Military lab launches experimentation network
The "transformation laboratory" of the Joint Forces Command this month launched an initiative that seeks to make it easier for the armed services to collaborate with each other, government agencies, foreign allies and industry partners on war-fighting experiments.
Based in Suffolk, Va., the Distributed Continuous Experimentation Environment (DCEE) serves as an "experimentation Internet" that will enable military officials to conduct war games and other joint concept-development activities more quickly and efficiently than in the past.
"We're not going to be doing anything differently; we're just going to be doing the things we have been doing in a more effective way," said Maj. Thomas Greenwald, the DCEE's engineering lead at the command's Joint Experimentation Directorate.
The directorate serves as a laboratory to fuel defense transformation by developing and testing joint concepts and doctrines for fighting the types of wars that could occur as late as 2020.
In the past, that type of joint experimentation required experts and other participants to travel to temporary sites where the directorate had set up computers, networks and other infrastructure. "All the participants would have to come to that location on a temporary basis ... and then at the end [of an experiment], everybody would go back to their home stations and we'd tear down the infrastructure," Greenwald recalled.
He explained that the $4.5 million DCEE facility, constructed over the past three months at the directorate's headquarters, serves as a permanent lab where modeling and simulation events, joint training events and other transformation activities can be conducted either on site or through a global experimentation network.
"The long-term vision for DCEE is to be able to distribute it not just to the [military] services but also to the regional combatant commanders, other government agencies, potentially academia, and a number of different industry partners-pretty much anyone who has an interest in ... joint experimentation," Greenwald said. "This will afford us the opportunity to stand up an experiment and run it with everyone connected in distributed way."
Command officials held their first DCEE event, dubbed Pinnacle Impact '03, at the facility earlier this month. Transformation experts from all the armed services and their foreign military partners participated in the nine-day event, a "seminar war game" that explored how the U.S. military and allies might combat potential adversaries.
All of the Pinnacle activities were conducted at the DCEE facility, but Greenwald said the experimentation directorate will launch the first "distributed" DCEE event in July. "That will be first time we stand up a number of simulations, federate them together and send that federated picture to distributed sites across the country," he said.
"We've also got a number of multinational partners that will be linking in and will actually be running some foreign simulations and [integrating] them with some U.S. simulations and creating one federation," Greenwald added. "That's never been done before."