Just as the present revolution in military affairs has formed the thoughts of joint and coalition forces between national and international militaries, a future revolution is also facing civilian authorities and agencies. Exchanging commander intent and collecting, fusing, and sharing a common operational picture between commanders and grassroots from various civilian authorities/agencies is not easily done. Laws prohibit information exchange, systems are not intended to share information and there is no or little formal training between authorities/agencies.
For both simulated and real world operations, an unambiguous language to describe a commander's intent in Crisis Management is needed. The resemblance with the ongoing standardization of the Coalition Battle Management Language (C-BML) is striking. In this paper the idea to form a CML aligned with C-BML is presented. The ongoing standardization effort of a Societal Security1 standard within the frame of ISO/TC-223 and the Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL) is introduced. The authors identifies some potential research topics and propose that the work in defining a Crisis Management Language, which is aligned with and benefits from the accomplishments of the ongoing C-BML standardization, is performed under the embracement of SISO.