The Modeling and Simulation Coordination Office (M&SCO) was re-designated in October 2006, having previously been recognized as the Defense Modeling and Simulation Office (DMSO). The change intended to demonstrate the Department's revised way of managing modeling and simulation (M&S).

In recent years, it became evident to Department of Defense (DoD) senior leaders that the original approach for managing M&S at the Department level via DMSO and the Executive Council on M&S (EXCIMS) fell short in implementing the original Departmental M&S vision, policies, and plans established in the early 1990's. They asked where would we be today if the Department had fully implemented the original 1994 policy for managing M&S (DoD Directive 5000.59) and 1995 M&S Master Plan (DoD 5000.59-P).

That Master Plan called for a viable, flexible common technical framework for M&S to facilitate interoperability and reuse so DoD users could quickly find and pull together models and simulations to create credible combinations of live, virtual, and constructive joint capability forces for acquisition decision-making, programmatic analysis, experimentation, operational planning, testing, training, mission rehearsal, doctrine development, etc. The senior leaders thought that given 13 years, the better part of a billion dollars counting just the DMSO budget from 1994 to 2007, and many more billions of dollars throughout the Department, we should be much further along on that vision than we are.

So, starting in 2004 internally to DMSO, and culminating in the fall of 2005 with an FY07 Program Review Issue Team and Program Decision Memorandum, the senior leadership directed a revision of the Department’s approach to managing M&S.

Initiatives over the past three years include a newly published DoD Directive 5000.59 (August 8, 2007), replacing the three/four star level EXCIMS with a one/two-star level M&S Steering Committee (M&S SC) supported by an M&S Integrated Process Team (M&S IPT) and a repurposed DMSO simultaneously re-designated as the M&SCO. Today's M&SCO performs those key corporate-level coordination functions necessary to encourage cooperation, synergism, and cost-effectiveness among the M&S activities of the DoD Components. The M&SCO is the Executive Secretariat for DoD M&S Management in fostering the interoperability, reuse, and affordability of crosscutting M&S to provide improved capabilities for DoD operations. The current M&SCO director, Mr. Jesse Citizen, has served in the position since August 2007.