Summary

The Department of the Air Force (DAF) faces a future operational environment characterized by rising complexity, evolving and increasingly agile threats, accelerated innovation cycles, and heightened integration across operational and technical domains. Recent conflicts have highlighted the rapid evolution not only of strategy, operational art, and tactics but also of supply chains, equipment, and acquisition timelines. Threat actors of all levels of sophistication develop and employ new tactics, techniques, and procedures that evolve rapidly and that challenge even the most advanced traditional opponents.

To achieve dominance in these new, evolving environments, the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Space Force must embrace agility, foster innovation, and build enduring resilience. Evidence has shown that the Services are highly motivated to do this, and the technology base is ready to support it. Several key disciplines and technologies are driving this advancement, including model-based systems engineering (MBSE), software engineering, artificial intelligence, and digital engineering (DE). To fully capitalize on the potential of these disciplines and technologies, the DAF tasked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Air Force Studies Board to study how the department might implement and benefit from digital transformation (DT) to enable rapid design iteration, accelerate development and deployment, and transform sustainment.

The predecessors of DT rest in computational modeling and simulation, computer-aided design, and computer-aided manufacturing. These have already proven their value. Advances in system and software engineering as well as compute capacity may enable much higher-fidelity modeling and simulation for analyzing more complex systems, both qualitatively and quantitatively, and for maintaining digital

twins of systems through their life cycles to enhance sustainment and continuously improve performance. DT is the comprehensive shift from traditional approaches to integrated, model-centric, and consistency-managed digital methods that improve agility, decision making, and performance across an enterprise.

To briefly define the strategies for DT discussed in this report, a digital thread is a body of engineering data, including models, design elements, analyses, and other features, that can provide explicit representations of design choices and rationale in a way that can support continuity and consistency across an entire system life cycle. In other words, it is the capture and application of a broad range of engineering information that makes design choices explicit and traceable, enabling developers, test and evaluation teams, and sustainers to rely on a consistent base of explicit models and records.¹

Digital threads are at the core of DE. When MBSE techniques are used and the span of modeling is sufficiently extensive—including the system and its operational context—then the models can be used to create digital twins that can support simulations of a system in a virtual environment, and with some claims of validity. Benefits from digital twins and digital thread efforts include cost-effective early validation and verification, improved traceability, continuous model improvement, accelerated prototype development, enhanced decision making, and continuous collaboration and improvement.

In the context of this report, “digital transformation” is the advancement of practices in support of MBSE, digital twins, and digital threads that enables capture, retention, and ongoing consistency of engineering information that spans full system life cycles—and that can assist in supporting families of systems and interconnection among systems. This suggestive definition is elaborated in later sections of this report. This report is the result of a study that addressed the following key topics:

• DAF’s proposed strategies and roadmaps for achieving DT in the next decade,
• High-priority common elements to aid in the acceleration of DAF DT,
• Use case examples to showcase DAF’s digital adoption progress, and
• Opportunities and challenges for the creation of a unified DAF digital enterprise.

Through examining these topics, the DAF may pursue a digitally transformed enterprise that successfully enables agile and responsive fielding of new capabilities and seamless end-to-end life-cycle management.

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¹ M. Maybury, 2013, “Air Force Global Horizons,” https://ndia.dtic.mil/wp-content/uploads/2013/ST/Maybury.pdf.

VIABILITY OF PROPOSED DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION STRATEGIES

As the DAF progresses in its DT journey, it should critically assess its existing DE efforts and the maturity of their integration and adoption throughout the development life cycle. DE plays an important role in both analysis of alternatives and concept development. As systems transition into the design phase, these models are refined with increasing levels of fidelity. Test and evaluation then rigorously assess the operational environment to verify and validate design assumptions and ensure that model predictions align with real-world outcomes. Today’s platforms can also function as adaptable, software-driven systems, essentially mobile computers, that can be rapidly reprogrammed to meet evolving mission needs. The DAF has already seen substantial value from these practices in pockets of excellence.

One notable DT effort adopted by the DAF is Digital Materiel Management (DMM). Led through the Air Force Materiel Command (AFMC), DMM integrates digital tools and processes across the entire life cycle to accelerate the fielding of new systems, improve sustainment, and enable faster, more agile decision making. A standout example of this effort is AFMC’s development of “LaunchPad,” a suite of software tools designed to streamline DE and program development.

However, due to the program-specific and often fragmented nature of current approaches, these DE efforts have not been fully integrated across the development cycle, let alone the entire system life cycle. In many cases, models are not properly maintained or managed once the physical system transitions into operation and sustainment. Additionally, some platforms continue to be developed as closed, self-contained systems rather than as re-programmable, adaptable platforms. As systems grow more complex and interconnected, and as capabilities are delivered more iteratively, much of the downstream value of these efforts are lost. When engineering information is not preserved or rigorously curated, it creates technical debt, requiring costly and time-consuming efforts to recreate and revalidate information during later life-cycle phases, such as test and evaluation or sustainment, or at the onset of new programs. As a result, system enhancement and modifications often take longer, incur higher costs, and may fail to consider the full spectrum of alternatives.

Additionally, the DAF digital enterprise capabilities and the ability to establish digital threads within and across individual systems and platforms are constrained by limited access to digital models and artifacts, which often remain with the original equipment manufacturers. Further compounding the challenge, many systems are not designed with modular, updateable software in mind, and warfighters are not trained to adapt such systems.

Current DT efforts under way are not on a trajectory to deliver a unified capability that supports both the Air Force and Space Force with a seamless digital thread across the system life cycle and major commands. This shortfall stems from

the absence of a common high-level strategy, integrated digital architecture, and consistent, sustained resources. As a result of these observations, the Committee on Digital Transformation in the Department of the Air Force came to the following overarching conclusion:

Overarching Conclusion: Although the Department of the Air Force has established numerous elements that support a digital enterprise with pockets of excellence in some centers, the efforts under way are not on a trajectory to achieve a unified capability that serves the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Space Force with a seamless digital thread across the system life cycle and commands, due to lack of a common high-level leadership, strategy, architecture, and consistent funding.

COMMON ELEMENTS TO ACCELERATE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

The committee was tasked with identifying a small set of high-priority, crosscutting elements that may aid in the acceleration of DT across the DAF, which can be found in Box S-1.

Conclusion 3-1: The committee identified several high-priority common elements that may aid in the acceleration of digital transformation: leadership and adoption culture, funding and incentives, software and data, hardware and secure information technology, and metrics.

When determining common metrics for DT evaluation, the committee recommends the following:

Recommendation 3-1: The Department of the Air Force Digital Transformation Office should establish initial sets of digital transformation metrics for legacy and new systems that are measurable, relevant, and enable diagnosis of state, status, and health. It should then continue to iterate, improve, and adjust these metrics at regular intervals.

USE CASE EXAMPLES OF DIGITAL ADOPTION PROGRESS TO DATE

To assess DAF’s progress in digital adoption to date, the committee was asked to examine two representative use cases. Among those reviewed, the Air Force Sustainment Center’s (AFSC’s) digital ecosystem stands out as the most mature and sustained DT effort, having evolved over a 5-year period. The Boeing T-7A Red Hawk Advanced Jet Trainer, meanwhile, is notable as the first DAF aircraft to be “born” fully digital (i.e., conceived and developed entirely through DE). The committee selected these two pockets of excellence to establish a baseline for assessing

the current state of DAF’s DT, and to demonstrate DAF’s capacity to achieve DT at scales below the enterprise level.

Air Force Sustainment Center

Selected as a use case example of digital adoption due to its 5-year effort to utilize DE, AFSC is a geographically dispersed organization responsible for diverse weapon systems. The role of AFSC is depot maintenance, supply-chain management, and operations and installation support.

As a starting point, AFSC possesses a great deal of digital capability. However, most of this capability is located on isolated workstations with little integration at the same location, much less across the enterprise. The legacy infrastructure represented a hindrance to integration across the enterprise. The advent and acceptance of cloud infrastructure enabled the transition from this environment. The main component of AFSC’s integration effort is an intranet between major centers, utilizing commercially available products, which enables the sharing of information and coordinating business.

Boeing T-7A Red Hawk Advanced Jet Trainer

Selected because its integrated DE applications help realize program benefits, the T-7A Advanced Pilot Training (APT) program was planned from the beginning to be built on a base of digital models. Since the contract was put in place

before the establishment of key DE standards, the program was challenged to fully leverage the full digital capabilities. Digital adoption enabled an improved trainer flight within 3 years of design start and a representative weapons system trainer that maintains equivalency with the aircraft hardware and software. Other benefits achieved through DE included remote verification of select system-level requirements and improved management of the APT through enterprise-wide digital tool suites.

The T-7A use case also demonstrates challenges that are driven by the dynamic environment and the limitations of Air Force contracts to keep pace. The contracts did not have an affordable mechanism to enable changes as DE capabilities evolve. Contract limitations prevented Air Force use of Boeing models. To counter these challenges, the Air Force would need contract requirements for direct access to desired DE models and artifacts.

OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES FOR CREATING A DIGITAL ENTERPRISE

To address the current stove-piped approach, the DAF has a significant opportunity to leverage a digital thread—a linked set of digital models, data, and artifacts—where consistency is maintained throughout a system’s life cycle. A seamless digital thread would enable traceability of data, decisions, and artifacts across the entire life cycle of a system, from design and development through testing, fielding, operations, and sustainment. This end-to-end connectivity fosters consistency and continuity across disciplines and domains, reducing organizational and disciplinary silos and ensuring that all stakeholders operate from a common, authoritative source of truth (a unified reference for validated models and data throughout the system life cycle).² This would have benefits in cost, schedule, risk reduction, and adaptability for enhancement and repair. Achieving a viable digital enterprise will require the DAF to implement a comprehensive, enterprise-level strategy that supports the creation of complete, integrated digital threads while also allowing each command to continue advancing digital capabilities tailored to its functional requirements. Efficient establishment of the digital thread based on an authoritative source of truth must begin in the earliest phases of the system life cycle to ensure long-term interoperability.

The interconnected and complex DAF operating environment poses challenges that require a well-managed system architecture. Without a common understanding of how systems are structured and interact, collaboration can become frag-

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² As prescribed in Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, 2023, “Digital Engineering,” DoDI 5000.97, https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/DD/issuances/dodi/500097p.PDF?ver=bePIqKXaLUTK_Iu5iTNREw%3D%3D.

mented and integration efforts hampered. This leads the committee to make the following recommendation:

Recommendation 5-1: Department of the Air Force (DAF) leaders should embed digital transformation into strategic visioning, requirements, resourcing, and communications to ensure continuity across leadership transitions, using governance, policy, and roadmap alignment that is iteratively updated to maintain momentum. The DAF should clearly define new roles and responsibilities and who will fill them, including the roles of a consistency manager and data curator. Successful digital transformation will address the critical challenges of intellectual property ownership, stakeholder involvement, use of tools and associated engineering data, and culture.

Current organizational models present challenges to creating a unified digital enterprise. In response, the committee focused recommendations in response to four organizational factors: leadership, budget processes, workforce, and the role of commercial capabilities.

Centralized governance and leadership structures can drive alignment among command and program equities, resource allocation planning, and enforcement of a cohesive vision of mission and engineering. A centralized authority can help unify standards, provide minimal yet enforceable guidance, and maintain consistency across programs. In order to further support authentic adoption from decentralized divisions and programs, these leadership structures must also ensure flexibility.

A strong governance model would support authentic adoption by the decentralized divisions and programs. Therefore, the committee makes the following recommendation:

Recommendation 5-2: The Secretary of the Air Force should designate an officer or senior leader within the Department of the Air Force headquarters with accountability to lead digital transformation for both the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Space Force, establish an enterprise-wide digital strategy and common mission architecture elements with standardized platforms and integrated tools. This position should have sufficient resources with operational and technical expertise and experience and the authority to direct program executive officers to use the enterprise capabilities.

Additionally, budgetary challenges must be overcome to support, integrate, and scale DT efforts. The fragmented and sometimes intermittent approach the DAF has taken to DT efforts means that the extant pockets of excellence are currently funded through a variety of ad hoc channels. A centralized DAF fund adaptable across programs could allow for the purchase and sustainment of shared digital

tools, as well as improved identification and codification of best practices. Given these considerations, the committee recommends the following:

Recommendation 5-3: U.S. Air Force and U.S. Space Force Service Acquisition Executives should formally ensure resources for digital engineering are included in the Program Objective Memorandum input.

Embracing DT requires a workforce with sufficient technical skills and a culture that encourages continuous learning. Crucial technical skills include management, systems thinking, and three-dimensional modeling for early-career engineers and fluency in MBSE insights for senior leaders. To encourage workforce development and retention, the committee recommends the following:

Recommendation 5-4: The Department of the Air Force should develop a comprehensive strategy to foster an innovative digital transformation culture and ensure a workforce equipped with the necessary digital transformation knowledge to perform all critical functions. This strategy should prioritize recruiting and retaining talent by creating clear career paths, offering incentives for upskilling and reskilling, and leveraging existing expertise.

Recommendation 5-5: To support continuous learning and collaboration, the Secretary-designated officer or senior leader should work with the Air Force Personnel Center to resource skill development pathways, establish digital sandboxes for hands-on experimentation, and implement adaptive processes that promote progressive knowledge sharing, a balance between technology innovation and standardization, and cross-functional engagement.

The DAF digital enterprise capabilities and the ability to establish digital threads rely solely on commercial capabilities and digital models and artifacts that reside with the contractors. The DAF would benefit from ongoing reviews of its commercial and open-source capabilities and should establish policy and standardized contract requirements.

Recommendation 5-6: The Secretary-designated officer or senior leader should perform an ongoing enterprise-level and enterprise-wide assessment of its current use of commercial and open-source digital engineering tools, licenses, and intellectual property and use the results of that assessment to prioritize upgrades. The DAF should repeat this process at regular intervals and monitor emerging technologies and solutions from the private sector.

Recommendation 5-7: The Secretary-designated officer or senior leader for digital transformation should establish policy and standardized contract requirements to ensure that the Department of the Air Force has the necessary data rights and maintains ownership or access over relevant data from prime contractors. Government-owned or -accessible data repositories should be established.

A DT framework provides an opportunity through a common language—a structured approach to organizing models and defining the necessary views to comprehensively represent a system’s architecture. Achieving this DT framework requires considering the following engineering factors: structure, through a prescribed technical architecture; practice, including engineering process, data, and tooling; and judgments, including considerations for framework capability, security, and quality.

Recommendation 5-8: The Department of the Air Force’s robust, secure information technology infrastructure should support three different kinds of digital engineering baselines—systems as-built, systems as-programmed, and what systems may look like in the future.

Recommendation 5-9: The Secretary-designated officer or senior leader should prioritize curation of engineering data, leveraging existing tools and software whenever feasible and appropriate. When new tools are necessary, they should be developed with interoperability in mind, including open approaches to engineering data, and adhere to open standards (particularly for associated engineering data) to ensure seamless integration and collaboration.

Challenges posed by security for a digital enterprise mandate cybersecurity best practices and the building of security into the DAF digital engineering ecosystem. The committee recognizes that, while it is important to have strong impetus, there are cases where it is necessary to take incremental steps to adoption of DT and use of common repositories. This could be driven, for example, for reasons of security, proprietary protection, and other governance considerations. Anticipation of these kinds of issues is an important element in DT planning and in maximizing benefits from DT, so the committee recommends the following:

Recommendation 5-10: The Department of the Air Force should more aggressively incorporate cybersecurity and build security into its digital engineering ecosystem. This includes architectural choices that enhance resilience and security; accumulation of evidence to support more confident

security-related test and evaluation; and modeling and threat-informed analysis to reduce attack surfaces, minimize vulnerabilities, and generally impose a high work factor on adversaries. Most importantly, security and resilience considerations should be considered at the earliest stages of program development. The Secretary-designated officer or senior leader should evaluate cybersecurity implementation.