Siloed Simulators: Improving Training at NATO a Bureaucracy, not Technology Problem.

• Author: Carberry, Sean

ROTTERDAM, Netherlands -- And then there were 31. The ranks of NATO grew with the recent addition of Finland, and while bigger might be better from a security standpoint, it makes the challenge of realizing the next generation of modeling and simulation for joint training that much more complicated, officials say.

While NATO has legacy simulators, building a persistent, synthetic training environment for geographically separated commands requires agreement on standards and protocols, which is not easy to achieve in a large, deliberative organization, NATO officials said during interviews at the IT2EC conference in Rotterdam.

"The big simulations we use for exercises are capabilities that were started to be developed 30 to 40 years ago," said U.S. Army Col. Mark Madden, head of NATO's modeling and simulation learning technologies branch. "They're very specific in what they can do. And what we need to do in NATO is we need to move on beyond just having a capability for one thing and a capability for something else."

Today, NATO members have a range of simulation systems and tools that don't interconnect or represent the full picture of current, let alone future, warfare, he said.

NATO networks can link live ranges to vehicle simulators or indoor tactical simulation systems to facilitate joint training, said Wim Huiskamp, scientific advisor to NATO's modeling and simulation coordination office.

"Constructive simulations are sometimes added to the game to, for example, play the opponents, and they are sometimes fully autonomous, or they have like an instructor or role player that gives some directions every now and then to the computer-generated players," he said.

"But it's very much ad hoc," he said. "So, we plan for an exercise, it takes quite a long time, you do the exercise, and then you tear down everything. And then next time around, you basically start from scratch again. It needs to be a persistent capability, persistent network, between the nations."

"Persistent" is one of the key requirements of NATO's Next Generation of Modelling and Simulation program. Other requirements are web-enabled, modular architecture, data-centric and a single synthetic environment, according to slides presented at the conference.

Madden stated that the future tool needs to not just run exercises, but have planning and wargaming capabilities, facilitate experimentation and work into what NATO calls "strategic studies."

"When I talk about exercise planning...