By Emelie Rutherford
While the Navy is committed to building systems with open architecture, it must weigh the cost of and operational need for retrofitting existing equipment to have such upgradable designs, the service’s acquisition czar said yesterday.
Sean Stackley, assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development, and acquisition, cited open-architecture efforts include decoupling hardware from software, building systems with greater modularity and commonality, publishing standards for system interfaces, and requiring the government have technical data for systems.
Speaking at Defense Daily‘s Open Architecture Summit, Stackley said the argument for forward-fitting systems with open architecture is “pretty clean, pretty easy.”
“We will design, we will build our systems going forward to an open standard, when it’s affordable,” he said.
Navy program managers have “guidebooks in terms of specs and standards to ensure systems are designed on the front-end to be open,” he said.
Yet back-fitting existing systems is “a little bit more difficult, because back-fit has a significant cost involved,” he said during the Washington conference’s luncheon keynote address.
“So we have to go about this very carefully with good measure, and we have to coordinate that activity with other modernization activities for the ships, aircraft, and weapon systems,” he said.
When gauging whether an existing system should be opened, he said, the Navy has to look beyond just whether there would be a return on investment.
“That is directive, but not sufficient alone to drive the opening of the system,” he said. “It has to have a good business case and it has to be the operational warfighting case, and you have to look at both side by side. You could argue you don’t need a return on investment if you need the system to be open to provide the (capability) that the warfighter will need.”
Back-fitting systems with open architecture can be technically challenging. Efforts to apply open standards to Aegis combat systems on warships has shown how the approach is not instantaneous and involves incremental steps, he said.
Stackley told the industry audience that naval officials planned yesterday afternoon to hold the first so-called gate review for a program–the Next Generation Enterprise Network–with open architecture as a mandatory part of the review. Making open architecture part of the gate-review process ensures officials periodically review its implementation when a system reaches critical milestones.