Burden Sharing via Modular Open Systems Approaches: A Collaborative Path to Affordable Mass

Commentary by Gregory Sanders and Audrey Aldisert

Published December 10, 2024

The war in Ukraine has served as a wake-up call for the U.S. defense industrial base (DIB). Russia's invasion has illuminated longstanding supply chain vulnerabilities and a lack of surge capacity plagues the U.S. DIB. Expanding U.S. production capacity is critical amidst a return to great power competition, especially when the manufacturing powerhouse of the world may seek to resolve territorial disputes and the status of Taiwan through force. The first-ever National Defense Industrial Strategy (NDIS)-and its accompanying implementation plan-means the message has been received by the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), but the United States cannot go it alone.

Ramping up production alongside allies is a bipartisan concern. The Heritage Foundation transition plan included calls to "increase allied conventional defense burden-sharing" to "strengthen America's defense industrial base" and to "minimize barriers to collaboration" with allies. Incorporating allies and partners into strategy provides the West with an asymmetric advantage that (a) U.S. competitors don't have and (b) can best compete against a nation with four times the U.S. population and nearly double the U.S. manufacturing capacity. But, in plain terms, cooperation is hard. The good news is that the U.S. Congress and DOD are already lowering barriers to entry, leveraging ally and partner industrial strengths, and easing cooperation pains through Modular Open Systems Approaches (MOSA).

What is MOSA?

MOSA is a strategy for designing an adaptable system that employs interfaces any authorized vendor can use. To use a commercial example, think of Universal Serial Bus (USB), International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) personal computers, or Android versus Apple. Android is a modular system designed to be adaptable across various hardware configurations from different manufacturers (such as Samsung or Google Pixel) while using common software. Apple, on the other hand, is vertically integrated and has a closed system that directly controls hardware and uses a walled garden approach to software.

MOSA applies Android's model to weapons systems-a critical capability for joint coalition operations. This standardization allows U.S. allies and partners to "plug-and-play," that is, incorporating technology from a variety of sources into one loosely coupled but standardized system. In other words, MOSA allows for the inclusion of subsystems produced by different vendors, including foreign vendors, into standard interfaces that integrate and operate together. Vendor participation in MOSA is determined by the government, not solely by individual companies. Some of the key benefits of MOSA include the following:

• Breaking the vendor lock; just under half of DOD contracts have competition with two or more offers. The DOD can choose which systems it wants to buy but competition is often low even for subcomponents. MOSA enhances the infrastructure enabling competition, which (1) incentivizes industry to put forth their best cost, schedule, and performance outcomes and (2) invites nontraditional vendors to more readily participate.
• Allowing for the separation of software from hardware and mission systems from flight critical systems. If software and mission systems can be acquired independently from their more slowly updated counterparts, governments have the freedom to choose the most competitive providers (rather than having to choose one provider for both).
• Providing a pathway for incremental acquisition strategies, which allows new technologies to be deployed faster and upgraded more frequently.

MOSA and the National Defense Industrial Strategy

To understand the utility of MOSA to international defense industrial efforts, it's important first to understand the "wicked" challenges the DIB faces. The NDIS, the DOD's guidepost to prepare the DIB to meet today's threat environment, has self-diagnosed U.S. constraints to include suboptimal interoperability with allies and partners, inflexible acquisition strategies, and failure to design for exportability, all of which MOSA offers solutions for.

With regard to interoperability, a variety of different vendors and regulations make standardization difficult. Standards setting and enforcement takes sustained effort and funding. However, the success of open architectures in the commercial sector shows that while the transition to MOSA can be difficult the subsequent business case can be strong. Uncrewed aircraft have been a cross-platform adopter of MOSA in the United States including integration into NATO standards. Thus, MOSA helps alleviate the inherent difficulties that accompany coalition operations.

MOSA reduces the burdens of U.S. export controls by making it easier to design for exportability. This refers to sharing technology with allies in the early stages of systems' development. MOSA makes it simple to remove modules containing sensitive technology or to swap in modules addressing the special needs of a recipient. This not only simplifies the export process and customization but also minimizes the risk of proliferating sensitive information.

Acquisition agility is a core tenet of the NDIS and refers to balancing capability with "efficiency, maintainability, customization, and standardization . . . [that] would result in reduced development times, reduced costs, and increased scalability." The NDIS explicitly calls for MOSA under this tenet because open architectures serve as a channel to more easily incorporate updates and leading-edge technology across various systems.

MOSA and Boosting the Production of Allies and Partners

MOSA also can leverage allied contributions to address two other problems identified by the NDIS: a diminished workforce and a lack of manufacturing capacity. MOSA provides a bottom-up answer to the Heritage Foundation's call to "enhance defense industrial base planning with partners to allow them to focus on niche areas where there are cost advantages for the United States." Maintaining a ready workforce and boosting production capacity is expensive. Open architectures permit nations to leverage the strengths of ally and partner DIBs via a production web to specialize rather than to dilute new the benefits of rising defense budgets through duplication.

However, there are limits to the commonality that can be achieved across allied defense industries. The United States seeks to project power around the world and often prioritizes high-end performance over affordability. Therefore, U.S. autonomous systems will look different than, say, Japanese autonomous systems for reasons such as proximity to likely areas of operation and other miscellaneous considerations such as terrain and weather. MOSA allows the United States and Japan to therefore use some of the same hardware, such as the aircraft "wrapper," but swap in different engines to accommodate varying mission suites, flight times, and payloads.

Allies and partners can strengthen their sovereign capacity-the means to either produce or acquire weapons systems to meet their national security needs-through building systems that are MOSA compliant or by producing components that can serve a larger marketplace. This allows nations, such as Japan, that have historically sold exclusively to their domestic market to at least be able to export internationally if they wish.

Putting MOSA into Practice

These benefits open doors for the United States to become more interoperable with allies and partners and therefore benefit from ally and partner defense industrial strengths and emerging technologies. However, open systems have been a goal of the DOD going back to memos written by Paul Kaminski in 1994 and require the DOD to offer a new business model. Overcoming the government and industry collective action problem to achieve the benefits of MOSA will be a demanding effort competing with other goals. A tangible pathfinder can be found in the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program.

The Collaborative Combat Aircraft Program

The Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program-part of the Next Generation Air Dominance family of systems-is a U.S. Air Force (USAF) initiative designed to field at least a thousand affordable, uncrewed aircraft. These uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) will accompany crewed aircraft on missions, acting as a force multiplier and adding intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and firepower support. While the program is on track thanks to U.S. industry's rapid execution, it can certainly be strengthened with U.S. ally and partner involvement.

The CCA program is aiming to field a fully operational capability before 2030. Currently, it's in increment one but planning for increment two is already in motion. The basic premise of this latter phase is to directly and deliberately engage allies and partners, with MOSA playing a key role. Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall and Air Force acquisition chief Andrew Hunter have been vocal advocates of this approach.

MOSA will serve as the chief entry point for international partnerships on the CCA program as partner nations can contribute to it and its associated standards to create a pathway toward a global standard. Two examples of existing open architectures are the Agile Mission Suite (AMS) Government Reference Architecture (GRA) and Autonomy Government Reference Architecture (A-GRA). Both are adaptable, modular, and government-provided architectures that guide system design and production processes. The AMS GRA, led by the USAF, allows for a marketplace of software and hardware vendors to decouple acquisition pathways. The A-GRA is a framework centered around a marketplace of autonomy vendors whose interfaces are open and common, serving as a key enabler of the CCA program. Allies and partners will be able to contribute to these open architectures in various capacities, depending on their desired engagement levels and expertise.

According to a senior Air Force acquisition official CSIS interviewed, some areas that may be conducive to international cooperation include the following:

• "Financial contribution to development efforts for exportability."
• "Non-material collaboration (e.g., test, experimentation, exercises, [concept of operation] development, [concept of employment] development, etc.)."
• "Access, basing, and overflight."
• "FMS purchasing and co-production" during increment one and "FMS purchasing, co-production, and co-development" during increment two.

This form of burden sharing can help ensure that some version of the CCA can address an ally's needs or lay the foundation for future industrial base participation. While program requirements are evaluated on a cost, schedule, and performance basis, allies and partners can contribute resources that ease cooperation constraints. For example, in February, Mikayla Easley reported that while Secretary Kendall would have liked "to have three vendors vying for the next phase of increment one, the service's current budget would likely only support two." Cost sharing by foreign governments or industry could enable sustaining competition from a larger number of vendors in the next increment.

This incorporation of allies is fundamentally at the service of USAF requirements. Allies-and coalition operations-will benefit, but the needs of U.S. operators are front of mind. In a separate interview, an official with the deputy chief of staff for Air Force Futures (AF/A5/7) laid out the needs CCA cooperation is addressing. The USAF is relying on allies and partners for additional capability and today, the coalition can rely on procedural interoperability and integration. The CCA should go beyond this to achieve technological interoperability. For instance, a coalition military will always need to have custody of a CCA-but the United States doesn't necessarily need to be that custodian. Enabling the United States to hand off control of U.S. autonomous systems-and for the allies to choose to hand off control of their autonomous systems-improves operational capability and strengthens mission readiness.

Achieving those benefits for U.S. operators will require the United States to do a better job of making MOSA easy to track internationally. The United States has a long history of being insular when it comes to sharing standards. Cross-border adoption of MOSA was impeded by a "lack of a common taxonomy," "cultural differences," and "legal and regulatory issues that can arise with [open-system architecture] usage across national boundaries, notably [the U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations]."

However, there are wider signs of progress. The United Kingdom has taken exceptional steps to adopt U.S. open standards and build its own. The consortium supporting Future Airborne Capability Environment open standard is available to members of all five countries in the National Technology and Industrial Base. AUKUS Pillar 2 is another nexus for MOSA cooperation with efforts like the Maritime Big Play providing an opportunity for Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States to test the compatibility of their autonomous maritime systems. But by and large, the international community isn't as clued in given the lack of institutional incentives and enabling arrangements.

CSIS Defense-Industrial Initiatives Group and Japan Chair recently published Building a Mutually Complementary Supply Chain between Japan and the United States, which placed a specific focus on UAS. Throughout interviews with U.S. and Japanese industries, the research team found that even though Japanese companies could legitimately cite their strengths with open architecture, there was little visibility on the Japanese side as to how MOSA was relevant to cooperation opportunities.

The CCA, however, serves as a demand signal for MOSA adoption given the major window for international cooperation during increment two. CSIS interviewed another senior Air Force acquisition official who shared that the USAF is inviting interested allies and partners to a series of International Partnership Symposiums that started this fall. The purpose of these symposiums is to share progress made on open architecture and CCA increments one and two while gaining a stronger understanding of how allies and partners wish to collaborate.

While there are myriad benefits that MOSA provides, there is also the challenge of classification. A repeated complaint throughout the interviews conducted with the Japanese industry was U.S. overclassification. However, there is an immense amount of work being directed toward declassifying aspects of MOSA standards. The USAF is working to make AMS GRA, A-GRA, and other open architectures available in an unclassified environment.

Familiarizing themselves with the specific standards and GRAs-particularly AMS GRA and A-GRA-in preparation for CCA increment two would set allies and partners up well for formal engagement, providing a platform for them to voice their opinions on implementations of MOSA that are best suited to their needs. As an expert with an Air Force innovation organization wisely observed, deliberate consideration of partner needs and their threat environments will significantly increase incentives for the adoption of common open architectures and for creating a production web capable of building affordable mass.

Air Force acquisition experts explicitly noted that allies could seek to use these architectures to develop not just their own autonomy software but also their own holistic system if they desire. For example, Japan is planning an increase of 65 percent in its defense budget. Some of that funding will go to cooperative programs or imports from the United States. However, both the Japanese government and industry have reasons to focus on domestic uncrewed aerial system domestic production as well. When doing so, incorporating MOSA offers the advantages of a system that would be integrated and interoperable by design.

Any partner nation engaged in the CCA program should pay attention to MOSA. MOSA provides a massive opportunity to shape ally and partner systems to be "globally compliant" for CCA participation. However, early engagement is absolutely critical. It's always more expensive to add capabilities late in the process. But if allies and partners start implementing MOSA now in anticipation of CCA increment two participation, it will lay the groundwork for ensuring that their further contributions to burden sharing are rewarded by enhanced interoperability and a foundation for future cooperation efforts. This epitomizes the potential of the production web.

Gregory Sanders is deputy director and senior fellow with the Defense-Industrial Initiatives Group at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. Audrey Aldisert is a research associate in the Defense and Security Department at CSIS.

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