© 2016 IEEE. Tactical networks are wireless in nature to support mobility and rapid deployment in contested environments. These networks also consist of various heterogeneous networking technologies. Since the tactical networks are specialized purpose built networks and their main motivation is to solve a special purpose functions, the interoperability between different technologies was not initially viewed as essential. As the deployment of wireless networks become ubiquitous both in private and government sectors, the lack of interoperability has become a disadvantage in creating a unified control plane. A unified control plane can abstract the complexity of heterogeneous wireless networks and can provide a centralized control over the network resources. In this paper, we develop necessary mathematical model to realize the unified programmable control plane for heterogeneous wireless networks. We develop a cross-layer optimization framework, which characterizes the interaction between physical, link, and network layer for the unified programmable control plane in a heterogeneous wireless network. By applying the framework on a throughput maximization problem, we will show an application of the model to solve practical issues in a tactical network and gain some theoretical insight on the optimal behavior of the unified programmable control plane for a heterogeneous wireless network.