In May 2024, the U.S. Army issued a new policy calling for the rapid adoption of modern digital engineering practices, saying it would speed the service’s modernization strategy to meet emerging threats.
“Historically, the Army has relied on traditional systems engineering processes, which are largely manual, document-intensive, and stove-piped across stakeholder groups,” the Army directive said. “Greater adoption of (digital engineering) approaches will allow the Army to identify cost drivers in system designs early … improve outcomes in our acquisition process, and deliver needed capabilities to soldiers.”
The Army’s policy follows a 2023 Department of Defense (DoD) directive that requires digital engineering to be used across the life cycle of defense acquisition programs.
The military backing serves as a powerful endorsement of digital engineering, an innovative and holistic approach to systems engineering that uses automation and modeling to improve project outcomes. Experts say use of digital engineering is growing in Federal organizations, especially defense agencies, and the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) in 2023 reported that it is practiced at “leading companies … throughout development for both hardware and software.”
In a recent conversation, experts from General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT) explored the numerous potential benefits digital engineering offers to Federal defense, civilian, and intelligence organizations.
The DoD describes digital engineering as “the usage of data and models throughout the systems engineering life cycle, from development to test and evaluation to sustainment,” noted Mike Nash, GDIT’s director of digital engineering. Nash said he often simplifies that definition to “automating our existing systems engineering processes through software.”
Surging data volumes and complex systems can overwhelm system operators, Nash noted, and digital engineering can help by providing “a solution that simplifies, organically, and extracts authoritative sources of truth so operators trust the information they’re seeing.”
The advantages of digital engineering include lower costs, reduced risk, better design quality, and a high level of automation, with measurable results typically provided within six months of implementation.
“We recommend usage of digital engineering not because you have to, but because it just makes sense,” Nash said.
GDIT’s approach to digital engineering involves digital threads, which help agencies avoid vendor lock. Digital threads are data use cases, or relationships among pieces of data, that answer engineering questions.
“By using standards-based models and open-source solutions to define these digital threads, agencies and organizations can move freely between different vendors as their requirements change over time,” Nash said. “Digital engineering should be open for everyone. It shouldn’t be just a one-stop vendor shop that can lock an organization into a very expensive agreement for a long period of time.”
GDIT heightened its digital engineering presence in April 2024 with the launch of its Ember Digital Engineering accelerator, which leverages modeling and simulation to support the development and testing of complex government systems – from weapons systems to enterprise IT networks – before production begins. Company officials say this approach yields lower costs, reduced risks, and greater speed throughout the life of a project.
GDIT plans to leverage Ember to support military applications, where its digital engineering capabilities are already utilized by defense programs. Those include a weapons system for the U.S. Air Force and a digital infrastructure for the U.S. Space Force that facilitates government and industry partner collaboration.
Beyond the military, GDIT expects Ember to support civilian projects in areas such as healthcare analytics, smart cities, and cybersecurity.
In all of its digital engineering solutions, GDIT emphasizes security, said Travis Dawson, the company’s senior program director for a U.S. Space Force program centered around cloud-based collaboration for DoD and industry partnerships.
“Secure environments come with a very unique challenge – the ability for us to collaborate with vendors and stakeholders in getting the products correct, because national security systems must be perfect,” Dawson said. “Our warfighters depend on it, and we owe it to them.”
To meet that challenge, GDIT builds digital engineering solutions with zero trust principles embedded at their core. Through digital threads, mission data is tagged with its sensitivity level and tightly controlled, ensuring that it remains within secure boundaries.
Digital threads also serve as the backbone for cybersecurity applications, enabling organizations to extract authoritative sources of truth for cyber data and reuse them across the engineering life cycle, Nash noted.
By integrating modeling, automation, and security, digital engineering helps agencies build systems that are agile, efficient, and resilient. To learn more, view the discussion and gain additional insights.