The U.S. Army unveiled a new policy this week that will enable the service branch to rapidly adopt and institutionalize modern digital engineering practices.
“We are looking to benefit from that utilization of digital engineering tools to be able to help establish the right processes in the Army, the right training, and how we adapt our institutional approach to be able to accommodate more digital engineering,” said Army Undersecretary Gabe Camarillo, who formally unveiled the strategy at an AFCEA NOVA event on May 21.
The new policy includes four lines of effort.
The first line of effort the new policy outlines is creating three focus areas to implement digital engineering within the Army: ground vehicles, aviation, and sensors. The second line of effort directs the Army to implement data engineering tools that “promote seamless collaboration, streamlined processes, and efficient systems integration.”
And he third line of effort in the policy designates several pathfinder programs aimed to highlight the potential contributions of digital engineering, thrash out potential implementation problems, and expedite adoption of the novel approach across the service. The last effort outlined in the policy aims to develop a strong workforce within digital engineering.
The Army’s mission to rapidly modernize to meet emerging threats is driving the need for innovation in both capabilities and engineering processes.
“We know that we have to continue to modernize IT infrastructure across our posts and stations, and we’re looking for effective and creative ways to do it. We also know that our tactical network remains a significant challenge,” Camarillo said.
Historically, the service branch relied on traditional systems engineering processes, which are largely manual, document-intensive, and stove-piped across stakeholder groups. As a result, the older process often drove costs and development timelines, hindering the Army’s ability to deliver cutting edge capabilities at the speed of need.
By leveraging digital engineering applications – modeling and simulation, and data to create digital models – in place of the legacy peer-based approaches, the Army will be able to use precise virtual representations of a system as it matures over time.
The new policy also will enable the Army “to identify requirements tradeoffs earlier in the process, to plan more adequately for sustainment of both hardware and software,” Camarillo said.
Additionally, the new policy identifies cost drivers in the operation of weapon systems in the future, and it helps the Army to “identify and mitigate technical risks through more robust modeling and simulation and the development of digital twins,” he added.
Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told lawmakers at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on Tuesday that the goal of the policy is to ensure the Army adopts digital engineering approaches at scale to improve efficiency and reduce costs.
“This is the kind of work that allows us to do modeling and simulation and explore engineering challenges using computer simulations, which is more efficient and less costly,” she said.
