AUSA 2023 — The Army’s upcoming digital engineering strategy will be out before the end of the year and lay the foundation for how it plans to speed the development of weapon systems, with the service already planning to apply its lessons on two of its major modernization priorities, according to the service’s undersecretary.
“The reality is, we’re a little bit late adopters in terms of the technology that industry is using for digital engineering ecosystems,” Gabe Camarillo told reporters at the annual Association of the US Army conference on Tuesday.
Through digital engineering, the Army wants to move from manual processes to an all digital environment. The service’s strategy is expected to be signed out before the end of the calendar year, Camarillo said, and the benefits will be “pretty extensive.”
Those could potentially include helping the service develop virtual prototypes before it invests significant amounts of money on delivering physical prototypes and enable upgrades in a more iterative manner.
Camarillo said the service has already asked vendors to come back with digital engineering “artifacts” and designs for two of its key modernization priorities: future vertical lift, which includes both the Future Attack and Reconnaissance Aircraft and the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft, and the XM30 Mechanized Infantry Combat Vehicle program, previously known as the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle.
“So this policy is designed to take, kind of, the next big step towards more widespread adoption in the Army,” Camarillo said, before outlining five areas he is focused in.
“One facet to it is making sure that we’re giving our workforce adequate training and experience with what these digital tools are,” Camarillo said. “The next one is identifying some pilot programs beyond the two that I just mentioned to be able to see if we can expand our use of digital engineering tools within those and the different programs that range the life cycle.”
“Some of them are early development and requirements, some of them are systems that we’ve already filled that are in sustainment or we may want to develop, for example, a digital twin,” he added. “A third aspect of it is making sure that we are identifying different approaches based on different commodity areas … So we don’t want to create a one-size-fits-all approach. And then, fourth, we want to make sure that we’re changing our policies to be able to enable all of the adoption of these ecosystems. And then lastly, how do we manage the data? How do we govern it, make sure that it’s authoritative?”
In May, Jennifer Swanson, deputy assistant secretary of the Army for data, engineering and software, told Breaking Defense in an interview that she hoped digital engineering would supercharge the notoriously cumbersome acquisition process, starting with helping to define requirements. Digital engineering can also help the service long after it has its hands on systems.
“Because in sustainment, we have changes that are required, we have obsolescence of parts — that’s a huge problem,” Swanson said. “And so if you have a digital model, you can figure out, ‘Okay, well, I can’t get this part. But will this part work?’ And you can do that all digitally before you spend money and bend metal.”
Separately, the Army is undergoing a review of its electronic warfare (EW) portfolio similar to how it reviewed its network modernization portfolio last year to look at where the service needs to make investments. Camarillo told reporters on Tuesday that EW has historically been an area the service has made a “limited investment in as a capability.
“And most of the uses of it were mostly on the electronic attack, electronic protection side for dismounted formations,” he said. “So as we look at the Army’s role in part of the joint force, globally employed, especially in the Indo-Pacific region, it’s time for us to relook what are the threats, what’s the state of technology? We know what programs we’re investing in today, but where are there gaps? How would we like to address and mitigate some of those gaps?”
He added there’s no timeline for the EW review to be wrapped up, but the hope is that it will inform the development of next year’s program objective memorandum.
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