The U.S. Air Force’s long-awaited, much-anticipated Joint Simulation Environment (JSE)—a high-fidelity simulated battlespace system that warfighters will use to train on fifth-generation platforms—is expected to reach initial operational capability in 2025 at the Joint Integrated Test and Training Center Nellis (JITTC-N) at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, with full integration expected by 2028, experts from HII say.
JSE’s development has been a years-long collaboration between the Air Force and U.S. Navy that is fully coordinated across services to help ensure a consistent strategic approach. In addition, government and industry collaboration and systems development is significant with the various elements of the JSE ecosystem being developed and evaluated.
HII, together with the Air Force and Navy, is playing an integral role in evolving and integrating the JSE technology at a faster pace than America’s adversaries.
HII currently supports the Air Force at the JITTC-N as the lead contractor, supporting capability studies, battlespace and platform integration, and software development tasks.
“[JSE] is so critical for the warfighter because today’s training ranges just can’t keep up with the fifth-gen platforms and how they need to train. These platforms can’t train systems high—they don’t have the space required on ranges. You don’t get the threat densities, and you can’t keep up with the adversary threat evolution,” says Mike Aldinger, HII Mission Technologies’ vice president for Live, Virtual, Constructive (LVC).
The initial instantiation of the JSE at JITTC-N will allow up to eight warfighters at once to train on F-35 platforms (in what Aldinger calls a “fighter in a box”) in a real-time combat simulation against eight Virtual Adversary Training Sims (VATS). Aldinger says this is planned for 2025, with the Air Force’s goal then being to extend the battlespace to support larger- and larger-scale simulations as JSE capabilities grow and the Air Force’s mission sets evolve.
The F-35 will initially be the primary platform in the JITTC at Nellis, but will also integrate F-22 and E-7 platforms with JSE’s capabilities. Within five years, Aldinger says, the JITTC-N is expected to support a fully joint training environment between multiple platforms across multiple services—including those of America’s coalition partner nations.
“JSE is intended to provide a standards-based simulation environment that all of the different platforms can use,” says John Bell, the chief technology officer for Mission Technologies. “One of the visions for JSE is to provide a platform-agnostic cockpit, which can be modular and can be reconfigured to support all the various specific platforms that our pilots need to train in.”
Bell says the cockpits are a good example of the advantage JSE provides the warfighter: a combination of virtual reality environment and physical reality—a fully synthetic environment that will allow all its users to train together today the same way they’ll fight together tomorrow.
HII’s integration efforts at JITTC-N have been an ongoing work in progress and will continue to evolve long after the JITTC-N reaches IOC in 2025, Bell says.
“Anybody who has paid attention to present day armed conflicts has seen that the way war is being conducted is completely different from wars of years past,” he says. “Because of that, the simulation systems that we have to build to train our warfighters are continually evolving. And because of that, the standards that we build to connect them together must continually evolve.”
“HII has a lot of experience in developing those standards,” Bell adds. “We’ve done this for the Navy, in building a complete worldwide distributed training network for all the Navy’s warfare systems. And so we’re able to bring that expertise to bear in the JSE.”
Learn more about HII’s involvement in developing the next generation of joint training here.