Answering The Question Why A BML Standard Has Taken So Long To Be Established?

ABSTRACT: Many development organizations of the past have failed to develop a battle management language. The current SISO Product Development Group has taken over five years to reach a trial use phase. Have the teams approaching this problem suffered failures resulting from ignorance of lessons learned in other acquisition and standards development efforts? Has some common set of factors led to team incompetence again and again? Or is there something else more complicated involved here? Is there some serious failing in the team that has been working on the standard or the environment in which they are working? We believe the progress made on a SISO C-BML standard is commensurate with the major factors in its development, which we see as (1) technical readiness to achieve the goal, (2) the need for a deliberate process that puts forward a standard which has been confirmed to be usable, and (3) adequacy of resources to pursue standard development. This paper first examines lessons learned from past BML development efforts to explain how technical readiness has been the common factor in failures of the past. Second, the paper examines how the current SISO C-BML Program Development Group and Drafting Group approached decomposing the problem, given the need to work within available resources, decomposing technical readiness into layers and cycles enabling the team to leverage evolving technologies and emergent requirements to achieve the promise of computational battle management language. Finally the paper identifies lessons learned from C-BML to explain how the need for a deliberate process to ensure that the standard will result in effective use of resources for the integration battle command with modeling and simulation systems that ultimately will finally achieve the promise of interoperability from individual levels of combat through the coalition.