U.S. defense industry considers new software tools to share data among military weapon systems networks
FALLS CHURCH, Va. – Just as consumers like headphones and other audio gear that connects seamlessly to their streaming data, future militaries will be more interested in weapons that connect to larger networks quickly and intuitively -- more so even than high-performing weapons that don’t share data well, Northrop Grumman CTO Scott Stapp said last week. Defense One reports. Continue reading original article
The Military & Aerospace Electronics take:
12 Aug. 2021 -- The defense industry -- and particularly, traditional prime contractors -- are grappling with the military’s new insistence that they share data more freely: among weapons, over the new battle nets, to uniformed maintenance personnel, with Defense acquisition officials, and more.
It’s the sort of change that will disrupt the way the contractors do business. Stapp said defense contractors eventually will stop fretting about opening their data silos and instead offer new software tools to combine and then use that data.
“I think it opens a new model for the defense industry, which, in a lot of ways, looks a lot like commercial when it comes to data,” he said in an interview. He likened it to Apple, which went from a company that sold computer hardware to a company that sold hardware that seamlessly interlinked to cloud-based data services across devices.
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John Keller, chief editor
Military & Aerospace Electronics
