The Army on Tuesday signed out a new digital engineering (DE) directive intended to enable broader adoption of such practices across the services, starting with an initial focus on ground vehicles, aviation platforms and sensors.
Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told lawmakers on Tuesday the new policy aims to bolster the use of modeling and simulation in design work, citing it is an opportunity to build on new development practices that are more efficient and less costly.
“We are excited about our new digital engineering policy. Basically, what we’re trying to do is make it easier for the Army to adopt digital engineering approaches more broadly at scale across the Army,” Wormuth said during a Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee hearing. “The policy has a number of different components, but it’s broad goal is to help us use that important approach more broadly so that we can be more effective in our modernization programs.”
In its new policy document, the Army cites traditional systems engineering processes are “largely manual, document-intensive and stove-piped across stakeholder groups,” while noting digital engineering utilizes applications, modeling and simulation and data “to create digital models in place of the legacy paper-based approaches.”
“[The legacy process] can often drive cost and development timelines, hindering the Army from delivering cutting-edge capabilities at pace,” the Army writes. “Greater adoption of DE approaches will allow the Army to identify cost drivers in system designs early, enabling system performance modeling to inform earlier tradeoff decisions that improve outcomes in our acquisition process and deliver needed capabilities to soldiers.”
In the document, the Army notes Under Secretary Gabe Camarillo is the main proponent of the new policy and the service’s acquisition office will lead implementation and provide quarterly updates to Camarillo on its progress.
The four lines of effort under the new policy include establishing the digital engineering focus areas, promoting interoperability and implementation, establishing pathfinder programs and developing talent and expertise.
The initial programs selected as pathfinders to “illustrate DE’s potential contributions, highlight existing policies and processes that may hinder a program’s ability to implement DE and identify how to advance DE adoption in various contexts, include the XM30 combat vehicle program to find a Bradley replacement, the Future Long Range Assault Aircraft, Integrated Fires Mission Command, Joint Targeting Integrated Command and Control Suite, M113 Armored Personnel Carrier, PEO Aviation Logistics Data Analysis Lab for Black Hawk, Chinook and Apache.
Wormuth on Tuesday noted digital engineering has been a core component of the prototyping work on XM30 to date.
Maj. Gen. Glenn Dean, program executive officer for ground combat systems, has said General Dynamics Land Systems [GD] and American Rheinmetall Vehicles work on Phase 3 of XM30 will include taking their vehicle concepts from digital designs to a “‘ready to build in the physical world’ digital model that is modeled, simulated and tested in a digital environment” (Defense Daily, June 26 2023).