Special Supplement - 2009 ITEC Preview: Reflections on Modeling and Simulation in NATO
M&S CAN HELP US IMPROVE DRAMATICALLY THE EFFICIENCY OF HOW NATO MAKES USE OF RESOURCES WITHOUT DUPLICATING NATIONAL EFFORTS.
BY ADMIRAL LUCIANO ZAPPATA, ITALIAN NAVY
The use of modeling and simulation (M&S) has a high priority in the agenda of decision-makers because of its ability to improve the way we do business today. In this article, I want to stress that my perception of M&S is one of particular importance for several reasons that I will endeavor to explain. M&S has been widely used for many years by NATO nations. A considerable number of simulation systems have been developed for specific military needs.
M&S is getting the attention of leadership for the great benefits it can provide to NATO combined and joint forces in order to improve interoperability and capabilities, contribute to training efforts, develop planning and decision support tools, test and develop doctrine, and validate concepts through experimentation. Risk mitigation, improvement of quality of products, efficiency from the time and financial perspective of development and integration processes are some of the benefits expected.
THE FRAMEWORK
Let me start describing how I perceive the big picture in which we are called to operate from a NATO and a military perspective. The level of ambition of the Alliance is challenged by the high tempo of current operations and the resources required sustaining these efforts. The Alliance is facing multiple challenges in a rapidly changing security environment and is engaged simultaneously in different scenarios. Coalitions are working together in operations with forces which vary in quality and number and, moreover, have the need to coordinate their action with civilian governmental and non-governmental bodies.
The enlargement of NATO to new members, the technology gap within the Alliance and partner nations, and the need to retain traditional warfare capabilities while being able to become as expeditionary as possible represent serious challenges to NATO. In response to these challenges the objective of the Alliance is to build the flexible, modular, adaptable and interoperable forces and capabilities required to meet the full range of the missions.
ACT ROLE IN TRANSFORMATION
In this context, Allied Command Transformation (ACT) can contribute significantly. The ACT mission in NATO is focused on transformation and, although it is still a young organization, the HQ is the leading agent for change in NATO in the pursuit of improved capabilities to deal with future challenges facing the Alliance. ACT pursues a transformational model where concept development and experimentation, research and technology, and interoperability combine to promote the capability development. ACT provides support to NATO operations and plays a significant role in training and lessons learned. ACT is committed to anticipating change fostering innovation and experimentation in order to deliver capabilities to the warfighters.
Transformation efforts strive to find the proper balance between short-term requirements and the need to address transformation in the long term, with a priority to thinking outside the box and toward the future.
My perspective on transformation is one of a continuous and pro-active process. ACT advises the nations on transformational issues.
ACT acts as a catalyst, but it is for nations to deliver transformation. NATO and nations, together, have to do more in this field. Mechanisms have to be put in place to make sure that NATO and nations have the same understanding of transformation and share objectives and priorities in their roadmap for transformation.
WHAT WE INTEND TO ACHIEVE USING M&S
M&S is a formidable tool that fits perfectly in this picture to support the transformation of our forces.
ACT works with nations to shape interoperability standards by designing and implementing common doctrine and procedures, and through joint education and training. ACT helps define common roadmaps, architectures and frameworks for the various capability development processes in order to build a common ground upon which nations can formulate their own plans. However, there is a need to work more and network national M&S capabilities under a NATO common vision and strategy.
M&S can help us achieve a number of objectives that I summarize briefly as follows:
- Increase interoperability supporting the development of interoperable systems and models;
- Improve the speed to move from the development of a concept or an idea to a capability on the field;
- Decrease costs and risks associated to the development of new capabilities;
- Improve the quality of training provided to our warfighters using new training methodologies that the technology makes available;
- Improve the planning processes to better assess our shortfalls and priorities;
All these problems have to be addressed with determination.
M&S can enable the development of new capabilities to improve training, operations support, defense planning and to improve the processes related to the capability development itself. It is in these four areas where the application of M&S can provide the best results. From the extensive use of M&S, we expect to increase interoperability, save precious resources, reduce significantly risk and improve the quality of the capabilities provided.
ACT EFFORTS
ACT is looking at M&S to support the capability development process and to help identify proper solutions. Standard platforms could support at the same time different M&S services and activities, such as experimentation, concept development, interoperability testing against reference facilities and training. Also, M&S will provide NATO with capabilities in areas such as training and education. In this respect ACT is building a NATO distributed training capability based on live, virtual and constructive simulation that will transform the way we train our forces in a coalition environment. The challenges the M&S community faces include multinational training in a coalition environment for multiple types of operations, including disaster relief, reconstruction and peace keeping, and in collaboration with non-military organizations and homeland security agencies. Interoperability is also another important area where we focus our efforts. As interoperability means working and preparing together, distributed architectures can really help us make tremendous improvements in this regard.
HOW TO DO IT
In order to effectively implement M&S in an organization, it is necessary to analyze the potential applications horizontally throughout the structure, posing significant management and organizational challenges. In order to achieve the identified objectives M&S provides the means to:
- Better define and manage capability development processes;
- Help bring together the users and industry in order to identify more interoperable solutions as part of the capability development;
- Develop tools that help the leadership in understanding the business environment and improving the decision-making;
- Develop test and evaluation environments based on open standards and architectures to improve interoperability;
- Develop distributed training architectures based on live, virtual and constructive simulations to deliver effective training services.
Building the right competencies and expertise to meet these demands is not easy. It requires investments in technology, but it requires also finding and educating qualified human resources.
M&S offers possibilities that need to be understood to be fully exploited. And all this takes time. For example, a collaborative network of government and industry battlelabs could support the testing of emerging concepts, architectures and interoperability. It would help better understand requirements and develop plug and play solutions based on standardized architectures and interfaces. Again, this requires investments and time, but also a mindset, a culture that recognizes the power of M&S to support and improve the business and decision-making processes.
COLLABORATION WITH INDUSTRY
All these efforts are useless if we do not manage to leverage on our military and industrial competencies. Establishing a framework of collaboration with industry is important to ACT. Industry is a primary partner with whom we need to work more and more closely in the future. Information exchange and collaboration on specific activities, for example in the prototyping and experimentation arena, is something we need to improve and ACT is working on this.
We are exploring the requirement for collaborative work with industry, the potential value to industry, and the methods of implementing such collaborative efforts. We want to better interact with industry to benefit from their expertise and assets and provide our operational perspective and future capabilities requirements. We are looking to develop a legal framework between ACT and industry that would allow the development of practical collaboration programs. In the next several months, this initiative will be discussed with industry and the various NATO bodies involved, and we will understand the practical implications related to it.
NETWORKING BATTLELABS
The national expertise at the government and industry level could be leveraged developing a networking environment, which can be used to work on themes of common interest. In this area, national concerns still exist and they are related to sharing information in emerging technologies or concepts. However, the idea meets the requirement to make a rational use of national and industry resources without expensive and useless duplications.
A network of battlelabs could integrate government (military and non-military) facilities and industry labs. The network, based on open standards and open architecture, would enable the easy integration of different platforms and models of government, industry and academia M&S facilities based in NATO member nations, but also in partner nations. The architecture would support the federation of distributed environments, where models could also interact with real-world objects.
A collaborative network of battlelabs would allow the testing of emerging concepts. Once the standard interfaces and the architectural framework are designed, national capabilities could be developed with the ability to plug and play with the NATO infrastructure. Testing of national solutions against NATO reference facilities would also allow leaders to assess the interoperability issues and the timely identification of compatibility problems before nations procure and field their systems.
More specifically, the networking of battlelabs would help meet demands in M&S, providing an environment that would:
- Support activities from concept/ doctrine development, to experimentation and prototyping, test and evaluation of architectures and interoperability, analysis and also training in multi-national contexts;
- Create a repository of shared knowledge and information, integrating models with varying levels of fidelity;
- Improve effectiveness for using simulations in analysis and experimentation in the areas of scenario development, operation and afteraction analysis;
- Improve technical interoperability, focusing on it since the beginning of the development process;
- Facilitate and improve reuse and access of models and simulations.
DISTRIBUTED TRAINING
Distributed training has great value for improving the interoperability and readiness of forces. The combination of enhanced capabilities being deployed in operations and evolving operational requirements are putting new demands on how we train our headquarters and forces to ensure that the NATO and national systems and tactics, techniques and procedures are interoperable with each other.
There is a need for a common NATO training and education distributed environment where NATO nations and partners can train routinely, thereby boosting standardization and interoperability. Moreover, the cost effectiveness of this approach is very promising, as it inhibits duplicate efforts and uses resources efficiently. The technology available is providing the opportunity to implement new methodologies to effectively train our forces. ACT, as part of its activities in M&S, is developing a project named NATO Snow Leopard aimed to deliver a persistent, distributed education and training capability from the strategic down to the tactical level through the federation of live, virtual and constructive elements.
The main players in this phase are ACT, the project manager, and the Joint Warfare Centre and the Joint Force Training Centre that provide the core capability. Centers of excellence, NATO HQs, NATO schools, governmental and non-governmental agencies and appropriate national training centers, ranges or virtual simulators will be able to integrate their assets in this developing network. There is a vision already established. While the first activity will occur in 2008, the concept is still to be defined in many areas especially in the maritime and land environments.
Synthetic training is challenging: From the conceptual perspective there is a need to fully understand how it can help forces to get ready for current and future operational scenarios, to what extent it can complement live training, and the savings that this approach can bring. There is a need also to fully understand the technological implications. However, it has a tremendous potential as training assets and resources become scarce, and interoperability is the key to successful multinational operations.
THE CASE FOR AN M&S CENTER OF EXCELLENCE
Nations have agreed to exploit national and multinational Centers of Excellence (COEs) to promote transformation within the Alliance. The COEs are open for participation by all NATO member states. They are nationally or multi-nationally managed and funded. They can be offered to NATO. The growing network of COEs that will support NATO is coordinated by HQ Supreme Allied Commander Transformation (SACT). COEs provide opportunities to NATO and Partnership for Peace (PfP) nations to improve interoperability and capabilities, develop doctrine, and validate concepts through experimentation.
An M&S COE to NATO could contribute to support ACT in the implementation of its vision. The process is still at a very premature stage, but it is important to be aware of the implications. The mission of an M&S COE would be to support SACT in his efforts to transform NATO by providing subject matter expertise and M&S to support aspects of the concept/doctrine development and experimentation, interoperability and training processes.
The COE would be dedicated to the promotion of M&S in support of operational warfighters needs assessments, acting as a catalyst for transformation and networking with NATO and PfP government and industry M&S and operational and training entities. The M&S COE would become a national and international main source of expertise for transformation in the domain of M&S by networking with sponsoring nations, ACT and Allied Command Operations and other international institutions and organizations. The M&S COE would be based on a federation of test beds and open to industry battlelabs. These sites would contribute to network representations, models and simulations, systems and prototypes used by NATO and nations.
The COE would support combined and joint forces doctrine/concept development, experimentation, test and evaluation of architectures and interoperability, certification, education and training, and decision support needs. The COE would help create a cultural, collaborative and innovative environment, and, at the same time, a window open to NATO nations and partners to get visibility and play an active role within the transformational efforts of the Alliance.
CONCLUSIONS
M&S is more than an emerging technology understood only by few experts who speak a different language. It is more also than networking videogames (although we should not underestimate this trend). M&S has become a reality that meets the needs of organizations who want to make their decisions being more informed, who want to improve their capability development processes and want to train and educate effectively their employees.
M&S has become so mature from the standards and industrial perspective that nations are using it extensively to make an efficient use of their resources and improve the quality of their business processes reducing risks. In the military field, NATO can aggregate what nations are doing individually or in bilateral agreements. It is very important to improve interoperability of coalition forces who are working together, but that have characteristics so different. M&S can help us improve dramatically the efficiency of how NATO makes use of resources without duplicating national efforts. It is a great opportunity and there are challenges ahead: they are technological and related to human resources (education and certification of professionals). ♦
(Editor’s note: Admiral Zappata serves as deputy supreme allied commander transformation.)