Transforming Military Command and Control Information Exchange

The DoD develops and manages information exchange requirements and their associated business practices to support all military operations. To support the required information exchanges, messaging standards and associated business rules for information exchange among command and control systems have been developed and used for the past thirty years. These messaging standards serve a global user community and are subject to international agreements. Despite their usefulness in promoting interoperability among automated information processing systems of many nations, the proprietary nature of these messages has presented cost, development and maintenance challenges. An international initiative was launched to investigate the use of XML to improve the quality, capability and affordability of text based, military messaging standards. To satisfy military information exchange requirements, the initiative leverages an extensive investment in the metadata defined in the proprietary standards. The initiative likewise leverages industry XML standards to improve information location, retrieval, exchange and processing across system, organizational and international boundaries. It enables the military to take advantage of low cost, high quality, rapidly evolving commercial software. Consequently, US services and agencies have recently approved specifications for representing these messages using XML and XML Schema. This provides a common method for a number of nations to represent their military information exchanges in an industry standard format. An overview of the events leading to this accomplishment and current activities supporting the effort is presented with an emphasis on the approach taken and on lessons learned in providing a migration path from proprietary formats to an XML based paradigm.