum LVC training requires an architecture approach that recognizes that shared data & and agile applications will power the future. Approaches that will deliver performance in an environment characterized by: real-time collective event orchestration and multi-participant collaboration; advanced software defined networking, elastic & extensible cloud computing; cross-constellation consistency in cybersecurity; and multi-dimensional SecDevOps and Multi-Level Security operations.