While our adversaries accelerate the acquisition timeline from concept to capability, the United States continues to field weapon systems and platforms on decade-long cycles. This disparity brings great risk to our warfighters, who will be left to defend U.S. interests with exquisite platforms that are obsolete on arrival. But this is not an indictment of the acquisition workforce. Rather, it is a structural problem with a powerful new tool available to solve it: digital engineering.
Digital engineering integrates digital models and underlying data throughout a weapon system’s development and sustainment life cycle. This approach is now embedded in policy from DoDI 5000.97 to Department of War guidance. Policy, however, does not deliver capability. Execution does.
Digital engineering will only accelerate acquisition when it replaces legacy processes, enforces data interoperability and is tied directly to mission outcomes. If digital engineering continues to be an overlay on top of legacy acquisition processes, it risks becoming a digitized version of the same old bottlenecks.
Maximizing digital engineering’s potential for shortening acquisition timelines, developing end-to-end capabilities and providing the warfighter with critical mission capabilities, demands we treat digital engineering as an acquisition weapon system itself.
Where It Works
The T-7A Red Hawk is perhaps the clearest proof of concept for digital engineering’s potential. As the first Air Force aircraft designed, built and tested using a fully established digital engineering model from day one, it went from contract award to first flight in 36 months. The integration of digital engineering from its start improved decision quality early in the development and testing process, enabling program leadership to see how design choices may impact capability in near real time before bending metal and therefore reducing engineering change order costs. Most importantly, this approach accelerated the concept to capability timeline for the T-7A Red Hawk by five to 10 years.
Another example is the Army’s XM-30 program to replace the M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle, which employed a digital engineering approach through Milestone B. This approach allowed program leadership to immediately see whether incoming designs were breaching threshold requirements and created an opportunity for two new OEM competitors to enter the market while the customer was still evolving its requirements. What resulted was an evaluation and decision process that was completed in roughly a week, when it otherwise would have taken many man-hours and many months to accomplish.
Meanwhile, the Space Force has taken the appropriate organizational steps to maximize the benefits of digital engineering as the U.S. military’s first fully digital service. The Space Warfighting Analysis Center has been modeling end-to-end mission threads for years, and the Operational Test and Training Infrastructure is now attempting to create a federated, shared data environment that cuts across all mission areas. Since the service’s founding in 2019, every PEO has initiated digital engineering projects to support acquisition, including digital RFPs, by leveraging high performance compute environments and requiring the delivery of digital models and simulations from their contractors. A representative example is the U.S. Space Force’s Spacestation program, initiated in 2021, which now supports more than 103 programs across the Space Force and Space Development Agency through a federated environment for requirements management and digital engineering execution at scale, integrating over 80 commercial and government-owned applications.
These accomplishments demonstrate how digital engineering can be effectively employed to counter a rising adversary. But proof of concept is not the same as proof of process. In the next article, we examine exactly where digital engineering breaks down when layered on top of legacy acquisition structures.