Air Force Looks to Expand JSE, Pair It with Other Training Tools

AURORA, Colo.—As the Air Force and Navy prepare to spend billions of dollars expanding the Joint Simulation Environment, military and industry experts said last week they are already thinking about ways they can pair the high-end virtual environment with training for other services and allies. 

The JSE—described by Col. Robert S. “Slip” Smith, commander of the 505th Combat Training Group, during an AFA Warfare Symposium panel as a “high-fidelity, fifth-gen-plus, physics-based environment”—started as a way to complete operational testing for the F-35 because some of the fighter’s capabilities were too sensitive to turn on during live flight.  

It evolved, however, when the Air Force Weapons School realized it could be used for pilot training, said Col. C. Matt Ryan, senior materiel leader for the simulators division at the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center, in another panel discussion. 

Now, the Air Force is planning to establish more JSE facilities starting in 2025 at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev. The goal is to eventually expand that even further to every F-35 base, including overseas. 

Along the way, the Air Force decided to mandate that all new weapons systems be able to plug into the JSE, Ryan noted. 

Yet as JSE grows, officials say they still see it as one component in the live, virtual, and constructive world of test and training—one they will need to make compatible with other systems. 

“Being able to bring that down and incorporate that type of training into fourth- and third-gen networks, coalition networks, and being able to really incorporate that into the unit of action [concept of operations], to be able to execute ACE operations in the Indo-Pacific theater, that’s what we need,” Smith said. “We need to be able to share that information, to go from the high-fidelity to the low-fidelity, and have a full immersive battlespace, synthetic and blended experience.” 

Iain Ferguson, an executive with SAIC’s Air Force and combatant commands business group, described that effort as “the larger JSE program of record” and said the Air Force and Navy “have already made really great strides … to include a lot of this understanding of different fidelities.” 

One of those strides, he noted, was deploying some of SAIC’s non-JSE simulators, called FENIX, to U.S. Air Forces in Europe’s Warfare Center.  

“It’s really exciting to see what we’re able to do at a lower fidelity, but very much focused on, how do you do integration, eight-ship integration with other components, joint, and coalition partners, training together, large-force exercises, much of it simulated or constructive, but also with pilots,” Ferguson said. 

While high-fidelity training is important, both Smith and Ferguson cited the need for less sophisticated simulators and virtual environments that can be deployed on a wider scale than JSE right now. Those training tools are important for large-scale exercises, an area of particular interest for the Air Force as it prepares for a potential conflict with the likes of China.  

Tying the JSE into the lower-end environments, however, is still important so that F-35 pilots can learn to operate alongside allies and forces outside of the “day one fight” as Smith put it—an inevitable scenario in any potential large-scale conflict. 

“It’s important that we can train with our coalition partners without losing the fidelity of the training for our forces,” Ferguson said. 

A Canadian coalition tactical air control party member operates within a simultaneously live, virtual, and constructive environment allowing warfighters to prepare to wage war, and then practice doing so in a realistic simulation so that they can learn how to be combat effective during Coalition VIRTUAL FLAG 22-1 at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, Oct. 24 – Nov. 5, 2021. This photo has been altered for security purposes by removing monitor screens and paperwork on the floor. U.S. Air Force photo by Deb Henley

One way to ensure that is to bring allies into the JSE—something Ryan said the Air Force is working on at Nellis. 

“Before the month is over, that’s our expectation, is that we will have that as a schedulable training asset for the [Combat Air Force], and hopefully for them to also bring in coalition partners,” he said. “That’s obviously a big emphasis area for our senior leaders, is to be able to do those reps and sets in a combined fashion with those coalition partners as well.” 

To bring the JSE to allies instead of vice versa will require solving latency and security issues, Ferguson said. 

It seems likely that officials will tackle those problems as JSE becomes more and more integral to test and training across the entire Pentagon. Col. Corey Klopstein, program executive officer for Operational Test and Training Infrastructure (OTTI) at Space Systems Command, said the Space Force has joined the JSE user group and is looking to upgrade its OTTI. 

“The Space Force needs to provide space effects to the joint warfighter to ensure the joint warfighter can validate in their training events and their exercises, whether or not they’re going to be effective,” Klopstein said. “The Space Force also needs a high-fidelity environment to be able to validate not just our system performance in the threat environment that we anticipate, but also our tactics, and validate our tactics.” 

Just like the Air Force, though, Klopstein said the Space Force wants JSE to fit into a larger infrastructure that has more scalable systems. 

“What we’re trying to do is establish multiple synthetic environments, one for distributed training and one for the high-end,” he said. “The distributed training environment that we’re working on right now is called SWARM. We use that for our Space Flag [exercises.] And we’re working … to try to get that as realistic as possible, and we want to make sure that that’s the training system that we use to have cross-mission area training. Going forward, though, we won’t just need the high-fidelity training. We also need the test capabilities.” 

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