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 allocate resources and manage programs in ways that recognize the central role of software—not legacy ships, aircraft, and vehicles—in controlling the speed and efficacy of modern kill chains and imposing military dilemmas.
3. Acquisition leaders can lead this change without overhauling law or regulation by building organizations and pipelines that can change code change quickly and securely, dividing complex software development efforts into manageable chunks that remain interoperable, and infusing projects with digital talent, security practices, ongoing learning and improvement, and user feedback.
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.
Please join Hudson Institute for a fireside chat with Senior Fellow and Keystone Defense Initiative Director Rebeccah Heinrichs and John Spencer, chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point and co-director of the Urban Warfare Project.
Join Hudson Institute and the Ben Franklin Fellowship for a two-panel discussion examining US policy as it confronts the crisis of terror in Nigeria.
Join Hudson Institute's Center for the Economics of the Internet for a keynote address given by Tricia Paoletta on the Trump administration's progress in managing and reallocating the electromagnetic radio frequency spectrum from the federal domain.
Join Hudson Institute for a discussion with Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson and Senior Fellow Harold Furchtgott-Roth.
