U.S. Army Employing Digital Engineering and Open Architectures
The U.S. Army’s network, from edge to enterprise, balances open standards with security and consistency.
“We have to be able to pivot, bring in new solutions available from anybody that [is] going to make the product better for the soldier, and the only way we can really do that is with an open architecture approach,” said Jennifer Swanson, deputy assistant secretary of the Army for data, engineering and software, on a panel at the TechNet Augusta conference on Tuesday.
The participants in the Connecting Initiatives to Impact session highlighted the importance of adopting open architectures to avoid vendor lock-in to foster flexibility and innovation. Open systems benefit both the government and industry by fostering competition and improving products for soldiers. The Army's five speakers focused on modular open systems architecture (MOSA) for data, software and hardware, enabling interoperability and faster adaptation. Additionally, the Army's digital engineering efforts involve standardizing digital tools, integrating legacy systems and upskilling the workforce to support digital transformation across different focus areas like ground, aviation and sensors.
Development for this architecture carries a high degree of flexibility.
“The other piece of MOSA for software is the modern software framework that we're developing,” Swanson told the audience of service members and industry in Augusta, Georgia. “It's really a methodology of, how do you create reference architectures and reference implementations for your product, what are the things that we need to provide as standards out to industry to be able to develop into, and then what are the things that you guys own that we don't need to worry about?” Swanson explained.
And this normalization goes beyond the Army.
“We're actually working very closely with the Navy, the Marine Corps; we're also working with a lot of our intel partners to come together and commonize those pieces,” said Christine Moulton, Open Architectures and Standards lead at the Integration Directorate Program Executive Office for Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors.
One of the participants gave insight into which kinds of discussions they preferred to have with potential suppliers.
We kind of lived in a world of security by obscurity.
When acquisition teams put out requests for information (RFIs) as part of the initial steps in a purchase, directing questions to specifics, especially the latest from the Department of the Army, are the type of questions that show proficiency.
“We're already speaking the same language when we're quibbling over version 1.1.1 or 1.1.2,” said Doug Burbey, deputy product manager for PEO C3T.
In terms of cybersecurity, one of the participants conveyed how deep the changes have been since the adoption of this framework.
“We had been looking at PDFs or looking at individual files, so we kind of lived in a world of security by obscurity, and as we make the data more visible and more useful, we have to be very deliberate in our protection of it,” said Matthew Picerno, U.S. Army chief cyber acquisition officer.
This evolution requires an appropriately trained technical workforce below top engineering and other highly specialized positions.
Currently, the Army evolves toward preparing those who will perform various functions in house.
“We're heavily leveraging on industry, but eventually we're going to get to that organic type of workforce,” said Bill Myers, chief, systems engineering at PEO C3T.
