By Ann Roosevelt
U.S. Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) this week hosted the All Things Missile (ATM) proof of concept demonstration, a collaborative effort to consolidate disparate missile simulation environments into one joint training environment, officials said.
“We needed a more dynamic capability to train the missile defense mission area to give the individual warfighters some flexibility to create their own training opportunities and to stimulate all the various display systems than to provide a stand alone training capability,” Patrick McVay, director, Joint Exercises and Training Directorate, United States Strategic Command J7, said in a teleconference Dec. 16.
Partnering with U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) and Navy Fleet Forces Command, the plan is to bring together survivable integrated tactical warning/attack assessment, ballistic missile defense systems and tactical engagement simulations to improve training from the strategic to the tactical level.
Early on the major work was to clearly define the problem and come up with solutions alternatives, McVay said. The results of the process will go through an accreditation process and then the capabilities will be exported to service training programs.
The ATM architecture is still not complete, McVay said, “We’re probably about the 75 percent level.” The work now will be to examine the “gaps and seams” discovered during the demonstration. Then, working with the individual combatant commands, the collaborative effort will determine the next steps to fully flush out the capability.
“The results of this [ATM work] have been remarkable, just by leveraging capabilities and going out and finding rather [than] building, certifying rather than developing, I think we’re going to get about an order of magnitude savings in the cost than it would have done to have a new acquisition of this type of project,” said Gregory Knapp, executive director Joint Warfighting Center and Joint Training Directorate (J7).
“By using the Joint National Training accreditation process in cooperation with STRATCOM and exporting the operational architecture of this capability to the services. I believe we’re going to be able to get about a 10 fold increase in our training capacity, in other words the reach, of the missile type training to the service components through a distributed training environment using simulation-based technology will really be an order of magnitude over the ways we’ve done this training in the past,” he said.
Eric Seeland, U.S. Fleet Forces Command (USFF) Joint and Sustainment Training (N71), said: “Along with improvements in the Aegis system, we believe All Things Missile will lead to better training, greater cooperation as well improved readiness for what we face in the future.”
Supportive of the effort to improve ballistic missile defense training, Seeland said: “It provides a training environment for all services to come together. It’s vital to our services and agencies that we share accurate information as seamlessly as possible. It is critical that we all work together as one team.”
The ATM work began in April 2008, and in October was given the formal green light to proceed. U.S. Northern Command was involved early on and more recently U.S. Pacific Command, U.S. European Command and U.S. Central Command have become more involved as ATM work looks at follow on capabilities in the integrated air and missile defense arena.
JFCOM’s role is as the lead for joint training, Knapp said. “We have to work with the operational requiring combatant commander, bring in the agencies, bring in the service components and then work toward common solutions.”
While in the past, individual organizations have tried to develop individual solutions, ATM is building a national level solution to a complex problem, he said.
JFCOM provides exercise support, working on some 20 exercises a year of combatant commanders.
The command also operates a joint national training capability, which provides opposition forces, instrumentation and feedback, a command and control capability and live, virtual and constructive simulation-based synthetic environments for many joint tasks, Knapp said.
“Right now that joint national training capability infrastructure supports in excess of 200 exercises a year, which is up dramatically over the past five years almost an order of magnitude,” he said. The capability will support the ATM once it’s up and running.
The capability reaches some 20 different major sites and secondary fashion reaches over 200 different training sites at the national level.
Additionally, JFCOM is moving into coalition work as well.
“Truly we’re coming into a global training environment,” Knapp said.
The point of the whole effort is to make the ATM “flexible enough and scalable enough” to add any new capabilities as MDA develops its systems and also to address any policy shifts that come about, McVay said.
Knapp said for JFCOM it’s very important that the services are involved early in the process to identify their requirements. Looking to the future at STRATCOM’s operations, the same requirements driven process will be used to improve training in the space and cyber environments.