The use of digital tools by defense acquisition programs is a widespread practice at the Department of Defense (DoD), but much of the work along the way still includes a lot of paperwork. Defense engineers are pushing for a different approach.
During a Federal News Network webinar on May 7, a defense engineer explained that digital engineering should be the norm for defense acquisition programs across the DoD.
Digital engineering – the use and integration of digital models and the underlying data to support the development, testing and evaluation, and sustainment of a system – would reinforce DoD programs and systems for research and engineering operations as well as acquisitions programs.
But while some defense officials have begun to pave the way to implement digital engineering as a standard practice throughout the department, the challenge remains in developing a mindset and policy framework that makes it the norm.
“There’s a difference between executing engineering using digital things and truly doing digital engineering — where you’re actually marrying all that up together,” said Joseph Pack, the digital engineering lead for Naval Sea Systems Command’s warfare centers.
He explained that when digital threads start to connect one tool to another it eliminates the need for physical paperwork to be reinterpreted by a staffer and ingested by another tool later in the process.
“That’s been one of those big focuses that we’ve had within the warfare centers. We do a lot of research, development, test and evaluation work, and the integration is in the seams between these different digital disciplines,” he said.
But, while DoD’s acquisition policies don’t exclude the possibility of engineering systems with digital-centric strategies, they don’t encourage it either.
“We have 10 different warfare centers, and when you look at each one, they all have different things that they specialize in,” Pack said. “But what that ends up creating is the old way of doing things: It’s document based, and we’re segregated according to the milestones and the documents that we’re responsible for. Each organization may be excellent, but it’s excellent within its silo. We’re going to have to start seeing institutional integration at a level that we have not seen in the past, and that’s likely going to be a big hurdle.”
However, integrating digital engineering as a standard practice throughout the department is “ultimately going to be one of the things that makes [it] more effective as a research and design community,” Pack said.
