December 16, 2004 – Earlier this year, ASTi received an invitation to be part of something labeled “Joint Virtual Training Special Event” (JVTSE) at the 2004 I/ITSEC show. At that time information was sketchy, and the significance or otherwise was not clear. However, because of our close working relationship with USJFCOM, we decided to give the program our support, under direction from JFCOM, to showcase new and emerging capabilities for training, education, and simulation through the Joint National Training Capability (JNTC).

Beginning in early summer, ASTi allocated dedicated engineering resources and worked with services, agencies, industry, academia, and coalition partners to develop and integrate a significant number of leading edge technologies over the 6 months leading up to I/ITSEC in December. This resulted in what many regarded as the talking point of this years show: the running of the first large scale, distributed, live, vitual and constructive simulation event—occurring in realtime as the show ran.

The event allowed the audience to observe a virtual simulation from the cockpit of an F-22, F-16, or an A-10, and experience the combination of live air track information, virtual aircraft and enemies, and real soldiers interacting in the same mock battlespace environment. A number of high ranking military and government personnel were present, and all reports indicated that they were both highly impressed with the cohesive battlescene presented and the scale of the event itself.

Apparently, ASTi was initially invited to participate because of our reputation as the de facto standard in large scale networked voice radio communincations. To summarize comments from Mark Phillips, VMASC battle lab director and co-lead integration engineer for the 2004 I/ITSEC JVTSE: “Without realistic voice comms between the players, we will not be in a position to run the event at all.” ASTi was therefore a required player. If that isn’t a stamp of approval, then nothing else is.

At the show, 28 widely distributed booths on the show floor were linked over a fiber optic network, along with long-haul links offsite to the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) in Mesa, AZ and the Southern California Offshore Range Environment (SCORE) at NAS North Island to integrate over 100 computer systems that each contributed different facets of the event.

During the event, ASTi ran a live feed of the voice traffic, and used both our workhorse DACS, and our “fresh from the wrapper” Windows XP-hosted PC’ver application to monitor the voice comms. This setup was also used to debug and support the event during the integration periods. At the peak of the event, over 150 radios were routinely seen on the network, of which approximately 105 were recorded as being ASTi radios. The remainder were all logged as being roll-your own implementations from specific programs. And several were noted as being decidely off-the-wall with a number of parameters. (We never did identify the source of the -100Hz transmission, or the 0Hz radios... but the log files will no doubt help!)

Key players using ASTi that participated during the event were:

• Air Force Research Lab
  Virtual F-16 cockpits in Mesa, Arizona (follow-up air-to-ground attack)
  
  
• Air Force Agency for Modeling and Simulation C4ISR Visualization Center (AFAMS CVC)
  UAV operator feed
  
  
• AFRL
  Virtual A-10 cockpit on the show floor (air-to-ground attack)
  
  
• L-3 Communications
  AVCATT-A UH-60 troopship and two AH-64 Apache gunships
  
  
• Zedasoft
  Virtual F-22 cockpit (initial air-to-air engagement and air-to-groud attack which opened the live event)

All of the above players provided live voice radio traffic that was broadcast to the audience at the JFCOM booth.

Since these events were run as live, man-in-the-loop, scenarios, no single run was the same as any other (and we won’t mention the AVCATT UH-60 crashing on the first event run-through! Well only this once...), but each run showed the amazing capabilities that can now be brought together to operate in a highly cohesive and integrated manner, and equally how valuable it is to have key industry players, such as ASTi, involved on the inside.

ASTi is proud to have been involved in this event, and was humbled to hear from so many members of the Technical Working Group team that ASTi is a fundamental element of the JNTC infrastructure. We were complemented several times, not just for the quality of our technology, but for engineers willingness to get “down in the mud” and help the various participants diagnose the myriad network issues that plague a first time event such as this.

So, looking to the future, the final JVTSE briefing reports that next year’s show is going to build on the success of the 2004 effort. The plan is to increase the number of participants on the show floor from 28 to around 60 (!) in 2005. ASTi has already indicated that we will be an enthusistic participant, so watch this space! We are already planning a number of support tools to enhance our ability to monitor and validate the integrity of the network voice communication traffic in such large scale events and exercises.