Critical MBE Themes That Enable Collaborative Government-Industry Digital Engineering Throughout the DOD Acquisitions Lifecycle
The future threat landscape is becoming more agile and dangerous as our adversaries field new capabilities at an increased pace and complexity. New and emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) swarm logic, multifunction digital electronics, cyber, and advanced anti-access area denial systems are all contributing to an increasingly lethal battle space. If changes aren’t made in the near term, the Department of Defense’s (DOD) traditional document-centric acquisition processes may be unable to efficiently field solutions that can keep pace with these ever-changing future threats.
We in industry see a critical need to transform the process by which the U.S. government acquires, develops, fields and sustains future weapon systems so that they can keep up with the ever changing and increasingly complex threat landscape of our adversaries. Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) offers a solution for such a transformation within the DOD Acquisitions and Development lifecycle process.
MBSE, used in this context, would transition away from the traditional document-centric process of maturing a weapon system from initial conception through sustainment into a much more dynamic, efficient and flexible digital engineering process. Model-based artifacts will enable increased traceability and allow errors, inconsistencies and broken links in the system to be detected earlier in the development lifecycle. This in turn will drive down the cost needed for “re-work,” which exponentially increases the later problems are discovered in the lifecycle.
