Throughout the years, the Modeling and Simulation (M&S) industry has sought solutions for interoperable training and mission rehearsal events. These kinds of events tend to leverage commercially available and/or proprietary software to consume GEOINT content to produce event content which may or may not be accurate or geotypical in nature. Each vendor, Service, Command, program, or association participating in these events often a have a set of preferred formats, data sources and ambiguous fidelity definitions. The lack of common data, definitions and processes present correlation and accuracy challenges that could potentially risk fair fight scenarios in these types of events which represent real world environments and challenges.
The DoD issued a memorandum via the Senior Steering Group (SSG) for the Under Secretary of Defense calling for a national level archive of simulation ready content to address simulator interoperability between the DoD and IC communities. As part of this memo’s directives, NGA is tasked to address simulator interoperability by standing up a capability known as Foundation GEOINT in 3-Dimensions (FG3D). The FG3D mission ensures geospatial data interoperability by making authoritative M&S content accessible on all US Government networks. The initial authoritative data holdings are comprised of a combination of USSOCOM and Joint Staff J7 content as well as the FG3D tools which can produce CDB content and translate such content to users. The generation of additional authoritative content occurs on demand leveraging available assets within the NGA Open Data Store.
This paper examines how the lessons learned, capabilities, and FG3D impacts to addressing the SSG memo.