Army charges on with Joint Simulation System.

• Author: Tiron, Roxana

The U.S. Army is proceeding with the development of the ground-warfare portion of the Joint Simulation System program, which now is shelved while the Pentagon is searching for alternatives.

WARSIM, the Army simulation program, was supposed to be the land component of JSIMS. JSIMS was designed to be a federation of computerized combat simulations to train commanders and war planners. After years of delays and cost overruns, the program appeared to be getting back on track in late 2002 as it delivered its first version. But in December, the Defense Department pulled the plug on JSIMS and directed the program manager to close the office by September of this year.

According to Col. Kevin Dietrick, the director of Army simulation, the Army made a strong case to the office of the secretary of defense that WARSIM was valuable enough to be further explored. The service has spent $300 million on the project during the past 10 years.

OSD agreed to let the Army "recreate" the program, and restored some of the funding that had been budgeted for fiscal year 2004, said Dietrick.

"We have a significant portion of the land models completed," he said. "We estimate around 70 percent, maybe 75 percent, of the models are done," he told National Defense. "What remains for us now is to make sure that the performance of the system is up to snuff, in other words, that it meets user expectations."

However, only a few months ago, according to one source, WARSIM could not support "even a small, watered-down scenario without crashing for a variety of reasons."

Now, with $14.7 million in the current budget and hopes for considerably more in the coming years, the service is reshaping its simulation program into what it now calls the Army Constructive Training Federation.

ACTF is a collection of simulation models that is going to be fielded in several versions, Dietrick explained. Next year, ACTF starts out with version 1, which will link current simulation systems, such as Corps Battle Simulation (CBS) with Tactical Simulation (TACSIM)--the intelligence piece--and with JCAPS, a joint simulation model at the entity level, said Dietrick. Other simulations also will be added to the federation.

Version 2 is going to bring in a brigade-size exercise from WARSIM.

"We are going to start to see the goodness of WARSIM already in version 2. WARSIM together with OneSAF [One Semi-Automated Forces] will replace the current systems in this second version. ... What we want to do is...