Air Force Funds Digital Engineering Initiative

The initiative is spearheaded by Istari Digital CEO and founder Will Roper, who previously served as the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics. His experience informs the project's goal of creating a "digital engineering metaverse" to streamline collaboration across the defense sector. Industry Øne aims to solve a core problem in defense programs: the reliance on thousands of suppliers who use incompatible digital tools behind separate firewalls. This fragmentation currently forces collaborators to manually copy and share data, which introduces security risks and slows down development. The new initiative will create an "Internet of Models," allowing different organizations to securely connect their digital engineering models without moving or copying the underlying data. This approach, which keeps each organization's data behind its own firewall, is designed to enable simultaneous collaboration across multiple contractors at an industrial scale. This effort is part of the Air Force's broader push for digital transformation to counter the speed at which near-peer adversaries like China can develop new capabilities. While the Air Force takes an average of 16 years to deliver new systems, competitors are doing so in seven years or less. The project builds on previous successful, smaller-scale initiatives. One such project, Flyer Øne, was a partnership between the Air Force Research Lab and Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works to pioneer digital certification for the X-56A experimental aircraft. The core challenge being addressed is the integration of legacy systems, some of which are decades old, with modern digital tools. The defense industry's risk-averse culture and the shortage of talent with expertise in technologies like model-based systems engineering and digital twins have traditionally slowed the adoption of new platforms.