Transitioning to the next generation (nextgen) defense training environment (DTE)

Department of Defense (DoD) closed architectures and proprietary solutions limit the ability to provide the warfighter gaming, semantic reasoning and social networking capabilities employed by industry and readily available in the open source community. Exorbitant sustainment costs of legacy solutions are unjustifiable and significantly inhibit transition to enhanced solutions. Additionally, legacy solutions leave a dependence on an aging workforce of static-centric modeling & simulation (M&S) subject matter expertise (SME) to promote reuse, while budget cuts increase attrition among junior-level technical staff. This paper describes challenges and recommendations for changing the DoD M&S training paradigm to facilitate interoperability, incorporate emerging semantic web technologies, and provide a knowledge base to promote reuse. Two ongoing R&D projects will be used to illustrate innovative strategies and their potential to alleviate many legacy system interoperability issues while transitioning to a Defense Training Environment (DTE) where US and Coalition Command and Control (C2) and M&S systems seamlessly interoperate to train as we fight.