Medium grade features for military messaging

Two grades of messaging service have evolved independently in two different communities. The military messaging community has evolved an expectation of a high grade of messaging functionality. In contrast, the Internet messaging community has long provided a low grade of messaging functionality in keeping with the Internet's "simple" and "best effort" paradigms. Commercial use of the Internet and military reliance on commercial off the shelf (COTS) products are forcing both communities to evolve to a common level of service-the so called medium grade messaging. Standards bodies and industry fora have been working, often disjointedly, for several years to elaborate definitions of medium grade messaging features. This paper attempts to capture and refine a unified set of functional definitions for medium grade messaging drawing from a variety of sources.