The Synthetic Torpedo Meets the Virtual Submarine

Battlespace Engineering Brings New Realism to Dockside Training

By DON McCORMACK

We all have to admit it; we've never really outgrown building blocks. There's something rewarding about building, rearranging, and creating something new. The engineers at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, Newport, R.I., have been utilizing this process to build a Virtual Undersea Battlespace that offers sophisticated virtual engineering support to meet the needs of the fleet and the Navy's research and development requirements.

Several years ago, the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, Newport, came to understand the power of combining simulation and range facilities. Our ultimate vision is to move beyond single-platform undersea warfare to a point at which undersea warfare decisions are determined by the undersea warfare capabilities of the theater/battle group. Operating in such a manner ensures domination of the undersea warfare battlespace in the physical, informational, and cognitive domains. This new focus on undersea warfare battlespace will enable the fleet to quickly and efficiently meet new requirements in the ever-changing geopolitical environment.

When Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Vern Clark issued Sea Power 21, his strategy for the 21st century, Sea Trial was designated as the process within the strategy for innovation, concept development, fleet and joint experimentation, and doctrine development. The Sea Power 21 operational concepts, and their associated underpinning capabilities, present a range of challenging questions and issues that require examination. Warfighters are faced with challenges to identify and examine the feasibility of new concepts of operations, command-and- control arrangements, and doctrinal and procedural implications. We also need to examine various engineering aspects of the emerging operational concepts. Even more important, sophisticated virtual engineering allows the examination and development of emerging concepts, capabilities, and initial doctrine prior to at-sea experimentation. This allows warfighters to identify the most promising experimental packages that will enable at-sea events to be focused and productive.

Create a Battleforce Information System

Undersea warfare (USW) Battlespace Engineering (BSE) is a multiplatform approach to warfare that encompasses all the battlespace information sources, creating a battleforce information system. Specifically, USW BSE is concerned with the integration of information from a multitude of sources--on-hull, organic, and off-hull--that will better enable Sailors, officers, staff, and commanders to conduct operations. It will provide the USW portion of FORCENet, a planned network architecture, to enhance the way the Navy acquires and uses information to improve combat effectiveness.

To achieve this vision, the Naval Warfare Systems Forum, which includes the executive directors of the Navy Labs, has chartered a working group to look at how best to link simulations and hardware at each of the labs. Limited experiments have been done between the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, Newport, the Naval Air Systems Command, and the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command to test an expeditionary sensor grid concept. This entails sharing of sensor data from a variety of sources across a sensor grid. Using this virtual platform, we will construct a virtual battle group that can be used to support multiplatform undersea warfare development, training, and operations.

The building blocks needed to construct this battle group began appearing a few years ago. The Los Angeles-class attack submarine USS Oklahoma City was on range at the Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center in the Bahamas. The torpedoes she fired were "virtual torpedoes" residing on a computer simulator at the warfare center's Weapons Analysis Facility. After launch, the torpedo's simulated location and corresponding wire-guidance telemetry were transmitted across the network between the analysis facility at Newport and the Oklahoma City.

Integrate On-Board Trainers With External Environment

The still-submerged Oklahoma City sees the torpedo in real-time, thus allowing the generation of wire-guidance commands on board to compensate for target evasion. The Synthetic Environment Tactical Integration project established the systems, processes, and capabilities to give the fleet access to the warfare center's models and simulations for undersea warfare. The original goal was to reduce cost and increase the value of testing and training through synthetic torpedoes and synthetic targets to supplement the ones available on range. We also wanted to integrate on-board trainers with external environments. The success was tremendous and the possibilities limitless. The submarine's commanding officer began his efforts with a group of engineers wanting to demonstrate something, and helped create the capability to bring his submarine to the battle stations so he could realistically train his people while dockside.

Fast-forward a few years: Building upon the success of using virtual components with a live platform, Fleet Battle Experiment (FBE) India utilized a virtual nuclear-powered guided-missile submarine (vSSGN) based on a modernized Trident platform. It contained a control room, navigation center, and missile control center compartments created at the undersea warfare center's Warfare System Presentation Facility. The vSSGN was manned by a 10-man military crew and functioned as both an engagement and sensor node in the Digital Fires Network. The design of the SSGN combat system is still in the development phase. Thus, the various systems employed in the experiment were a combination of submarine-specific and temporary FBE-India elements similar to those on the other real-world and virtual ships that participated. This advantage allowed the configuration of the SSGN to be tested in real-world scenarios and will aid in the refinement of the development process and operational deployment.

This latest effort is the most robust example of what the Virtual Undersea Battlespace can do. But in order to make the Virtual Undersea Battlespace a tool that can be successfully used by the fleet, we must build a comprehensive environment that looks beyond a single platform or weapon and whether it is virtual or live. USW BSE is the tool to make it happen. The USW BSE approach extends above the platform level of warfare to encompass the warfare commander decision level. More specifically, USW BSE is concerned with the level of decisions that must be made by the commander of multiple undersea warfare platforms and sensors. This approach includes all stages of mission planning, completely through detection, localization, tracking, classification, and engagement. Ultimately, the reconstruction and analysis of such a prosecution is essential.

Address Needs of Undersea Commander

The primary requirement is to provide a consistent, accurate, and timely situational understanding of the underwater battle-space and the various entities that may influence it. These may include force disposition, topography, and the environment, to all participants that are in the process of conducting either antisubmarine (ASW) or mine warfare (MIW) operations. Additionally, those charged with the planning, coordination, execution, monitoring, and command-and-control of undersea warfare (USW) should be provided with rapid automated decision support in order to optimize intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and prosecution efforts against the enemy.

In support of this approach, the Naval Undersea Warfare Center has developed an undersea warfare commander's module (UCM) to address the needs of the undersea warfare commander with responsibility for many platforms. The warfare center's Undersea Battlespace Lab (USB) provides existing single-platform undersea warfare capabilities with a common frame of reference for ocean environment and threat. Integrating the virtual battle group with the UCM ensures the UCM has full dynamic control of undersea warfare assets.

USW Commander's Module

The UCM is the focal point for the fusion of undersea warfare information and hence is the decision-making focal point for the USW BSE effort. The UCM will provide the undersea warfare commander the basic displays of legacy systems and multiplatform interactive capabilities. Also, new visualization and emersion technologies will be investigated for use in the UCM. The goal is to provide new three-dimensional displays in a large emersion-type environment to increase the efficiency and battle space awareness of the undersea warfare battle group commander.

Virtual Battle Group

Existing undersea warfare laboratory platform entities across the naval warfare centers will be connected to the UCM to permit the simulation of virtual platforms and sensors engaged in undersea warfare prosecution. The goal is to create a virtual battle group with multiple platforms for those at the decision level. When presented to a decision maker located in the UCM, such a set-up will provide a controlled environment for command-and-control of the virtual platforms and sensors, and multiplatform undersea warfare stimulation and reaction, testing, evaluation, reconstruction, and analysis.

There are a lot of building blocks out there. By using sound USW BSE system engineering, the result will be a virtual test and training battlespace that goes far beyond the picture on the box that came with the building blocks. n

Don McCormack is executive director, Naval Undersea Warfare Center Division Newport. Don Aker, Head, Surface Undersea Warfare Analysis Department; Andy Appleget, Engineering, Test & Evaluation Department; Chris Julius, Sea Trial Program Manager; and Gene Hackney, FORCENet Program Manager; all of the NUWC, assisted in the preparation of this article.