Architectural Design of a Common Operating Environment

The Global Command and Control System is the next generation replacement for the legacy World Wide Military Command and Control System, which has served the command and control needs of several high level US military commands for more than 20 years. The GCCS is implemented on heterogeneous Unix workstations as opposed to the WWMCCS's mainframe implementation. The GCCS will eventually extend down to tactical levels of command and control not encompassed by the earlier system. For this and other reasons, the Defense Information Systems Agency is undertaking the architectural design of the new GCCS common operating environment. The architecture for the Global Command and Control System's new common operating environment will comprise several modern architectural concepts currently used in complex, distributed systems. We plan to reduce the environment's complexity by using architectural components supported by existing commercial products and standards.