  Military is one of many industries that is more computer-dependent than ever
before, from soldiers with computerized weapons, and tactical wireless devices,
to commanders with advanced battle management, command and control systems.
Fundamentally, command and control is the process of planning, monitoring, and
commanding military personnel, weaponry equipment, and combating vehicles to
execute military missions. In fact, command and control systems are
revolutionizing as war fighting is changing into cyber, technology,
information, and unmanned warfare. As a result, a new design model that
supports scalability, reusability, maintainability, survivability, and
interoperability is needed to allow commanders, hundreds of miles away from the
battlefield, to plan, monitor, evaluate, and control the war events in a
dynamic, robust, agile, and reliable manner. This paper proposes a
service-oriented architecture for weaponry and battle command and control
systems, made out of loosely-coupled and distributed web services. The proposed
architecture consists of three elementary tiers: the client tier that
corresponds to any computing military equipment; the server tier that
corresponds to the web services that deliver the basic functionalities for the
client tier; and the middleware tier that corresponds to an enterprise service
bus that promotes interoperability between all the interconnected entities. A
command and control system was simulated and experimented and it successfully
exhibited the desired features of SOA. Future research can improve upon the
proposed architecture so much so that it supports encryption for securing the
exchange of data between the various communicating entities of the system.
