Integrating Air and Ground Operations Within a Common Battle Management Language

Battle Management Language (BML) is the unambiguous representation of all military Command and Control (C2) elements necessary to generate an executable plan of action – from actions to tasks, and from platforms to units. BML consists of three views: Doctrine, Representation, and Protocol. The Doctrine view describes the operational relevance of each C2 term, the Representation view enables the modeling of these C2 terms, and the Protocol view delivers an executable plan to the target system, which can be Command & Control systems, Simulation systems, or Robotic systems. The first prototype of BML was focused on the US Army ground operations, specifically the operations order (OPORD). However, none of the characteristics of BML cited above requires limiting BML to one service. Quite the opposite – from the beginning, other services and nations were part of the BML concepts. To support the United States Joint Forces Command (JFCOM), the BML team was tasked to prove the feasibility of multi-service operations within the common framework of BML. To this end, air operations were added to existing ground operations within BML using a common representation. An initial prototype was demonstrated at the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation & Education Conference in December 2004 and is described in this paper. This paper summarizes the ongoing integration of air operations BML with ground operations BML and recommends how to approach future challenges that will occur when integrating other service or coalition requirements into a common methodological framework for BML.