Software Defines Tactics: Fielding Transformational Capability without Transforming Acquisition

Key Takeaways

1. Currently, military-technical competitive advantage is driven more by software, data, and artificial intelligence and the new tactics they enable than by bent metal and physics. Software is the glue that binds our military professionals and systems together, and digital data increasingly defines the loop between development and operations.

2. The Department of Defense needs to act in a way that recognizes that software, not legacy warfighting platforms, controls the speed and efficacy of the modern kill chain and military dilemma.

3. Acquisition leaders can deliver results and create a vibrant environment of learning and improvement by setting up infrastructure permitting code to change quickly and securely, divvying up complex software efforts into manageable chunks that can still interoperate, and embedding digital talent, user feedback, and security practices into a project.

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A decade ago venture capitalist Marc Andreessen argued that software was eating the world. Today the US military is wrestling with that reality as defense systems, like consumer electronics, increasingly derive their capability from algorithms and digital data. But exploiting the opportunities in software-derived capabilities will require the Pentagon to move beyond its industrial model of acquisition to embrace new approaches that enable integrating development and operations through a program’s lifetime.

Please join Hudson Senior Fellows Bryan Clark and Dan Patt for a discussion on the new Hudson report Software Defines Tactics and how the Pentagon can field software-defined capabilities without waiting for acquisition reform. The panel will include former DoD Chief Software Officer Jason Weiss and former Assistant Secretary of the Navy James “Hondo” Geurts.