Department of Defense News Release (April 30, 2007): DoD announces winners of annual Modeling and Simulation Awards.

The Department of Defense announced today that 10 winners have been selected for the ninth annual Department of Defense Modeling and Simulation (M & S) Awards. The winners for each category are:

* Acquisition Community Winner: Acquisition Modeling and Simulation Working Group (AMSWG) of the DoD Systems Engineering Forum, a body chartered by the under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics, Washington, D.C., received the team award for leading the examination of the Department's M & S challenges in acquisition, fostering cooperative M & S activities, and creating an acquisition M & S master plan and business plan to improve M & S across the acquisition spectrum.

* Analysis Community Winners: World Class Models Initiative (WCM) of the Naval Operations' (OPNAV) Assessment Division (N81), U.S. Navy, Washington, D.C., received the team award for aggressively implementing WCM as an OPNAV enterprise-wide effort to improve readiness, manpower, strategic planning, C4ISR, and non-traditional warfare through an innovative mix of traditional M & S enhancements and exploratory "discovery" tasks. Its innovative and risk-balanced approach will expand the frontiers of Navy M & S, and pay dividends for years to come.

* Operational Reachback Team of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Division, Air Force Nuclear Weapons and Counterproliferation Agency at Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M., received the team award for developing an innovative end-to-end M & S toolkit--Serpent--that provides warfighters with advanced counter-chemical biological, radiological, nuclear technologies and systems; consolidates the latest Air Force capabilities for the collateral effects and target defeat; provides a test bed for fielding future agent defeat weapon concepts; and gives an operational capability to joint commanders for "target defeat with minimal collateral hazards.

* Experimentation Community Winner: Modeling and Simulation Division of the U.S. Joint Forces Command's Joint Innovation and Experimentation Directorate (J-9), Suffolk, Va., received the team award for development of a synthetic environment sufficient to conduct political, economic, social, informational, and infrastructure modeling. This tool helps revolutionize joint experimentation by allowing the critical elements of national power to be explicitly modeled as actions and perceived effects in an environment common to the military and U.S. inter-agency communities.

* Planning Community Winners: Integrated Consumable Item Support (ICIS) Team of the Defense Logistics Agency, Ft. Belvoir, Va., received the team award for reengineering and redesigning the Joint Logistics Adaptive Planning and analysis tool into an Oracle-based system that improves accuracy and performance; saves time and resources; and does in minutes or hours what formerly took planners days, weeks, and even months to accomplish.

* Adaptive Planning Implementation Team (APIT) of the Joint Staff, J-7, Washington, D.C., received the team award for developing a transformational adaptive planning process and an end-to-end suite of planning and execution tools that support all aspects of contingency and crisis planning for combatant commands, joint force commanders, Service/functional components, combat support agencies, and the Joint Staff.

* Test and Evaluation Community Winner: U.S. Navy's Next Generation Command and Control Processor (NGC2P) Test and Evaluation Team of the commander, Operational Test and Evaluation Force (COMOPTEVFOR), Norfolk, Va., received the team award for using the hardware-in-the-loop (HWIL) capability of the Navy's Distributed Engineering Plant to cost effectively support an operational assessment of NGC2P. This cooperative test effort permitted robust assessment of NGC2P's joint interoperability and demonstrated the cost savings of using HWIL M & S facilities to provide in-depth joint operational and technical insight during systems development and acquisition.

* Training Community Winner: U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer Harvey Jackson, director of the Army's Wheel Vehicle Maintenance School, 187th Ordnance Battalion, Fort Jackson, S.C., received the individual award for his visionary efforts in transforming training. He spearheaded the use of interactive 3-D equipment simulations for training mechanics to increase the readiness of high mobility multipurpose wheeled vehicles for use in the global war on terrorism. As a result, commanders in the field saw an immediate reduction in previously common HMMWV problems, greater availability of the vehicles, and increased soldier safety.

* Common and Cross-Cutting Winners: Ambiguity and Human Intelligence (HUMINT) Methodology Integrated Product Team of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command Analysis Center, Ft. Leavenworth, Kan., received the team award for closing the gap in the development of means of incorporating HUMINT operations into DoD modeling needs.

* Modeling and Simulation Branch (A5XS) of the Headquarters, Air Force Concepts, Strategy, and Wargaming Division, Washington, D.C. received the team award for ground-breaking work integrating modeling and simulation tools to support the analytical and information technology needs of Air Force Title 10 and Joint wargaming. During the Unified Engagement 06 war game, the team delivered a war game information environment that seamlessly put powerful and intuitive information retrieval, analysis, and visualization tools in the hands of joint and coalition participants.

The annual awards recognize achievement in support of DoD M & S objectives. Ninety-nine nominations were received from across DoD.