The Pentagon’s Digital Revolution

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The U.S. military is undergoing its biggest technological transformation in a century. After decades of relying on paper blueprints and static documents, the Department of Defense is going completely digital.

The DoD Digital Engineering Strategy represents a complete overhaul of military engineering. Instead of teams working from separate paper documents that quickly become outdated, everyone now works from the same live, digital models.

This transformation became mandatory in December 2023 with DoD Instruction 5000.97. Every new defense program must now use digital engineering. Legacy programs have to adapt “to the maximum extent possible.”

What Digital Engineering Actually Means

From Blueprints to Bytes

Digital Engineering flips the traditional process on its head. Instead of static documents scattered across different teams, everything centers on dynamic digital models that serve as the single source of truth.

The Defense Acquisition University defines it as “an integrated digital approach that uses authoritative sources of systems’ data and models as a continuum across disciplines to support lifecycle activities from concept through disposal.”

Here’s what that means in practice: imagine building an F-35 fighter jet. In the old system, the mechanical engineers had their blueprints, the electrical team had their schematics, and the software developers had their code documentation. These could quickly get out of sync, leading to expensive mistakes when the pieces didn’t fit together.

With digital engineering, everyone works from the same interconnected digital model. Change the software, and the hardware team immediately sees how it affects their components. Modify a wing design, and the maintenance crew instantly knows how it impacts their procedures.

The Digital Twin

The cornerstone of this new approach is the “digital twin”—a virtual replica of a physical system that’s continuously updated with real-world data. This isn’t just a 3D computer model. It’s a living, breathing digital copy that mirrors what’s happening to the actual equipment.

Take an F-35 in service today. Its digital twin receives data from sensors about engine performance, structural stress from recent flights, and the status of electronic systems. Engineers can test a software update on the virtual plane without touching the real $80 million aircraft. They can simulate how a new missile affects the airframe or predict when a component needs maintenance.

The Army is creating digital twins of Vietnam-era M113 armored personnel carriers. Since the original manufacturers no longer exist, these digital blueprints let them 3D print replacement parts and test upgrades without risking the actual vehicles.

The Digital Thread

If the digital twin is the virtual blueprint, the digital thread is the complete history that connects everything together. It’s defined as “an extensible analytical framework that seamlessly expedites the controlled interplay of technical data, software, information, and knowledge.”

The digital thread links a requirement from the concept stage to the design specifications, manufacturing instructions, test results, and maintenance records. When a part fails in the field, engineers can trace it back through the entire supply chain to the original design requirement that created it.

This gives program managers what they call “unprecedented insight” into how components interact and lets them see the ripple effects of any change across the entire system.

The Single Source of Truth

The foundation of trust in this digital world is the Authoritative Source of Truth (ASOT)—the single, official repository where everyone must go for correct information. No more hunting through different versions of documents scattered across various teams and servers.

The ASOT solves one of the military’s most persistent problems: the chaos of multiple, conflicting documents. This “document-based culture” with its “stove-piped systems” has been a primary source of errors and cost overruns for decades.

The Strategy Behind the Revolution

The 2018 Vision

The transformation began in June 2018 when Michael Griffin, the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, released the original Digital Engineering Strategy. This wasn’t yet a requirement—it was designed to “foster shared vision and ignite timely and focused action.”

The strategy outlined five interdependent goals:

Formalize the Development of Models: Make digital models a standard, required practice rather than an optional engineering aid.

Provide an Authoritative Source of Truth: Establish a common, secure digital repository that gives all stakeholders access to current, consistent information.

Incorporate Technological Innovation: Go beyond traditional approaches by leveraging artificial intelligence, big data analytics, and advanced computing.

Establish Supporting Infrastructure: Create the robust, secure IT backbone and collaborative digital environments needed to support these activities.

Transform Culture and Workforce: Use change management best practices to equip the DoD’s workforce with digital skills and mindset.

From Vision to Mandate

For five years, the military services experimented with pilot programs and learned hard lessons. This period culminated on December 21, 2023, with DoD Instruction 5000.97, which made digital engineering mandatory across the entire Department of Defense.

The instruction established several key requirements:

All new defense programs must use digital engineering methodologies. Exceptions require formal review and approval from the program’s decision authority.

Existing programs must incorporate digital engineering “to the maximum extent possible, when it is practical, beneficial, and affordable.”

Digital engineering must be explicitly addressed in foundational documents like the Acquisition Strategy and Systems Engineering Plan.

Models replace documents as the primary means of communicating system information.

Program managers must secure appropriate data rights during contracting to ensure the government can use and maintain digital models throughout a system’s lifecycle.

The Defense Acquisition University becomes the primary institution for workforce training on digital engineering.

Why This Transformation Is Happening Now

The Complexity Crisis

Modern defense systems have reached a level of complexity that traditional methods simply can’t handle. An F-35 fighter integrates millions of physical parts with tens of millions of lines of software code. A Ford-class aircraft carrier contains approximately 3 million parts and over 2 billion data attributes.

Document-based engineering methods break down at this scale. Integration problems that go undetected until late in the process can cost hundreds of millions to fix and delay programs by years.

Falling Behind Commercial Industry

The Pentagon realized it was losing ground to commercial companies that had already embraced digital transformation. Automotive and aerospace companies were using digital twins and threads to design cars, build jet engines, and manage global supply chains with an agility the military couldn’t match.

Companies like Ford and Siemens were reaping massive benefits in efficiency, quality, and speed. The military needed to adopt these commercial best practices to maintain its technological edge and reform its acquisition processes.

Strategic Competition

The 2018 National Defense Strategy called on the department to “adopt new practices to achieve greater performance and affordability” and deliver capabilities at the “speed of relevance” to counter increasingly capable adversaries.

China and Russia aren’t standing still. They’re rapidly advancing their military capabilities using modern design and manufacturing techniques. The U.S. military recognized that sticking with 20th-century processes in a 21st-century competition was a recipe for falling behind.

Digital Engineering in Action

U.S. Army: Born Digital Combat Vehicles

The Army has focused its digital engineering efforts on three priority areas: ground vehicles, aviation, and sensors. It’s established common contracting language and data governance standards to ensure different systems and contractors can work together seamlessly.

The XM30 Combat Vehicle

The XM30 program, designed to replace the M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle, is the Army’s first ground combat vehicle to be “born digital.” Instead of paper blueprints, the program office receives digital models and data directly from contractors.

This digital-first approach has given the Army “unprecedented insight into the level of design, level of detail, and level of interaction between the components.” More importantly, it allows the Army to develop and test advanced capabilities long before any physical metal is cut.

A prime example is the onboard AI-powered counter-drone system called AiTDR. Using the XM30’s digital twin, engineers generate vast amounts of synthetic data to train the AI model. They test its ability to detect drone threats under thousands of different simulated conditions—varying vehicle speed, weather, terrain, and drone types.

This process dramatically shortens development timelines, lowers costs, and results in more thoroughly tested systems than would be possible with physical testing alone.

Digital Twins for Legacy Equipment

The Army isn’t just applying digital engineering to new systems. It’s creating detailed digital twins of legacy equipment like the Vietnam-era M113 armored personnel carrier and workhorse helicopters like the UH-60 Black Hawk and CH-47 Chinook.

This effort directly addresses a critical logistics challenge: parts obsolescence. For many older systems, the original manufacturers and suppliers no longer exist. Digital twins provide precise blueprints of every part, enabling advanced manufacturing and 3D printing to produce high-quality spare parts on demand.

The digital environment also provides a place to test new upgrades and analyze maintenance problems, extending the life and improving the performance of these vital legacy fleets.

U.S. Navy: Taming Maritime Complexity

The Navy faces some of the most complex engineering challenges in the world, building what are essentially floating cities with immense power and combat capability. Naval Sea Systems Command has developed a strategy focused on four pillars: People, Process, Tools, and Data.

The Ford-Class Aircraft Carrier

The Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carriers are among the most complex machines ever created. From the beginning, these ships were designed and constructed within a 3D digital environment—a necessity for managing a system with 3 million parts and over 2 billion data attributes.

However, the Ford-class program also serves as a cautionary tale. Despite being a pioneer in digital design, the program has suffered significant cost overruns and schedule delays. These issues were largely driven by the challenge of integrating multiple brand-new, high-risk technologies like the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) and Dual Band Radar.

A Defense Science Board Task Force concluded that while digital engineering offers significant benefits for complex programs, it’s “no substitute for rigorous systems engineering, sound program management, common sense, and real-world testing.”

Digital engineering is powerful for managing known complexity, but it’s not a silver bullet that eliminates the inherent risks of large-scale technological innovation.

MK 48 Torpedo Modernization

On a smaller scale, the Navy has seen clear success applying digital engineering to modernization programs. In upgrading the MK 48 Heavyweight Torpedo, contractor SAIC used cloud-based digital engineering tools to create a single Authoritative Source of Truth for the program.

This provided a unified view of all technical data for both Navy and contractor teams, which eased decision-making, enhanced communication, and facilitated more effective testing of modernized components.

U.S. Air Force & Space Force: Digital Dominance

The Department of the Air Force is pursuing “Digital Materiel Management” (DMM), applying digital engineering principles across a weapon system’s entire lifecycle. The Space Force, as the newest military branch, has the unique opportunity to be “born digital” from day one.

F-35 Lightning II Sustainment

The F-35 program demonstrates digital engineering’s value in the sustainment phase. Each F-35 aircraft has a “Structural Digital Twin” hosted in Lockheed Martin’s Common Analysis Toolset Data Manager (CATDM). This digital twin is a living record for each specific aircraft, containing all known data about its physical structure, operational history, and maintenance records.

The results have been transformative. The digital twin allows for highly customized maintenance planning for each individual aircraft based on its unique usage and condition. Lockheed Martin has documented a 75% cost reduction in delivering structural data products to customers compared to traditional, document-based methods.

This directly translates to lower F-35 ownership costs and improved readiness for the fleet. The digital twin also allows engineers to virtually assess the impact of modifications on the entire fleet’s performance.

The Sentinel ICBM Lessons

The Sentinel program, replacing the nation’s aging Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles, offers a stark lesson on digital engineering’s limits. While the program intended to leverage digital engineering, its projected cost ballooned from around $78 billion to $141-160 billion.

Crucially, the primary cost driver wasn’t the missile itself but the vast ground infrastructure—rebuilding hundreds of missile silos, constructing new launch control centers, and replacing 7,500 miles of copper cable with fiber optics across multiple states.

A test project to convert an existing silo “validated the implications of unknown site conditions with significant cost and schedule growth.” This demonstrates that while digital engineering excels at optimizing manufactured products, it can’t easily predict or mitigate unforeseen challenges in large-scale construction projects spread across massive geographical areas.

Space Force’s Project Enigma

As a new service, the Space Force is building its digital infrastructure from the ground up. “Project Enigma” is creating the secure, cloud-based, multi-enclave digital environment needed to facilitate collaboration between the DoD, industry partners, and other stakeholders.

Built on Zero Trust security architecture and leveraging automation for IT operations, Enigma provides a scalable, accessible, and highly secure network. This environment allows the Space Force to be truly “born digital,” connecting all stakeholders and creating the interconnected foundation needed for digital dominance in the space domain.

The Benefits and Challenges

The Payoff

When implemented effectively, digital engineering delivers powerful advantages that address long-standing defense acquisition problems.

Better Design and Performance: Dynamic models let engineers explore a vastly expanded range of design alternatives, enabling more optimal solutions. This allows for more complex and capable systems while improving overall quality through comprehensive modeling and simulation.

Increased Speed: Virtual prototyping is a massive accelerator. Defects that might have been discovered late in physical testing—requiring expensive fixes—can now be found and corrected early in the design phase. This accelerates the entire development timeline.

Reduced Lifecycle Costs: While digital engineering requires significant upfront investment, it promises substantial long-term savings, particularly in sustainment. The F-35 program’s 75% reduction in structural data costs demonstrates how digital engineering can lower total ownership costs over decades of service.

Improved Collaboration: Digital engineering is fundamentally a communication tool. The Authoritative Source of Truth and digital thread break down traditional silos between engineering disciplines, contractors, and government teams. Everyone collaborates using the same trusted data, leading to better-integrated designs and faster, more informed decisions.

The Hurdles

The path to a fully digital enterprise faces significant obstacles that the DoD and industry partners must overcome.

Technical Barriers

Lack of Standardization: This is perhaps the most significant challenge. Different contractors and government teams use various proprietary software tools that can’t easily communicate with each other. This creates “digital islands” instead of a seamlessly integrated ecosystem, undermining the concept of a digital thread.

Legacy System Integration: The DoD operates vast inventories of legacy systems designed decades before modern digital tools existed. Digitizing these systems—which may only exist on paper blueprints or obsolete digital formats—is a massive, complex, and costly undertaking.

Financial Barriers

High Upfront Costs: The transition is expensive. According to RAND Corporation studies, the biggest cost drivers are IT infrastructure, sophisticated software licensing, and robust data management systems. These significant upfront investments must be made before long-term sustainment savings can be realized.

Security Barriers

Expanded Cyber Attack Surface: An interconnected digital ecosystem with data flowing between government and contractor networks represents a much larger target for sophisticated cyber adversaries. Protecting classified data and sensitive intellectual property across this distributed environment requires a new level of cybersecurity rigor.

Zero Trust Implementation: The digital engineering ecosystem must align with the DoD’s broader shift to “Zero Trust” cybersecurity, which assumes networks are already compromised and requires strict verification for every user and device. Implementing this across a complex, multi-organization environment is a formidable challenge.

A critical point about financial impact: while cost savings are a powerful motivator, independent analysis shows these savings haven’t yet materialized as lower upfront acquisition costs for major programs. The most compelling evidence for financial benefit comes from the sustainment phase, as seen in the F-35 program.

This suggests digital engineering’s primary financial value is in long-term cost avoidance over the 30-50 year lifespan of systems, achieved through more efficient maintenance, easier upgrades, and better operational performance.

Transforming People and Culture

The most sophisticated digital tools will fail if the people who must use them aren’t prepared and willing to adopt new ways of working. The DoD recognized from the start that transforming culture and workforce is both the greatest challenge and the ultimate key to success.

A Fundamental Culture Shift

The transition requires moving away from a deeply ingrained, document-centric mindset that has defined defense engineering for generations.

From Documents to Data: Engineers, program managers, and leaders must learn to trust digital models as the primary source of truth, moving away from the comfort of paper documents and static reports. This is a significant change in a bureaucratic culture where physical signatures and paper trails have long been the bedrock of accountability.

Overcoming Resistance: Professionals naturally resist abandoning familiar methods for new, complex tools. System engineers comfortable with traditional processes may resist adopting digital engineering, leading to inefficient “manual digital” workflows where old processes are simply layered on top of new tools, completely negating their benefits.

Prioritizing Data-Driven Analysis: Digital engineering requires prioritizing quantitative, data-driven analysis over relying exclusively on intuition and experience. For a traditionally hierarchical and risk-averse organization, this represents a significant departure from established norms.

Closing the Digital Skills Gap

The DoD faces a critical skills gap in high-tech fields like artificial intelligence, data science, and digital engineering. This talent deficit is seen as one of the greatest impediments to modernization goals, part of a broader national challenge with private industry also facing projected shortfalls of millions of skilled technology workers.

The DoD is taking a multi-pronged approach:

Identifying Needed Competencies: Through organizations like the Systems Engineering Research Center, the DoD is developing a Digital Engineering Competency Framework (DECF). This framework defines specific knowledge, skills, abilities, and behaviors required for digital engineering professionals across the acquisition workforce.

Recruiting and Retaining Talent: The DoD competes directly with high salaries and dynamic cultures of private technology companies. To attract and retain top digital talent, the department recognizes it must reform personnel systems by creating new career paths for digital experts and providing more opportunities to apply skills to critical missions.

Training the Digital Workforce

DoDI 5000.97 explicitly designated the Defense Acquisition University as a key institution for upskilling the workforce. DAU has responded with comprehensive resources:

Formal Credentials: DAU offers targeted credentials like the CENG 001 Digital Engineering for DoD Consumers Credential, providing foundational understanding of digital engineering concepts, goals, and policies.

Training Courses: A wide range of courses cover everything from fundamental digital literacy to advanced technical skills in areas like Systems Modeling Language (SysML) and modeling and simulation.

Webinars and Workshops: DAU hosts ongoing webinar series like “Let’s Get Digital” and immersive workshops on specific tools and methodologies.

Digital Engineering Body of Knowledge: The DoD maintains the DEBoK as a central, interactive knowledge base for the entire community, serving as a repository for resources, best practices, contracting language, and lessons learned.

The Digital Engineering Strategy is catalyzing a much broader modernization of the DoD’s entire talent management system. The pre-existing “digital readiness crisis” and “talent deficit” were systemic problems that the urgency of digital transformation has forced the department to confront head-on.

The skills gap isn’t merely a training problem—it’s structural, rooted in a personnel system not designed for the digital age. The multi-billion-dollar investment in digital engineering tools and infrastructure will only deliver promised value if the department succeeds in recruiting, training, and retaining a workforce capable of wielding them effectively.

Service Implementation Strategies

The collective experience reveals a crucial pattern. Digital engineering delivers its most significant benefits in the design, manufacturing, and sustainment of discrete, complex systems like combat vehicles, aircraft, and torpedoes. In these cases, variables are largely contained within the system itself, allowing digital models to optimize performance and reduce lifecycle costs effectively.

However, the strategy’s ability to control upfront costs and schedules on massive, one-of-a-kind construction and integration projects—like Sentinel silos or Ford-class carriers—is far more limited. These programs face unpredictable realities of the physical world and high risks of integrating multiple novel technologies simultaneously.

Key Concepts Defined

Frequently Asked Questions

What exactly is the DoD Digital Engineering Strategy?

It’s the Pentagon’s official plan to replace traditional paper blueprints and disconnected documents with integrated 3D digital models and connected data for designing, building, and maintaining all complex military systems. The goal is to work smarter, faster, and more collaboratively in a modern digital environment.

Why is this change necessary?

Three main factors drive this transformation: keeping pace with rapid technological advancement by adversaries like China and Russia; managing the immense complexity of modern military systems; and getting cutting-edge technology to warfighters much faster and more affordably than traditional processes allow.

What are the main benefits?

The primary benefits include better-designed and higher-performing systems, the ability to find and fix problems virtually before spending money on costly physical prototypes, significant long-term savings on maintenance over a system’s life, and providing military leaders with better data for faster, more informed decision-making.

What’s the difference between a “digital twin” and a “digital thread”?

A digital twin is a detailed virtual copy of a single, specific physical asset, like one particular F-35 aircraft with its own unique history. The digital thread is the communication network that connects all data about that system—from original design files to current maintenance records—into one continuous, traceable story over its entire life. The twin is the model; the thread is the story.

Does this just affect engineering, or other areas too?

This affects the entire defense enterprise. It’s a total business transformation that changes how the DoD writes contracts with industry, manages global supply chains and logistics, approaches cybersecurity, and most importantly, how it recruits, trains, and manages its military and civilian workforce.

What are the biggest challenges?

The biggest challenges aren’t primarily technical but organizational and cultural. They include the high upfront cost of acquiring new digital tools and building necessary IT infrastructure; the difficulty in getting different digital systems from hundreds of contractors to work together seamlessly; and the massive cultural shift required to move hundreds of thousands of people away from familiar, document-based processes to a new, model-based way of working.

Essential Resources

Official Policy Documents

The DoD Digital Engineering Strategy (June 2018) outlines the five strategic goals and initial vision for the transformation.

DoD Instruction 5000.97 (December 2023) is the official policy that formally mandates Digital Engineering across the Department of Defense.

DoD Digital Engineering Fundamentals provides a concise guide outlining core principles for implementing Digital Engineering and Modeling and Simulation.

Key DoD Websites

The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research & Engineering (OUSD(R&E)) – Digital Engineering, Modeling and Simulation serves as the central hub for official information, resources, and policy updates.

The Digital Engineering Body of Knowledge (DEBoK) is an interactive, publicly accessible knowledge base containing resources, data, contracting language, and best practices.

Defense Acquisition University Digital Engineering Resources provides a gateway to extensive training materials, articles, and community resources.

Training and Development

The DAU Course Catalog offers searchable training courses, including specialized credentials like the CENG 001 Digital Engineering for DoD Consumers Credential.

The DAU “Let’s Get Digital” Webinar Series features ongoing discussions with experts on various aspects of digital acquisition and engineering.

Reference Materials

The DOD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms provides standardized military terminology used across the joint force.

The DAU Glossary of Defense Acquisition Acronyms and Terms offers comprehensive coverage of terms used in the defense acquisition process.

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