Supporting Joint Warfighter Readiness: Opportunities and Incentives for Interservice and Intraservice Coordination with Training-Simulator Acquisition and Use

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Marler, Timothy

Contributor:

Andrews, Graham

Downing, Bryce

Eden, Rick

Haberman, Ryan

Kochhar, Ajay K.

Lewis, Matthew W.

Toukan, Mark

Language:

English

Other Title:

Supporting Joint Warfighter Readiness

Place of Publication:

Santa Monica, Calif. RAND Corporation 2021

Summary:

Given the military's continuing effort to "train as we fight," warfighters must be prepared to collaborate with other services. There is a need to ensure coordination and interoperability within and across the services with respect to simulation-based training. However, because of organic changes in policies and organizational structures, there are significant challenges for the services to coordinate within their own organizations and to collaborate with one another while working toward joint training needs. Concurrent with the growing need for virtual distributed training capabilities, the military simulation-and-training market is growing, and this market includes substantial efforts to develop new training-simulator capabilities. However, technological development is not always driven by training needs, especially for cross-service exercises. Development of training simulators often drives the users rather than the reverse, especially with respect to distributed training systems. With a focus on air and ground training simulators for Tier 3 and Tier 4 exercises—i.e., training at the service component (operational) and individual unit (tactical) levels—the authors of this report investigate the gap between joint training needs and currently available and forthcoming technology in the training-simulator field. They provide a broad analysis of the simulation-based training enterprise and the organizational structure, requirements processes, and acquisition processes for each service. They also analyze joint training needs, organizational and policy mechanisms for coordination between services, and incentives structures for cross-service simulator development.