US Air Force awards $8.6M for digital engineering
The Department of the Air Force has awarded an $8.6 million contract to Istari Digital. The funding is for an initiative called Industry Øne, which is designed to accelerate digital transformation and break down digital engineering barriers across the defense industrial base.
The Industry Øne initiative is designed to create an "Internet of Models" to overcome significant hurdles in defense acquisition and sustainment. These challenges include fragmented IT environments, incompatible software tools, and strict security requirements that hinder collaboration and delay the development of new capabilities. The goal is to enable secure, real-time digital collaboration across the thousands of suppliers in the defense industrial base, who often operate with different tools behind separate firewalls. Leading this initiative is Istari Digital, a company founded by Will Roper, the former Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics. The company, backed by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, aims to revolutionize digital engineering by creating a platform where technology can be designed, tested, and certified through modeling and simulation. Roper's vision is heavily influenced by the rapid, iterative design processes used in Formula One racing. Industry Øne builds upon previous successful digital engineering projects. One such project, "Flyer Øne," in partnership with Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works, is pioneering the digital certification of the X-56A aircraft. Another initiative, "Model Øne," focused on breaking down barriers for collaboration across different domains. The broader push for this digital transformation stems from the need to accelerate the delivery of new weapon systems. Currently, it takes the Air Force an average of 16 years to develop and deploy a new system, compared to about seven years for China. The Air Force's "Digital Materiel Management" strategy aims to shorten these timelines by replacing traditional documents with digital models and fostering a digital-first culture.
