Prototyping advanced warfare gaming capabilities for the 21st century warfighter

The United States Marine Corps has a unique role in development of the next-generation warfare gaming system for command staff training. This system, titled the Joint Simulation System (JSIMS), is under development by the Department of Defense through a Joint Program Office acting to coordinate the activities of multiple DoD agencies and military services. The nature of operations conducted by the USMC requires modeling and simulation across all JSLMS domains-land, air/space, maritime, intelligence, and command and control. The Marine Corps requires the broadest reach across these domains to provide battlespace representations that will support staff training, from marine expeditionary unit through multiple marine expeditionary force operations. This paper describes the Marine Corps approach to ensure USMC requirements are achieved across the JSIMS enterprise. The paper also describes investigations into exercise control and exercise conduct capabilities for the USMC JSIMS product, working from the foundation of the Marine Air-Ground Task Force (MAGTF) Tactical Warfare Simulation (MTWS), the USMC's fielded command staff trainer. Prototyping efforts include exercise analysis and review capabilities; an integrated command, control, communications, computers and intelligence (C4I) and exercise control workstation architecture; interoperability of real-world C4I systems with the simulation system; and exercise data preparation tools.