The Program Executive Office for Integrated Warfare Systems is reshaping its Open Architecture initiative as a broad Navy-wide enterprise that will redefine the design of warfare systems for surface combatants, submarines, aircraft, and command-and-control systems.
Captain James Shannon, major program manager for open architecture in the executive office, says that open architecture will be "transformational for the force structure" by forcing the Navy to look some 20 years into the future and "to understand the way industry does business." The new enterprise approach will focus on requirements of the several warfare "communities of interest. That's a big shift for our culture."
The open architecture effort traces its origins to a program called HyperD, started at the Naval Surface Warfare Center's Dahlgren Division in the mid-199Os that explored the use of commercial computing technology for surface Navy applications. Simultaneously, the surface warfare community tried other programs to develop a common combat system for cruisers, destroyers, aircraft carriers, and amphibious warfare ships to overcome the long-standing lack of interoperability between the Aegis system and the systems on non-Aegis ships.
The Aegis system, developed and built by Lockheed Martin, evolved as a tightly coupled integration of Navy-proprietary hardware and software. However, the early Aegis baselines require extensive re-writing of code to introduce new performance. The current Aegis program, designated baseline 7 phase 1, has introduced extensive levels of commercial software for many applications.
The program executive office began the open architecture effort in the late 1990s to identify combat-system functions, such as tracking and identification, that are common to multiple ship classes and promoted the use of commercial business practices and software standards to make the functions transparent across surface platforms. The program established a series of categories that reflects levels of compliance. Category 3 represents full independence of software and hardware from each other, which makes upgrades of both easier. Category 3 will be followed by even more open categories in coming years.
Rueben Pitts, major program manager for integrated combat systems for the program executive office describes open architecture as an "adjective, not a noun," adding that it can be defined as a "state of being compliant with a set of standards. OA brings a set of processes and standards."
Initially, though, open architecture was not deemed transformational by the Navy leadership because it focused only on surface combat systems. In August 2004 then-Assistant secretary of the Navy for Research, Development, and Acquisition John Young directed the Navy to extend open architecture principles to the submarine fleet and to naval aviation. Shannon, the program leader, reports not only to Rear Admiral Michael Frick of the integrated warfare systems program executive office, but also to Rear Admirals William Hilarides, program executive office for submarines and David Venlet, program executive office for tactical air programs for open architecture coordination with undersea and aviation programs.
The intent, Shannon says, is to look at naval systems, such as Aegis, as components of larger architectures. A more precise model for the goal, he adds, is the Navy's FORCEnet initiative, which aims at providing a force-wide architecture encompassing multiple types of systems integrated in a distributed information-management network.
"The key to creating open architecture networks is understanding interfaces between differing applications," he notes. Shannon points out that the enterprise transformation from surface warfare to the fleet operational communities requires effective collaboration with industry. The initiative will demand that Navy acquisition officials collaborate to obtain rights for data that could be ported across multiple programs-potentially a huge Navy-wide cost savings-instead of forcing individual program offices to purchase the same data.
The data could come from far more sources: Because the open architecture seeks capability based on compliance with standards, it will open competition to a greater number of contractors who comply with the standards.
Pitts says that while the Navy traditionally has awarded systems-integration to large prime contractors, the architecture's stress on capabilities will enable programs to seek out smaller firms who can provide the highest level of performance.
Shannon says that the best model for open architecture is the submarine community's Acoustic Rapid Commercial Off-The-Shelf Insertion, which also takes advantage of the Navy's Small Business Innovative Research program. This balances industry input on commercial technology with operating fleet input on the highest-priority performance upgrades required.
Integrated warfare systems officials point out that while the enterprise focus for open architecture evolves, the surface warfare community open architecture effort continues to home on its Category 3 goal, now set for 2008, which for Aegis will represent the full uncoupling of hardware and software, which Pitts calls "ungluing the stack." The recently certified Aegis baseline 7 phase 1, for example, while closer to commercial standards than earlier baselines, still requires development of some new software code, he says.