By Geoff Fein

The need to move the Navy toward open architecture systems (OA) is an imperative, as the service faces the challenges of the increasing cost to build ships, the need to pace technology change and to maintain mission relevance against changing threat scenarios, according to a top service official.

OA is driven by two principle considerations: affordability and cycle time for bringing capability to the force, Sean Stackley, the Navy’s acquisition chief, told Defense Daily in a recent interview.

The past history of systems development has been such that growing up through the military specification (MILSPEC) world, hardware and software have been closely coupled and in the course of the last couple of decades the complexity of the systems has been growing non-linearly, he said.

“The systems that we field today–you are talking ten-plus million lines of code. When those types of systems are closely coupled with the hardware, then when it comes to upgrades it becomes extremely [a] cumbersome…protracted development, and largely sole sourced,” Stackley added.

“So now you’ve got areas where the threat is outpacing the combat systems development, in certain cases, and the cost to upgrade the systems is outpacing our budgets,” he said.

So, the first step the Navy took was to decouple the hardware from the software, an effort that is underway during the transition from MILSPEC to commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) systems, Stackley said.

“That’s happening across the board because it has to happen. When you look at the refresh rate for COTS equipment we cannot be hamstring by having to go in and rewrite code every time we change out processors,” he said. “You have to be able to separate those out, if you will, so that every time you change the hardware you are not forced to go into these often monolithic software systems to just maintain compatibility without even bringing the issue of upgrading capability.”

The second step, and what Stackley said is the more significant level, is going into the software and basically decoupling functionality capability within the software and almost rebuilding it into a modular fashion. “So that when it comes time to upgrade capability in the software, you can do that without having to take on the total program.”

“To be able to do all that, you need to have standards. So beyond just decoupling hardware from software, beyond just modularizing the software, now you have to enforce certain standards for dropping code so that you can control the interfaces and also so that a third party has the ability to dive into it,” Stackley said.

And, as the customer, the Navy sets those standards, he added.

That way, if a third party were going to modify it, they have sufficient insight into the way the software is constructed, the interfaces between that module and other modules, so that they can turn around the upgrade and restore it to the system reliably, he explained. “Then, in the future, someone else likewise will be able to do the same.”

“So through those steps you do a couple of things. You create the ability to insert upgrades, you shorten cycle time, you create the ability for a third party to now compete for software development, and you create the ability to upgrade the hardware without having to rewrite the code,” Stackley said. “All this lends itself to a more affordable approach to maintaining our systems, and pacing the threat, if you will, in terms of our capability.”

The third piece of this effort to OA is about pacing the threat, he added.

“If you take a look at the Aegis modernization, for example, we have a modernization program for a 62-ship class. We have got to have the ability and go in and upgrade that system at a rate that ensures that mission relevance of each platform so that every time a ship goes into an availability it can get an upgrade to the software without having to rip out the hardware,” Stackley said. “We have to have the ability that each time a ship goes into an availability we can incrementally add capability by using…what we are referring to as Advanced Capability Build (ACB) for the system.”

The Aegis program, in that case, will be developing a new capability build every two years and each time a ship pulls in for an availability it will get its update based on the current capability build, as opposed to some baseline that was established years before, Stackley said.

“Open architecture allows that. Absent open architecture, we will be continually challenged to maintain mission relevance for classes of ships,” he added.