To ensure that our soldiers are well prepared to operate in a complex and dangerous security environment, MITRE is working with the U.S. Army to develop the most advanced training environment in the world. MITRE’s Bruce Gorski and Brian Parrish created a knowledge-sharing plan to enable the development process. The plan supported stakeholder engagement and communication via an interim solution until the key stakeholders (the Training and Doctrine Command Capability Manager for the Integrated Training Environment (ITE) and the Project Manager for ITE) could establish the knowledge portal for capability development. The project was recognized at the May 2016 MITRE Knowledge Advantage Project Showcase. —Editor

Author: Karen Fleer

War has changed dramatically—from potential large-scale engagements between formally defined cold-war protagonists to targeted, rapidly evolving operations where multiple threats are hard to identify. That’s why it’s imperative that the U.S. Army’s Synthetic Training Environment (STE) evolve from the patchwork of legacy delivery methods developed decades ago to teach the “Air Land Battle” doctrine of the 1980s and 1990s.

The Army’s next-generation STE will be built around a single set of common, customizable, and authoritative data and will add mixed reality to live training. It will provide point-of-need training via real-world Mission Command systems and support brigade- and battalion-level command and staff training, including training with Joint and Multinational Unified Action Partners.

It’s a huge project, with many government and private industry stakeholders who can really benefit from knowledge-sharing. So MITRE has described an STE partnership centered on a robust collaborative environment that includes the Combined Arms Center-Training Innovation Facility, technical feedback laboratories, a design cell, a collaborative cloud development environment, and a collaborative integration facility. The partnership covers the three major roles in STE development—operational requirements, technical implementation and acquisition, and science & technology—and participants from the highest levels of the military and more than 125 stakeholders from industry and academia. Members of the STE collaborative environment have committed to work within their respective areas of responsibility to provide continuous feedback to their colleagues throughout STE development.

The STE collaborative environment promises to provide powerful evidence that knowledge-sharing can do more than make processes more efficient and effective. It can help deliver critically important technologies that enable the U.S. Army to wage new generation war—and win.