Building Net-Centric Military Applications over Service Oriented Architectures

We compare the overall structure of military GIG and NCES architectures with that of the object oriented architectures (CORBA, J2EE and .NET) and of the emerging Web Services architecture. While the match is good in many ways, particularly with respect to Web Services, we also identify a series of shortcomings that could stymie attempts to implement a GIG or NCES system directly on a commercial Web Services platform. Our comparison leads to suggestions for experimental investigations of some topics, but also for more fundamental inquiry in some areas where the scientific base is inadequate. Several issues of the latter sort arise when we consider the mixture of scalability, security, robustness, and time-criticality that must be simultaneously satisfied in demanding military applications.