Replicating platforms accurately in simulations remains one of the biggest challenges for the Army, according to a service official.
“As many of you know, we’ve been chasing concurrency for several years and we’re a couple of years behind on each of the platforms and by the time we had caught up, a new platform had dropped,” Col. John Ferrell, director of simulation for the Army Aviation Center of Excellence at Ft. Rucker, AL, said at an Association of the U.S. Army event last week…
Current simulations also do not support multidomain operations, according to Ferrell, and the service is taking a close look at the Synthetic Training Environment cross-functional team, one of its top priorities.
“We’re putting a lot of emphasis on [the STE CFT] on how we replicate the complexity of the environment to include highly sophisticated air defense networks, cyber networks, how the space domain is going to impact the battlefield in the future, [and] how we replicate that in a simulation,” he said. “The STE CFT is trying to do that.”
That was from Inside the Army, “Platform replication remains a challenge for Army aviation” (gated).
I think there are two stories here. First is that the Department of Defense continues to struggle to rapidly field complex software, like flight simulators. As platforms have more capabilities across sensors, ordnance, communications — and as they push the boundaries of flight design to be stealthy or quiet — all these attributes compound the interrelationships which have to be modeled. It’s not clear what a Minimum Viable Product is for a flight simulator. I imagine a great deal of time is required to fix bugs throughout the system. This is a general challenge and is not specific to simulators.
Second, the difficulty of developing simulators of how new machines interact with the physical world is also a sign that we are entering more complex problems. For example, linear approximations of the turbulence faced by hypersonic missiles are increasingly inadequate. As we enter domains of the very fast, very small, or very powerful, we will inevitably find physical phenomena that behaves in complex ways that cannot necessarily be accurately modeled on computers. If they could be, then experimental development would be superfluous — all answers are already at our fingertips.
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