As the battlespace rapidly evolves and threats grow more sophisticated, the defense community needs to enable our military to keep pace, modernize, and advance quickly. The speed and agility required to win future battles calls for embracing new advanced technologies and an open systems approach for the Department of Defense (DoD).
While an open systems approach is not new for the DoD, it continues to gain momentum to ensure flexibility, interoperability, and affordability, all of which are not feasible within proprietary environments. Simply put, while the defense community seeks to field new mission capabilities or crucial updates, it can take years in a siloed and proprietary environment, while adversaries and threats continue to move at faster speeds.
Furthermore, when navigating proprietary environments, the lack of data rights, and comprehensive tech data packages locks in vendors, integrators, and OEMs. This results in high development and sustainment costs, point solutions, costly re-qualification, potential cybersecurity shortfalls, and a difficulty to re-compete systems and/or individual functions.
And, with so many open systems standards developed, there is confusion in the defense community. To address these issues and make a recommendation on a future approach, Collins Aerospace, who has been leveraging an open systems approach for the past two decades, offers clarity and digs deeper into what an open systems approach means for the defense community in a new whitepaper titled “Defining an Open Systems Approach for the Defense Community.”
This paper addresses the real meaning of an open systems approach and takes a closer look at the approach in action using real world deployments as examples.
