A Half Century of Progress in Training, Modeling, Simulation and Analysis

The use of modeling and simulation (M&S) as a tool for multiple defense applications has radically improved in the last 50 years, but persistent issues have plagued users for decades. Today many of these issues have been resolved. Providing real-time environments across the Department of Defense both efficiently and effectively is within reach. In the past, these M&S environments were created at great expense in terms of time and money. The use of existing and emerging technologies will serve to lower both technical risk and costs of future M&S systems and applications. The contents of this paper reflect the author's perceptions in witnessing firsthand a slice of M&S history that spans numerous innovations in hardware and software to enable progressively better modeling and simulation applications.