Revolutionizing Defense: How Digital Engineering is Changing the Game
As digital transformation reshapes industries, the U.S. Department of Defense is embracing change with a powerful shift toward digital engineering. Driven by the DoD mandate 5000.97, this strategy moves programs from outdated, siloed systems to a fully integrated, data-driven ecosystem. This shift isn't just about efficiency. It's about speed, cost, collaboration, and traceability, making digital engineering a mission-critical requirement for all new defense programs.
Transcript
00:00:01 Digital is changing the civilian industries, but it's also changing government industries. The Department of Defense is looking at implementing a digital engineering strategy. How important is that for the department? It's uh extremely uh important. I mean, we're seeing uh as of maybe 18 months ago uh a mandate come out from the DO
00:00:24 Department of Defense. Uh, anyone who's in the space is familiar with DLDI 5097 that basically states that thou shalt um execute and engage in digital engineering on defense programs from this state moving forward. Um, but to be honest, it had uh legs prior to that dating um prior to 2018 2017 with the digital engineering handbook. Um the under secretary of defense for um
00:00:53 digital engineering modeling and simulation has been uh very forwardleaning to uh getting the community involved in sharing best practices trying to cross-pollinate to make sure that we're leveraging the best practices so that we can have successful programs. So I mean it's very very important so much so that it's a requirement for all new defense programs
00:01:19 u moving forward. What was the backstory of this? How how did it come about? Was it a was it efficiency? Was it cost savings? What was the backtory that made this as you said extremely important? I came in around 2018 2019 when MBSSE was really starting to take off. we started seeing uh evidence of what multidisciplinary design optimization and analysis could do. Um I believe
00:01:45 North of Brumman uh laid out one of the most uh eloquent uh displays of showing that if you had a baseline design you could optimize it based on um requirements and constraints such as speed, weight, cost, the various parameters. Um but as we started continue to move forward things such as uh authoritative sources of truths and integrations
00:02:12 and migrating away from documentbased and siloed based practices to an integrated ecosystem with uh workflows uh where data could move birectionally and there was traceability started becoming more important. And as that continued to gain momentum and we're seeing some of those um industry leaders such as Loheed Martin, North of Grumman,
00:02:40 Boeing um pushing the frontier of that and working with the defense agencies. Um we we start seeing that morph into what became the DoD 500097. A lot of that effort was led by Phil Zimmerman who was uh one of the um call her the godmother of digital engineering and uh she did a lot of great groundwork establishing communities of practice where academia, industry and government
00:03:13 could come together to discuss what were the pain points, what were the advantages and how we should move forward.