Navy Program Bolsters Links Between Testers, Engineers.

• Author: Tiron, Roxana

The Defense Department is funding a two-year, $10 million program that seeks to emphasize the use of technology experimentation and cost analysis before weapons systems enter full-rate procurement.

The initiative, called War Fighting Concepts to Future Weapon System Designs (Warcon), is managed by the Office for Naval Research. Essentially, it is looking to provide a link between the experimentation and acquisition communities.

The growing emphasis on so-called war-fighting experiments by the military services means that acquisition programs cannot work in isolation from those experiments, officials said. The availability of advanced digital models and simulation technologies now is making it possible to experiment with weapon-system concepts before final design decisions are made.

"The venue we have picked to emphasize the concepts is modeling and simulation," said Ben Riley, government program manager for Warcon.

In addition to the Office of Naval Research, other Warcon participants include the Naval Sea Systems Command, Newport News Shipbuilding, Lockheed Martin, MTS Technologies, BMH, TSI and Oculus Technologies, among others.

Warcon explores ways to change the roles between government and industry and "lay more emphasis on up-front demonstrations to validate technology and determine the cost, versus performance, before an actual weapons system is acquired," said Riley. The goal, he explained, is to use "engineering-level models to fill the gap in the refinement of system requirements, as weapon systems proceed through the acquisition life cycle." Modeling and simulation facilitates "continuous technology insertion," he said.

For the Defense Department to benefit from these technologies, there needs to be a "collaborative engineering enterprise," where government and industry program managers are linked electronically, in a "distributed team" operation, he added.

If one applies the Warcon principles, Riley said, the end-result is a "knowledge base for the acquisition process."

A critical tool for Warcon is a joint synthetic battle space, "where all the models are integrated into a single architecture," said Riley. BMH, based in Virginia Beach, Va., is responsible for this part of the project.

In the context of Navy programs, for example, the synthetic battle space models the natural environment, the ships and the battle space for an aircraft carrier. "We are using the joint synthetic battle space as opposed to the virtual ship," said Lockheed Martin's Richard Schaeffer. "It is providing the context in which the war fighter can evaluate new operational concepts," he added.

The simulation used...