The Defense Department in recent years has pushed for the use of open standards in military systems, but a renewed emphasis on commercial technology could lead to a breakthrough for industry and government alike, experts said at a recent conference.

Since 2021, all Defense Department acquisition programs are to use a modular open systems approach, or MOSA, to the maximum extent practicable. By using widely accepted standards for a platform’s key interfaces, MOSA is meant to make it easier for the military to add or replace parts over time.

The Open Group, a global business and technology consortium, has set up a pair of government-industry consortia that develop the technical standards for different defense systems: the Future Airborne Capability Environment, or FACE, Consortium provides an open avionics environment for all military airborne platform types, and the Sensor Open System Architecture, or SOSA, Consortium develops standards and best practices for sensor systems.

Kirk Avery, senior fellow and chief architect for maritime and mission systems at Lockheed Martin, said the number of companies adopting the FACE standards for software and the SOSA standards for hardware is “continuously growing … and what that does is that allows us, as an integrator, to look at all the products that we can bring in, and the diversity of suppliers has just gone up.”

As the supplier base broadens, integrators like Lockheed can take greater advantage of the innovation within industry, Avery said during a panel hosted by the Open Group at the Association of the United States Army’s annual conference in October.

With the use of open standards proliferating across industry, the Defense Department is “on the cusp” of seeing “dramatic results” such as cost and schedule savings, said Matt Sipe, founder of TTK LLC and former director of MOSA transformation at the Army’s Program Executive Office Aviation.

“I would say if you’re not tracking” open standards like FACE and SOSA, “you will quickly get left behind,” Sipe said during the panel. “Every other vendor is going to be able to say, ‘Well, I’m already almost there.’ … As we know, the administration right now wants people going extremely fast, and that’s the whole way you’re going to go fast is to have been able to pre-develop something that’s almost there or is” commercial off-the-shelf.

A major reason the government is on the cusp of reaping the rewards of MOSA is the Trump administration’s push for commercial off-the-shelf technology, he said. The push for such systems “almost went too far” to the point where “MOSA was going to disappear,” he said. “Fortunately, we do have legislators who were on to that, and the legislation that’s going to come out is going to be very pro-COTS if certain conditions are met.”

SOSA Consortium Director Nick Borton said this is where open standards can be helpful in giving the government “a set of key interfaces” it can build requirements around, providing the boundaries within which commercial companies can work.

Sipe said the “new legislation is going to force the government to get comfortable with not getting all the” intellectual property from those commercial vendors, something the government has struggled with historically.

“I think that’s going to be one of the keys to allowing us to go fast,” he said. “If we want to go fast, you have to allow industry to invest, invest, invest, and then not take away all their IP, because then they will never invest.”

Progress is being made in regard to commercial vendors maintaining intellectual property rights, Sipe said.

“We’re certainly seeing it at card level on programs where … that’s 100 percent a commercial product inside of a militarized box,” he said. “On the software side … that is also starting to turn where we see commercial companies” beginning to adhere to open standards.

Industry is starting to recognize “these reference architectures are every bit as good, if not better in some senses, [as] what we do internally,” he said, “so we might as well just start developing in accordance with the standards. Now, I can apply it to commercial or to the government stuff — I think that’s the other reason why we’re going to start seeing a dramatic increase” in the use of those standards.

As the weapon systems the Defense Department uses change — such as the pivot to fielding more uncrewed platforms — the standards will evolve too, Avery said.

“The standards are applicable across multiple domains and multiple levels of solutions, but I also believe that every standard has to evolve and adapt,” he said. For example, new technologies and programming languages “inherent” to small- and medium-level launched effects will need to be looked at.

While uncrewed systems still need to be safe, “we’re actually not protecting that human, and so [are] there sacrifices you can make? To an extent, but we still have to make sure that we’re doing the right thing from an airworthiness perspective,” he said.

Another emerging technology in the defense space is artificial intelligence. “Everybody is doing AI software apparently,” Sipe said, “and it’s so hard from an industry perspective or a government perspective to understand, well, where do you stop?”

Is your AI solution “essentially the full stack,” or is it a component that can operate off another company’s system? Sipe asked. Even if AI vendors don’t offer a product that can do it all, they “need to pay a lot more attention to some of these standards so they know where to fit, so they can be integrated more seamlessly on a lot of platforms.”

Source: National Defense, 4 December 2025… by Josh Luckenbaugh