Development of formal grammars to support coalition command and control

Coalition Operations are characterized by the diversity of organizations involved. This diversity can cause challenges, in particular, with Command and Control (C2) due to 1) the difference in military doctrine between forces, and 2) the incompatibility of their Information Technology (IT) and their IT systems. The majority of current IT solutions do not address differences in military doctrine. Current emerging solutions include the Command and Control Information Exchange Data Model (C2IEDM) developed by the Multinational Interoperability Programme (MIP) as a NATO standard. However, while C2 information can be stored in the C2IEDM, exchange relies upon a specific exchange mechanism. A large number of ad hoc business rules enforce consistency and semantic coherence. To incorporate military doctrine, orders, requests and reports should be conserved and exchanged as such. Therefore, development of a C2 language for military messages is clearly preferable. The keystone of such a language is a formal grammar. A formal grammar ensures that the messages can be processed automatically, a necessity under the network-centric perspective. In this paper we propose an initial C2 grammar which not only unifies military doctrine with current IT in a network-centric approach, but is also applicable to a wide range of civil operations.