Simulation of multi-domain operations for experimentation and analysis – requirements and available tools

The future operating environment is expected to become increasingly complex, lethal, and ambiguous. The operational tempo in high-intensity operations is expected to increase, and effects will be increasingly cross-domain and contemporaneous. An essential question is: How can our forces conduct successful military operations in this envisioned future operating environment?

The proposed solution is multi-domain operations (MDO). MDO is an overarching concept for future operations where the underlying idea is seamless integration of capabilities and activities across all the operational domains (land, maritime, air, space, and cyberspace) to present the enemy with multiple simultaneous dilemmas and achieve overwhelming local superiority in time and space on the battlefield. MDO will, however, be inherently much more complex to execute than current operations of the same scale, due to a higher diversity of combat elements and capabilities (from all operational domains), higher requirements for synchronization of capabilities, activities, actions, and effects, and higher requirements for operational tempo.

Experimentation and analysis are key enablers for concept development and provide the ability to iteratively explore, test, refine, and validate concepts. Modelling and simulation (M&S) and wargaming will be essential in experimentation with, and further development and detailing of, the MDO concept. However, M&S of the future operating environment and MDO will also be correspondingly more complex. In addition, very few, if any, of the simulation tools currently available can represent combat elements and capabilities in all operational domains at a sufficient and balanced level of fidelity throughout the combat model.

In a simulation for experimentation and analysis, the specific requirements for the synthetic environment will ultimately depend on the objective of the simulation – for example, answering a specific research question. Nevertheless, at FFI we need a holistic synthetic environment as a basis for experimenting with, and analysing, combat across all operational domains in an operating environment five to twenty years into the future. Furthermore, we envisage that we need to provide insight into both detailed research questions at the tactical/engagement level and more overarching research questions at the operational level.

In this report, we outline a set of overall requirements for simulation of the future operating environment and MDO for concept development, experimentation, and analysis. We then evaluate a set of available entity-level, constructive simulation tools against these requirements. Our preference is to have one simulation tool that supports all domains, instead of connecting two or more simulation tools that only support a subset of the five domains.

None of the evaluated simulation tools meet all our requirements. We recommend that the way forward is to test these simulation tools more thoroughly in relevant scenarios at FFI, to see how well they work in practice.