U.S. Air Force Funds Digital Engineering Platform
The U.S. Department of the Air Force has awarded an $8.6 million contract to Istari Digital. The funding will be used to establish Industry Øne, an initiative designed to break down digital engineering barriers and accelerate digital transformation across the Defense Department.
The Industry Øne initiative is built upon previous successful collaborations between the Air Force and Istari Digital. These include "Flyer Øne," a project with Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works to digitally certify the X-56A aircraft, and "Model Øne," which aimed to break down barriers for cross-domain collaboration. Industry Øne expands these efforts to an industrial scale, involving multiple contractors simultaneously. Istari Digital was founded in 2022 by Dr. Will Roper, who previously served as the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics. In that role, Roper championed the Air Force's digital transformation, overseeing a $60 billion annual budget for technology development and operations. The company is backed by prominent investors, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. The core problem Industry Øne aims to solve is the fragmentation of digital tools across the defense industrial base. Currently, thousands of suppliers use incompatible software behind separate firewalls, forcing them to manually copy and share data, which introduces risk and slows down development. Istari's platform allows different organizations to connect their engineering models and data securely without centralizing or copying the information, maintaining data sovereignty. This contract is a key part of the Department of Defense's broader push for digital engineering, a strategy first announced in 2018. The goal is to create an integrated digital approach using "authoritative sources of truth" in data and models to support a system's entire lifecycle, from concept to disposal. This shift is seen as essential for the U.S. to maintain a technological advantage over near-peer adversaries. By creating a secure "Internet of Models," the platform enables engineers across government and industry to verify designs and run automated tests in a shared virtual environment. This approach mirrors the digital agility seen in industries like Formula 1, where teams design tens of thousands of digital cars each season using authoritative modeling and simulation. The aim is to make the development of complex hardware systems faster, cheaper, and more innovative.
