Browse Topic: Defense industry
ISO 26262ISO/SAE 21434ISTQB/ASPICEMOSAGCIAVICTORY
Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) has become a mandated practice for Department of Defense acquisition programs, yet measured benefits remain elusive. The 2024 Defense Science Board found that less than one percent of published literature actually quantified MBSE outcomes, and flagship ground vehicle programs such as the XM30 Infantry Fighting Vehicle have experienced schedule delays attributed directly to insufficient proficiency with model-based approaches. This paper presents the Digital Safety Twin concept: an AI-powered safety intelligence architecture that addresses three of the most labor-intensive and error-prone MBSE workflows. First, the architecture uses hybrid natural language processing and large language model (NLP/LLM) pipelines to auto-formalize unstructured natural language documents into formally structured, traceable requirements. Second, it auto-generates and continuously maintains traceability relationships across requirements, design elements, hazard analyses, and verification artifacts. Third, it provides continuous safety case completeness and confidence assessment through automated Goal Structuring Notation (GSN) synthesis connected to live evidence sources. The approach is grounded in Systems-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA), the OMG Risk Analysis and Assessment Modeling Language (RAAML), MIL-STD-882E system safety practice, and the UL 4600 safety case framework. We present the methodology, its alignment to the DoD Digital Engineering Strategy, and its applicability to ground vehicle autonomy programs including next-generation infantry fighting vehicles and robotic combat vehicles. We also discuss the limitations, risks, and cultural barriers that must be addressed for AI-augmented safety engineering to achieve acceptance in mission-critical defense applications.
Modern defense platforms are no longer isolated systems. They are high-bandwidth nodes in a joint network spanning air, land, sea, space and cyber domains, and the connectors holding it all together are being pushed to their limits. The increasing prevalence of high-speed Ethernet in defense is pushing the boundaries of the tried and true circular D38999 connector. Military jets are becoming increasingly interconnected with edge computing devices, sensors, communication equipment and cameras via high-speed Ethernet. This is being replicated in other military assets, such as armored ground vehicles, artillery and command centers, as we move closer to the envisioned interconnected battlefield. The industry standard D38999, which has been around for decades, is starting to show its limitations when it comes to high-speed data signals.
The form factor decision comes early, and it often sticks. Once you officially spec a 3U SOSA aligned chassis for a program, you're shaping every plug-in-module (PIM) selection, cooling approach, and upgrade path that follows. Get it right, and the system integrates cleanly. Get it wrong, and you're retrofitting workarounds six months before CDR, when changing direction costs real money. Neither form factor wins outright. They're tools, and the right one depends on program requirements. Here's what to know before you commit.
Defense RF platforms are evolving from “sense-and-stream” architectures to “sense-think-act-communicate” Physical artificial intelligence (AI) architectures where inference and control occur as close to the antenna as possible to shorten decision loops and improve performance in contested environments. This shift is driven by rapidly increasing spectrum and waveform complexity, paired with strict size, weight, power and cost (SWaP-C) constraints, and the growing need for trusted microelectronics in sensitive defense applications. In practical terms, operators need RF systems that can adapt to dense spectral occupancy, interference, jamming/spoofing, multipath and complex multi-function sensor operations without relying on high latency backhaul to centralized compute. As spectrum becomes more crowded, and decisions more real time, defense systems must redesign RF architectures to achieve in-theatre electromagnetic advantage with closed-loop, edge-resident intelligence.
As military forces expand the use of distributed and expeditionary operating concepts across the Indo-Pacific, high-frequency (HF) communications continue to play a critical role in maintaining command-and-control links across vast distances without reliance on fixed infrastructure or satellite networks. A recent demonstration by communicators with Marine Rotational Force-Southeast Asia (MRF-SEA) and Marine Rotational Force-Darwin (MRF-D) highlighted the enduring value of HF technology for long-range military communications. During the event, Marines established two-way voice communications between Manila, Philippines, and Darwin, Australia, spanning approximately 2,000 miles. The communications link was achieved using an AN/PRC-160 high-frequency radio paired with a TRC-209 amplifier, validating the ability to maintain command and control across the Indo-Pacific using expeditionary communications systems.
When policymakers debate defense readiness, the conversation often centers on semiconductors, rare earth magnets, advanced optics, and other headline technologies. What rarely makes the list is the category of engineered technical textiles that equip, protect, and support American warfighters every day. These are not ordinary fabrics. Military technical textiles are engineered systems produced on computer-controlled looms, built from advanced synthetic polymers, and qualified under demanding aerospace and defense standards.
Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division Patuxent River, MD
This prototype array uses a small, lightweight, low-power, and low-cost aperture. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, MA Preventing adversaries from interfering with communications is crucial to national security. Tactical satellite communications (SATCOM) focus on securing reliable communications channels against adversaries in contested environments. In support of this mission, a team from MIT Lincoln Laboratory is building a prototype antenna characterized by low size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C). Threats in contested environments - specifically proliferated low-Earth orbit (pLEO), where satellites must be as low-SWaP as possible because of the high volume of satellites present - are signal jamming and signals intelligence. Mitigating these threats through methods such as changing the shape of antenna beams in real time so that the ground user's signals can't be interfered with and preparing for future advanced capabilities are key to ensuring that satellites stay in communication with users on the ground.
New technologies, advanced materials, evolving mission profiles and fast-changing requirements are forcing the aerospace and defense (A&D) industry to dramatically increase the speed of engineering. Companies must design, validate and bring more complex products to market faster than ever, even as software, electronics and autonomy continue to reshape what aircraft, spacecraft and defense systems can do. At the same time, a growing production challenge is emerging. Workforce shortages, supply chain disruption and pressure to reduce cost and cycle time are converging with new demands for greater volume and flexibility. Defense programs are seeing increasing need for larger quantities of lower-cost systems such as drones, while commercial aerospace companies continue to work through backlogs and reinforce their fleets. To keep pace, the industry must accelerate innovation while also scaling production with greater speed, resilience and adaptability.
AeroVironment, Inc. Arlington, VA
This digital standard is a digital model of AS9100D Quality Management Systems - Requirements for Aviation, Space, and Defense Organization. This file contains an MBSE model in a mdzip file for use in modeling applications.
Keith Yuen, a supervisory engineer at Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division (NAWCWD) spent years building a jammer designed to defeat America's own radars. The harder his team made it for friendly pilots to see through the jamming, the better they were doing their job. Then the question changed: what if the same system could jam the enemy?
Keith Yuen, a supervisory engineer at Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division (NAWCWD) spent years building a jammer designed to defeat America’s own radars. The harder his team made it for friendly pilots to see through the jamming, the better they were doing their job.
Aerospace and defense systems demand materials capable of maintaining performance under extreme environmental and operational stressors, including wide thermal cycling ranges, exposure to hydrocarbon fuels, vacuum conditions, and repeated mechanical strain. Silicone-based materials have become essential in these environments because they can retain elasticity, stability, and functionality where many traditional materials fail. Silicones are widely used as coatings, adhesives, sealants, and elastomers in aircraft and spacecraft applications. Their chemical structure enables resistance to both high and low temperatures, while also providing durability against solvents and fuels such as jet fuel. In contrast, many conventional elastomers degrade under prolonged thermal exposure or become brittle at cryogenic temperatures.
Enterprises that develop complex products or systems often struggle to reuse technology efficiently across their portfolios. This challenge is especially prevalent in aerospace, transportation, energy, and defense industries, where preserving freedom of action is critical. In this context, freedom of action is defined as the ability to avoid vendor lock imposed by integrators or third parties, while enabling competition within clearly defined functional boundaries that establish effective market segments for system components. This paper presents eight best practices for Enterprise Reference Architecture (ERA) development to address this challenge and applies them to aviation functionality spanning both vertical lift and fixed wing platforms. Because complex systems can be modularized in many ways, a consistent set of guiding rules is required to produce an organized set of modules that are reusable across an enterprise portfolio. The best practices presented in this paper are intended to fulfill that role.
Autonomous Inspection via small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS) is increasingly utilized across industrial use cases such as inspection of bridges, buildings, construction sites, roadways, transmission lines, pipes, wind turbines and power systems (1). In principle, the system workflow of inspection; identification and characterization of defects; and mapping in space is very similar across industries. Boeing and Proxim (A Near Earth Autonomy Company) have partnered to pursue this technology in the Aerospace and Defense industry for General Visual Inspection (GVI) of airframes predominantly in a maintenance setting. This activity began by deploying Proxim’s Autonomous Aircraft Inspection (AAI) technology and Boeing's Automated Damage Detection Software (ADDS) on Boeing C-17 Globemaster III at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam. It has expanded to offer U.S. Department of War (DoW) and Commercial customers aircraft-agnostic enhanced exterior GVI capability at point of need by leveraging unique ADDS AI algorithm in support of both home station and deployed operations. This paper gives an overview to industry developments in Autonomous Inspection, and the development AAI/ADDS technologies.
Developing a comprehensive autonomy solution for the Army's current and future aircraft fleet requires a robust computational and perception capability for decision-making across the entire flight envelope without a pilot. This also requires a flight control system and infrastructure capable of executing autonomous decisions in complex mission environments. Ongoing development of automation and autonomy, utilizing a wide range of perception sensors, has been conducted on platforms such as Sikorsky's S-70 and the Army's UH-60Mx aircraft. This work builds upon previous efforts and leverages ongoing collaborations with industry, the Department of War (DoW), and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to advance autonomous capabilities for both optionally piloted and uncrewed aircraft.
Synchronizing time in modern warfare - often down to billionths of a second - is critical for mission success. The Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency's (DARPA) Robust Optical Clock Network (ROCkN) program enables precision timekeeping, even in contested and/or GPS-denied environments, creating the opportunity for unprecedented endurance and coordination for warfighters around the world.
High-volume production of drones and missile systems is reshaping the defense industry, placing unprecedented strain on testing infrastructures that were never designed for speed, scale, or rapid change. Automated and modular test technologies are emerging as a solution, enabling defense manufacturers to adapt quickly to shifting demands, accelerate validation cycles, and maintain operational readiness without compromising safety or security.
On a clear afternoon over a contested airspace, a drone suddenly appears on radar. Within seconds, more follow, and they're small, fast, and unpredictable. For the U.S. Army's air and missile defense operators, every moment counts. The difference between mission success and mission failure is measured in milliseconds. During that brief window, sensors must connect instantly, embedded systems must process floods of data at the edge, and command links must hold steady even under electronic interference.
Machina Labs recently closed its latest round of financing with $124 million, enough to develop a facility featuring up to 50 of its RoboCraftsman cells capable of producing thousands of complex structural assemblies for aerospace and defense customers - a list that already includes Lockheed Martin and the U.S. Air Force, among others. Founded in 2019, Machina Labs is a California-based company that seeks to reinvent metal manufacturing with a robot that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to rapidly form and assemble complex military grade structures directly from digital design files. RoboCraftsman is the company's manufacturing robot that leverages its proprietary “RoboForming” process to integrate multiple manufacturing processes - including metal forming, trimming, scanning, and heat treating - into a single containerized machine.
USC Viterbi researcher received Office of Naval Research's Young Investigator Program award with Study on dexterous robotics. University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA In dynamic, unstructured environments like ship decks and even home kitchens, robots today still struggle to perform precision tasks such as tightening bolts or handling wires. This makes critical ship maintenance tasks difficult. USC researcher, Erdem Bıyık, aims to advance robots' finger manipulation and integrate human feedback to enable real-time learning for robots in an upcoming three-year, $750,000 project funded by the Office of Naval Research (ONR).
Synchronizing time in modern warfare – often down to billionths of a second – is critical for mission success. The Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency’s (DARPA) Robust Optical Clock Network (ROCkN) program enables precision timekeeping, even in contested and/or GPS-denied environments, creating the opportunity for unprecedented endurance and coordination for warfighters around the world.
The convergence of highly capable edge AI models and advanced commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) edge AI accelerators is reshaping how computation is deployed across defense, aerospace, and commercial platforms. Mission-critical decisions increasingly must be made at the edge, onboard vehicles, satellites, and infrastructure nodes, where latency, connectivity, and power availability are constrained.
Today's defense operations are defined by mobility, speed and data. Whether coordinating ship-to-shore logistics, maneuvering ground forces, or enabling autonomous and semi-autonomous systems at the tactical edge, reliable communications are no longer a support function - they are mission-critical. Defense forces must operate across fixed and mobile environments while maintaining secure, high-bandwidth connectivity amid interference, jamming, and limited spectrum availability. Legacy approaches, typically optimized for either static infrastructure or limited mobility, struggle to meet these combined requirements.
MyDefence has officially opened its U.S. counter uncrewed aircraft systems (C UAS) manufacturing and innovation facility in Oklahoma City, marking a major step in the company's expansion of its North American production footprint. The latest MyDefence facility, which became operational in February, strengthens the company's ability to support U.S. and allied defense customers with domestically produced counter drone technologies while reinforcing supply chain resilience, regulatory compliance, and lifecycle support. The opening comes amid rapid growth in the scale, diversity, and technical sophistication of uncrewed aerial system threats. Advances in autonomy, range, payload integration, and - critically -radio frequency (RF) employment have increased demand for counter UAS solutions that can evolve as quickly as the threat itself.
Scientists with Naval Information Warfare Center (NIWC) Atlantic's Unmanned Naval Innovation Team (UNIT) reached a historic milestone on Sept. 9, 2025 when they recovered a U.S. Navy-sponsored Lightfish uncrewed surface vessel (USV) in Troia, Portugal, following its harrowing - and completely solo - transatlantic crossing. This fully autonomous vessel accomplished the journey in just over two months, nearly 12 days faster than the last known previous attempt of its kind. UNIT engineers launched the Lightfish, a solar-powered, low-profile USV designed for long-endurance missions, on a blazing summer day from a community boat ramp in Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, at the end of June. After performing numerous systems checks and taking a moment to christen the vessel, the team's lead scientist and program manager Michael Grass waded into waist-deep sea water to send the unmanned vehicle off on its long voyage across the Atlantic Ocean.
Defense Advaned Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Arlington, VA
Astrolight recently demonstrated undetectable, unjammable, and high-bandwidth laser-based ship-to-ship communication with its POLARIS terminal during REPMUS'25, NATO's largest unmanned maritime exercise. During the Robotic Experimentation and Prototyping using Maritime Uncrewed Systems (REPMUS) /Dynamic Messenger mission, hosted by the Portuguese Navy, POLARIS laser terminals maintained a stable, jam-proof horizon-limited laser-based link between two vessels: NRP Dom Francisco de Almeida and NRP Dom Carlos I. During testing, the link wasn't detected by a single sensor of other participating ships, drones, and land assets.
EnCharge AI, a California-based startup, recently launched the EnCharge EN100 artificial intelligence (AI) chip, developed with a scalable analog in-memory computing architecture. The launch of EN100 came a year after EnCharge AI signed a partnership with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop the new chip. The company describes EN100 as the industry's “first AI accelerator built on precise and scalable analog in-memory computing.”
During the 2025 Association of the United States Army (AUSA) annual , Forterra announced several major defense industry vehicle partnerships and introduced four new integrated modules designed to enable autonomy for military vehicles, communications, and more.
Consider this: A new groundbreaking technology has just been developed that needs to be integrated into multiple types of aircraft as soon as possible. This could take years to accomplish, since each aircraft implements a different method of communicating with it, using different data transport protocols. Even worse, this new technology likely has proprietary information that needs to be transmitted to the aircraft in some format. All of these issues would require a different version of the technology for each aircraft.
During the 2025 Association of the United States Army (AUSA) annual meeting and exhibition, Forterra announced several major defense industry vehicle partnerships and introduced four new integrated modules designed to enable autonomy for military vehicles, communications, and more. Headquartered in Clarksburg, Maryland, Forterra develops autonomous mission systems for specific defense applications, including robotics and self-driving vehicles. The company has a new partnership with BAE Systems that will rapidly prototype an autonomous Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle (AMPV). Separately, Forterra has also collaborated with Oshkosh Defense and Raytheon to develop the “DeepFires” autonomous vehicle launcher technology.
The U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command Technical Center's Aerophysics Research Facility, (ARF), fired a successful hypersonic shot to test its new rainfield simulator. U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command Technical Center, Huntsville, AL Zack Perrin, ARF manager and technical lead engineer of the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command (USASMDC's) Targets and Test Resources Branch of the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site, said ARF is SMDC's premier hypersonic flight and hypervelocity impact laboratory. Perrin said their largest gun system, the 254 mm light gas guns, or LGGs, is the fastest gun in the Army and can launch projectiles 6 inches in diameter to speeds up to 3 kilometers per second or smaller projectiles on the order of 2.7 inches in diameter to velocities exceeding 6 km/s. “I like to tell people that the facility is a gun range the size of an aircraft carrier and within the facility are multiple engineering tools, called light gas guns,” Perrin said. “Aerophysics' core mission is to efficiently and affordably provide both the Army and the broader Department of Defense (DoD) engineering community with state-of-the-art hypersonic aerodynamic data, hypervelocity impact physics data, and weapons system performance data.”
RF and fiber have long co-existed within modern military and aerospace systems, with each medium dedicated to separate, mission-critical roles. Increasingly, however, system designers are turning to RF-over-fiber (RFoF) architectures to bridge the gap between over-the-air RF interfaces and the long, interference-resistant transport advantages of fiber. When it comes to over-the-air communications uses like tactical radio or satellite communications terminals, radio frequency (RF) is still the dominant signal format. RF is also commonly used at the front end of radar and electronic warfare, supporting search, tracking, fire control radar, missile seekers, jammers and electronic support measures.
Pyrovalves (also known as pyrotechnic valves) have long been a staple in defense systems, particularly in missile and munition launcher applications. The rapid growth of counter-UAS and missile defense systems makes this an ideal time to explore smarter alternatives to pyrovalves. One of the largest ongoing U.S. military efforts is the Missile Defense Agency's (MDA) Scalable Homeland Innovative Enterprise Layered Defense (SHIELD) Multiple Award Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract. In December, MDA issued two tranches of SHIELD awards to more than 2,100 companies, including major defense contractors and startups such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Shield AI, Anduril, and Virtualitics.
Current world conflicts have proven that drones are now indispensable tools in modern warfare. Whether for reconnaissance, loitering munitions, or asymmetric tactics that exploit vulnerabilities in conventional defenses, unmanned aerial systems (UAS) are redefining the rules of engagement.
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