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DECEMBER 2011 ISSUE AT A GLANCE - Test as We Fight.
Actual operations aren’t merely realistic, they are real. ‘Test as we fight’ requires every cue that impinges on the senses to be considered, every constraint present, and every threat represented at the same level of fidelity as the friendly force. It entails operators who are trained as we fight and embodies integrated testing and its relationship to the operational environment. Outside of the Department of Defense the counterpart is testing in operationally representative environments, whether for air traffic control, power plant operations, harbormasters in busy commercial ports, or law enforcement.
The Guest Editorial is coauthored by three experienced Department of Defense test and evaluation (T&E) professionals, The Honorable John Krings, The Honorable Thomas P. Christie and Mr. Pete Adolph, attesting to the need for enforcing existing directives and guidance as a primary step in addressing shortcomings in the acquisition process. COL (R) Wilbur Gray describes the origin, history and use of military wargaming in Historical Perspectives.
December sees a new special section featuring perspectives from three of the Department of Defense and one industry T&E Executive. The Honorable Dr. J. Michael Gilmore, Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, summarizes two recent studies that examined acquisition program delays, concluding that none of the reasons cited included T&E. Dr. Steven Hutchison, Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) T&E Executive, describes the need for designing a test to determine if the product does what the user expects it to do, and the DISA lessons captured from the information technology sector to help craft an improved approach to testing. Ms. Amy Markowich, Senior Executive for Department of the Navy Test and Evaluation, ‘‘busts’’ some of the myths of T&E to dispel commonly held false beliefs and reveal kernels of truth. Finally, Mr. Dennis O’Donoghue, Vice President of Boeing Test & Evaluation, explores test as we fight as a cultural shift in test philosophy necessitated by complex system-of-systems testing. In the 2011 ITEA Technology Review Best Paper, Mr. Michael Curry, Mr. Noe Duarte and Ms. Nancy Sodano present a T&E infrastructure for data-driven decision-making and development of an integrated, end-to-end T&E strategy.
The contributed articles open with a need for creating a more relevant operational environment by crafting realism and enabling free-play in operational testing, by MAJ Cornelius Allen, Jr and his coauthors. Three articles from the Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC) directly speak to test as we fight. Mr. Richard Delgado, Jr et al. explain JITC automated test tools and procedures and their value in providing rigor to the testing process and raising the confidence level of the test results. MAJ Lee Brinker iscusses the importance of distributed integration and testing in realizing test as we fight. MAJ Robert Houston reviews multi-national testing for assessing operational interoperability of various command, control, communications, and computer systems.
Ms. Jamie Pilar and co-workers introduce modeling and simulation tools that are flexible and network intensive to fully investigate the value-added of systems during evaluation. Mr. Bill Rearick demonstrates how computer modeling and simulation has the ability to elevate testing and training to a whole new level of realism and fidelity. Dr. Charlie Holman and Ms. Anika Dodds illustrate the use of bioinformatics tools for improving the accuracy of biological warfare agent detection systems. Mr. Todd Remund and Mr. William Kitto apply Monte Carlo techniques for achieving statistical rigor in aircraft T&E. Mr. Craig Schlenoff et al. review lessons learned in evaluating military systems, citing decisions made during the evaluation design stage as possibly the most critical. Mr. Brian Weiss and Prof. Linda Schmidt describe a methodology for automating evaluation design and test plan generation for complex systems. The issue closes with an article by Ms. Nancy Welliver and Ms. Marguerite Shepler that describes two methods for meeting system reliability requirements and reducing life cycle support costs for major weapon systems.
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