Department Of Defense Open Business Model for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Ground Control Stations

Over the past twenty years, the Department of Defense (DoD) has acquired a diverse portfolio of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) across the Military Services to meet its national security needs. Newly emergent threats and evolving national security requirements are prompting the DoD to re-evaluate its entire portfolio of systems, while at the same time, seeking to reduce the total ownership costs including lifecycle sustainment costs of these systems.

The anticipated reduction in defense spending in concert with advances in information technology provides ample opportunity for DoD to rethink how it acquires, designs, and builds its systems. As a result, DoD is adopting and exploiting open system design principles and architectures to increase competition, foster reuse across systems, and increase interoperability. This new acquisition model requires access to multi-vendor solutions to enable rapid insertion of new technologies to counter emerging threats, avoid technology obsolescence, and decrease time to field new capabilities. DoD is adopting an Open Business Model (OBM) to support the implementation of an Open Architecture (OA) for UAS Ground Control Stations (GCS) in order to drive greater acquisition efficiencies and reduce the total ownership costs. This new model is built upon several lessons learned from the Navy’s own open architecture efforts in the submarine community when it radically changed its approach to building weapon systems due to an emerging threat from an adversary in conjunction with declining budget.

Within the confines of this framework, DoD maintains a UAS portfolio of 11 Programs of Record (PoR) across the Services. Six prime integrators support this UAS GCS portfolio. These six integrators represent only a fraction of the available defense, aerospace, and software vendor market that could provide innovative solutions for UAS GCS.

The Deputy Secretary of Defense chartered the Unmanned Aircraft Systems Task Force (UAS Task Force) to facilitate collaboration across the Services and industry and address DoD-wide integration issues. The Task Force is chartered to coordinate UAS requirements, increase interoperability, shape acquisition programs to prioritize joint solutions, and develop regulatory policies and procedures. To date, the Task Force has developed a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for GCS using standard data models and SOA service interface definitions. The architecture will serve as a basis for acquiring, integrating, and extending the capabilities of the GCS across the UAS portfolio.

Implementation and adoption of an OBM for the GCS will leverage the collaborative innovation of numerous participants across DoD and industry permitting shared risk, maximized asset reuse, and reduced total ownership costs. There are ten components that are essential for adherence to an OBM: acquisition strategy, contracting strategy, intellectual property rights, design disclosure, strategic reuse, collaborative development, technology insertion, testing strategies, automated tools, and certification.

DoD will develop acquisition strategies across the UAS portfolio that are built on continuous competition and reuse of services within the GCS architecture. The goal is to create an environment where innovative technology providers and integrators – both large and small – can freely and openly participate in competitions for a wide range of services or system domains. There are two different integration models for the UAS GCS: (1) the Contractor Integrator Model whereby the Government acquires services from multiple contractors and one contractor serves as the integrator or (2) the Government Integrator Model whereby the Government acquires services from multiple contracts but serves as the integrator for the services.

DoD will also include open business and technical attributes as factors of evaluation for new contract awards and will incentivize Industry for adopting an open systems approa