Bottom Line Up Front: Dr. Will Roper answers questions raised by his first Digital Engineering manifesto, which we covered yesterday.
Where We Left Off yesterday
In yesterday’s blog entry, we talked about Dr. Will Roper’s “There Is No Spoon” manifesto where he explained that the Air Force was going to Digital Engineering. The purpose is to be able to test, refine, and validate designs as computer simulations before anything is actually built.
But I Still Have Questions!
So did everybody, that’s why Dr. Roper wrote this follow-up document, answering the stuff everybody kept asking him after reading the first document.
In short, in the future, the Government is going to want to see everything it buys as a high-fidelity computer simulation. Capture proposals will be in the form of digital simulations, and these will be refined as the product is developed. Training will now be done on these computer simulations. Once the product is fielded, usage data will inform predictive maintenance information so that spare parts and repairs are scheduled before things break down.
Dr. Roper paints a picture of what this will mean for Defense contractors:
“We truly stand at a crossroads, where historical lowest-price technically-acceptable approaches as well as outsourcing to industry are primrose paths to future irrelevance.”
TL:DR, Do You Have A Video?
Fortunately for you, Barron Stone has made a fantastic video explaining both of Dr. Roper’s videos in a way that is super easy to understand. Take some time and give it a view.