FEATURE ARTICLE

July 2005

Battle Labs Explore New Concepts for Warfare

By Harold Kennedy

The Defense Department has created the following additional test beds for exploring new warfare concepts:

• The Joint Warfighting Center, operated by the joint staff at Fort Monroe, Va., guides the development of ways for the services to improve their cooperation on the battlefield.
• The Joint C4ISR Battle Center, at nearby Suffolk, Va., works to assure interoperability of command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance technologies. It also provides combatant commandeers at the joint task-force level with assessments and a state-of-the art environment for modeling and simulation experiments.
• The Army has 10 battle labs, Mounted Battlespace, Dismounted Battlespace, Command and Control, Depth and Simultaneous Attack, Combat Service Support, Maneuver Support, Air Maneuver, and Space and Missile Defense. All 10 operate under the direction of the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command at Fort Monroe.
• The Navy’s Maritime Battle Center, in Newport, R.I., is designed to provide the oversight needed to translate promising concepts into operational capabilities.
• The Air Force has established six battle labs to identify innovative ideas, assess their merit and validate concepts that can impact future Air Force training, doctrine, requirements and acquisition programs. The battle labs are Air Expeditionary Force, Command and Control Battle Management, Force Protection, Information Warfare, Space and unmanned Aerial Vehicles.