FEATURE ARTICLE

December 2006

Virtual Weapons Lab Sought by Air Force

By Sandra I. Erwin

One of the explanations often heard for the ballooning cost of weapon systems is that the military services habitually make changes to the design late in a weapon’s development cycle. This expensive habit often occurs even after contractors have begun cutting metal on the production line.

Military officials assert that, given how long it takes to develop a weapon system — several years or even decades — they need the flexibility to modify the specs or request new features as their missions and combat environments change.

At the same time, a number of experts within the Defense Department and the defense industry contend that the huge price tag associated with design changes could be lowered dramatically, if the Defense Department chose to forgo live prototypes in favor of virtual, or digital mockups.

The Boeing Company, after all, designed one of its most successful jetliners, the 777, entirely in digital format and tested it in cyberspace before it cut any metal.

That is exactly how the military should create and develop new weapon systems, says Keith E. Seaman, modeling and simulation senior advisor to the secretary of the Air Force.

To that end, Seaman is seeking funds to build a leading-edge virtual laboratory where the Air Force could design and test its weapon systems, at a much more reduced cost than live trials. More importantly, says Seaman, tests at this virtual lab would be just as credible as those conducted with real hardware.

The project, known as the Air Force integrated collaborative environment, is in the early stages of design at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio.

If all goes well, Seaman says, the Air Force could design and build its futuristic new bomber aircraft in the digital lab.

“We started last year,” he says. The technology “is supposed to provide a reusable environment to test systems.” He is confident that it could be up and running in five years.

David M. Votipka, a retired Air Force colonel and former commander of the Air Force agency for modeling and simulation, says this technology has been long overdue. The problem has been convincing acquisition program managers that it works. “It’s hard to get investments until it’s proven,” says Votipka, who now works for Gestalt LLC, the contractor currently developing the collaborative environment for the Air Force.

A major concern in developing this virtual lab is securing data — owned by the government and by contractors — from intruders and industrial spies, he says. “We are working with the Air Force to come up with a broader approach to do multiple protection levels and protect intellectual property so industry can participate in experimentation and testing,” he says. Both the Air Force “long range strike” and “airborne electronic attack” programs are candidates for this collaborative environment.

Each major weapon system currently has its own digital models, which typically are not shared with any other program. So asking program managers to give that up in favor of a consolidated test environment is a tough proposition, says William Loftus, president of Gestalt.

The savings that the Air Force would reap by designing systems only in digital labs would be huge, he suggests.

Hypothetically, if the F-22 next-generation fighter had been designed in a virtual lab, the Air Force could have saved billions of dollars by slashing several years from the development cycle, Votipka says.

If he can make this case to the Air Force leadership, the service might agree to invest more funds in this technology, Seaman says. He acknowledges that previous attempts at “simulation based acquisition” have failed because the goals were too ambitious. “A lot of the modeling and simulation-based acquisition in the past took a monolithic approach—trying to build it all at one time. We are not going to take that approach. We are going to gradually build, test, build, test.”

One of the challenges, he adds, will be “finding money to make it happen, without hurting programs.”

Another hurdle is proving that the technology is as reliable as live tests, which could be a tough sell for the Defense Department’s office of test and evaluation.

In research and development programs, simulations are widely accepted as substitutes for hardware, but it could be a long time before acquisition managers replace live prototypes with digital models, says Stephen Albert, senior manager of business development at CAE, a provider of simulators and training devices. “Everyone is looking at using simulation in research. But how do you get the acquisition people to use it? … That’s a major hurdle,” he says.

But there is increasing evidence, he adds, that some procurement agencies outside the United States are relying on simulations to make weapon-buying decisions. Specifically, acquisition officials are employing “virtual sandboxes” to try out unmanned aircraft prototypes before they commit to buying them, Albert says.

Military procurement agencies in Canada and the European Union have developed virtual labs to assemble unmanned air vehicle with components from different manufacturers. The simulations not only test the performance of the aircraft but also how it can be integrated into the command-and-control structure, Albert says. “People need to validate the chain of information driven by the UAV … It’s not enough to model a single airplane. With UAVs, it’s more about mission operations.”

Canada, which is seeking to buy a new unmanned aircraft for maritime surveillance missions, acquired digital models of the U.S. Predator and Israel’s Heron. Engineers equipped the digital UAVs with cameras and flew them along the west coast of Canada in a virtual database — where the aircraft were used to monitor ships in the port of Vancouver that were suspected of drug smuggling and polluting the coastal waters, Albert says. The simulations also help the Canadians determine the composition of UAV operator teams.

Germany and France are in the early stages of designing a virtual UAV with components from different countries. The idea is to eventually develop a European UAV that several countries would build and acquire.

In the United States, he says, “people don’t trust the technology enough … What if someone tweaks the model?

“Everyone has to agree on the technology and comply,” Albert says. “What you need is a Microsoft of simulation. This is not going to happen in the United States for some time, not across the whole military acquisition system.”

Please email your comments to Serwin@ndia.org

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