The goal of the Weapons Systems Common Operating Environment (WSCOE) is to develop a common environment of "products" to serve as a template for the development of new or upgraded U.S. Army manned and unmanned weapon systems.

WSCOE provides a framework for developing embedded weapons systems, addressing real-time, safety-critical and resource constraints. It employs a modular, open-systems design that facilitates interoperability through standardized interfaces (APIs) developed to promote functional hardware/software component-based design and reuse, portability/commonality across disparate weapon systems, incorporation/migration of commercially accepted COTS, leveraging of existing weapon systems capabilities, and reduction of system development time and system acquisition cost.

Both the Navy Open Architecture (OA) initiative and the WSCOE, rely on the hard, real-time deterministic capabilities of the LynxOS real-time operating system to satisfy their rigorous system requirements.