A Common Framework for Military M&S and C4I Systems

Despite the presence of technical solutions such as the Joint Technical Architecture (JTA) and the Common Operating Environment (COE), and despite the political will manifested in form of mandates by the superior leadership to use respective common frameworks, the story of common projects of the Modeling & Simulations (M&S) Community and the Command, Control, Communications, Computers, and Intelligence (C4I) Systems Community is more or less limited to a story of building interfaces. This may change in the near future. Both communities are within something that can become a paradigm shift. While the technical and architectural solutions of the past were system focused, the new emerging solutions are looking at distributed, composable functionality connected by a common infosphere. The system-of-systems approach places the information into the center. Distributed components deliver necessary functionality to manipulate and analyze the information to increase the efficiency of the Warfighter. The Internet and web-based services are becoming the new way to think about information technology applications. Within the C4I community, the Defense Information Systems Agency is working on solutions to ensure Information Superiority in Network Centric Warfare scenarios. The use of web-services will help to transform the system centric Common Operating Environment into Net Centric Enterprise Services (NCES) as a new backbone for future C4I systems. Within the M&S community, various efforts are looking at similar solutions. Only recently, the Extensible Modeling & Simulation Framework (XMSF) team articulated the idea to use open standards such as web-services, the Extensible Mark-up Language (XML), and the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) to create a framework for future M&S applications. This paper summarizes ongoing related efforts and articulates, that a common framework is not only technically feasible, but necessary to increase the efficiency of the Warfighter for future military operations.