Debrief and After-Action Review Technologies for Electronic Warfare Simulation and Training

ABSTRACT: Electronic Warfare (EW) will be a critical aspect of potential future conflicts. After years of facing threats without significant EW threats, many EW operators are left with atrophied skills. This lack of real-world experience, combined with the rapid pace at which new threat technology is developed, makes EW training crucial to military operations, and the EW debrief is one of the most effective means to evaluate the effectiveness of our training. The objective of this proposal is to demonstrate a cost effective, but high fidelity, solution to add a simulation environment that can consume EW data sources, assess an output, and then record, display and potentially communicate a more combat realistic environment to airborne operators, range control personnel and EW threat operators, while at the same time recording the info for immediate After Action Review (AAR). If this EW/AAR Phase II is successful, it will open the door to providing more realistic and higher fidelity EW training and debriefing, while also providing a more cost effective and extensible way to create the combat environments our military will potentially face in the future. BENEFIT: In Phase II, BSI believes this is a unique and innovative approach to improving the realism and cost effectiveness of Live-Virtual-Constructive EW training and debrief that could be applied at many ranges and simulations across the DoD. In the course of our research we have identified more applications for improvement in EW/AAR and expanded and targeted our objectives for future EW/AAR development. The results of our Phase I research has created a road-map for the implementation of advanced jamming technique simulation, visualization tools and gives insight into the vast possibilities of advancing EW/AAR if an EW simulation environment could interact with live ground and air systems. The market for distributed military simulation is vast and increasing as more and more training moves into the simulated realm, due to the cost of live training and the pressure to reduce the number of live training ranges. Many hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on DIS-capable simulations, including weapon system trainers, full-motion trainers, image generators, and a wide variety of SAFs. In short, the market is many orders of magnitude larger than required for BSI to thrive with just a small market share. The first product that will incorporate the Live Range Plugin (LRP) Phase II capabilities is BSI's Modern Air Combat Environment (MACE). MACE is BSIs flagship product, a DIS-based entity generator and threat environment. Within six months of the initial release of MACE in April of 2011, MACE had been sold to USAF, ANG, USAFE and USSOCOM units, educational institutions and to companies in the private sector. MACE is also registered with the Department of Defense Trade Controls and ready for international sales.