Battle management language: Military communication with simulated forces

In the increasingly complex worlds of battlefield, anti-terrorism, peace-keeping and disaster relief operations there is clearly a need for rapid, useful, precise and unambiguous exchange of information between military units within a given theater of activity. Orders, requests and reports need to be expressed in formal language sufficiently standardized to be unambiguous, while sufficiently expressive to convey a commander's intent or to report enemy or civilian activities. This language must also support network-centric communication requirements by facilitating automatic processing and dissemination of information. If military communication can be processed automatically, it can be exchanged not only among forces and their C2-systems, but also between commanders, C2-systems and simulation systems. Commanders then could directly command simulated forces. Simulation systems thus could be used during operations or exercises, e.g., as decision support systems or in staff exercises. A formal, context-free language based upon the JC3IEDM, Battle Management Language (BML) is currently being developed to this end. BML's grammars for orders and requests are well-developed and have been integrated successfully into several prototype simulation systems. The grammar for reports is mostly complete and is currently under further refinement to adequately represent parameters such as source, quality and credibility of the information being reported. In this paper we will discuss the integration of BML in simulation systems and demonstrate the GUI that allows commanders to formulate BML orders to command simulated units. In addition, we will show how simulation systems may use BML to generate reports responses.