The Defense Department is funding a two-year, $10 million program
that seeks to emphasize the use of technology experimentation and
cost analysis before weapons systems enter full-rate procurement.
The initiative, called War Fighting Concepts to Future Weapon System
Designs (Warcon), is managed by the Office for Naval Research. Essentially,
it is looking to provide a link between the experimentation and
acquisition communities.
The growing emphasis on so-called war-fighting experiments by the
military services means that acquisition programs cannot work in
isolation from those experiments, officials said. The availability
of advanced digital models and simulation technologies now is making
it possible to experiment with weapon-system concepts before final
design decisions are made.
“The venue we have picked to emphasize the concepts is modeling
and simulation,” said Ben Riley, government program manager
for Warcon.
In addition to the Office of Naval Research, other Warcon participants
include the Naval Sea Systems Command, Newport News Shipbuilding,
Lockheed Martin, MTS Technologies, BMH, TSI and Oculus Technologies,
among others.
Warcon explores ways to change the roles between government and
industry and “lay more emphasis on up-front demonstrations
to validate technology and determine the cost, versus performance,
before an actual weapons system is acquired,” said Riley.
The goal, he explained, is to use “engineering-level models
to fill the gap in the refinement of system requirements, as weapon
systems proceed through the acquisition life cycle.” Modeling
and simulation facilitates “continuous technology insertion,”
he said.
For the Defense Department to benefit from these technologies,
there needs to be a “collaborative engineering enterprise,”
where government and industry program managers are linked electronically,
in a “distributed team” operation, he added.
If one applies the Warcon principles, Riley said, the end-result
is a “knowledge base for the acquisition process.”
A critical tool for Warcon is a joint synthetic battle space, “where
all the models are integrated into a single architecture,”
said Riley. BMH, based in Virginia Beach, Va., is responsible for
this part of the project.
In the context of Navy programs, for example, the synthetic battle
space models the natural environment, the ships and the battle space
for an aircraft carrier. “We are using the joint synthetic
battle space as opposed to the virtual ship,” said Lockheed
Martin’s Richard Schaeffer. “It is providing the context
in which the war fighter can evaluate new operational concepts,”
he added.
The simulation used in the joint synthetic battle space is called
joint semi-automated forces, or JSAF, which is the “primary
simulation used in support of fleet battle experiments run by the
Maritime Battle Center and it is also used by [Joint Forces Command
Experimentation Division] J9,” said Schaeffer.
“In the JSAF model, we integrate features of the future design
of a carrier,” explained Riley. “In our test case, we
are asking, ‘will the ordnance infrastructure of the carrier
support the time critical strike concept developed by the Navy and,
if not, what are the alternatives?’”
Future Concepts
Newport News Shipbuilding has a direct interest in the success of
Warcon, because the shipyard is the only builder of nuclear-powered
aircraft carriers for the U.S. Navy. The company currently is working
with the service on design concepts for the next generation of carriers,
the CVN-X. (See related story). The Navy wants to make sure that
the new carrier can incorporate the latest technologies and that
those technologies can be continually upgraded throughout the course
of the ship’s 50-year life cycle. The Warcon approach is ideally
suited for this type of technology insertion, officials said.
The Office of Naval Research is evaluating future war-fighting
concepts on the 2010 to 2020 time frame, and “we even built
a platform that goes into the 2060 time frame,” said Rob Lisle,
Newport News Shipbuilding program administrator.
One example of a collaborative design environment advocated by
Warcon is the Virginia Advanced Shipbuilding and Carrier Integration
Center, established in 1998 by the Commonwealth of Virginia’s
General Assembly. Its goal is to develop new technologies for aircraft
carriers and other Navy ships. Much of the work at VASCIC will involve
advanced simulation and modeling. Newport News Shipbuilding is under
contract to manage the center.
One simulation that Newport News created replicates carrier flight-deck
operations—it includes every single person involved in carrier
operations, said Lisle. This simulation model, he said, is linked
to a weapons handling systems model, which helps design the weapons
that go on the carrier.
“The flight deck model is how you achieve a war plan,”
Lisle said. “The weapons model is a subsystem to hit targets
at a certain schedule. You have to be able to build up certain weapons
and bombs.”
To complement these two models, the Naval Air Systems Command,
in Lake Hurst, N.J., developed a weapons information model. “Our
carrier received tasking from the commander through JSAF, and then
the three models prepared for the tasking,” said Riley.
With JSAF, military planners can simulate an entire military operation,
from the build-up process, the people and the weapon kits, to the
information exchanges that take place on the ship, said Lisle.
“JSAF is a very complex time-sequence architecture where
the three models ... were discreet event models that were developed
as stand-alone models, and in our joint synthetic battle space,
we were able to link all three together and have them operate with
each other.”
Testing concepts using simulations saves time and money, explained
MTS Technologies’ David Schmitz. MTS is a management contractor
for Warcon. “We are looking for bottle necks and systems that
need improvement,” he said. “A future scenario might
stress a current design and if we understand how it is being stressed
then we can tweak that design to improve it,” he added.
In addition to the joint synthetic battle space component, Warcon
relies on advanced analysis tools, said Riley. A model developed
by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is used for trade-off
analysis, where the cost of a system, for example, is measured against
operational requirements, said Riley.
The Naval Research Laboratory is setting up a collaborative enterprise
environment that will pull all the parties of the program together,
said Riley. Then the analysis group will develop a definition of
a given problem and come up with a methodology and software to determine
what needs to be solved.
“One of the biggest challenges of the program is the fact
that you bring together a very diverse group of participants, from
government and industry,” said Riley. “Everybody, based
on their background and experience, has a slightly different understanding
of the problem and solution and the challenge is to bring this to
a unified manner, to see the problem and find a solution.”
Riley stressed that Warcon is only in the early stages of design
and there is a lot of work yet to be done, particularly in the development
of standard terminology and technical tools. The program received
funding for two years to prove its worth and to try to spin off
its findings into other programs. During the next several years,
Warcon officials expect to participate in the Navy’s advanced
battle fleet experiments, which are increasingly becoming a test
bed for emerging technologies.