Sustained Innovation Through Composable Systems

Abstract

"The enemy gets a vote. Our adversaries seek to outpace us as we seek to win in any clime and place. Winning future conflicts isn’t just about innovation, it’s about operational excellence and delivering useful innovation to the warfighter faster. The long-standing paradigm of building expensive, highly complex, monolithically integrated weapons systems that take years to plan and upgrade, are extremely vulnerable to asymmetric innovation (Schmidt, 2016). A simple zero-day hack can undue a decade of development and billions of dollars of taxpayer investment, leaving warfighters exposed and our economy irreparably harmed. The Hollywood climaxes of a Jedi against a Death Star or a small cell of rebels injecting a virus into networked alien attacker remain far too plausible an outcome against our inflexible and increasingly networked systems. Commercial technology cycles are outpacing DoD’s ability to integrate, giving our opponents the critical time needed to exploit the same technology against us. There is no doubt that emerging technologies like AI, autonomy, quantum computing and others just entering our imagination, will be critical to overmatch, but only if we can field it first and change it faster. Technology Superiority only worked as a strategy when seismic innovation was generational and we could ensure disproportionate access. This paper investigates the common pain points that have often-times impeded programs and proposes a set of acquisition, design, and deployment practices that shift towards composable systems to foster sustained, disruptive, and rapid innovation that outpaces our adversaries despite increasingly egalitarian access to technology. Recent world-wide activities where American firepower has been put to the test, shows that the products we have built so far, have been equal to the challenges presented in limited engagements, regional conflicts, or by unsophisticated opponents (Bath 2025) but with increasingly smaller margins. In addition, the Department of Defense (DoD) is continually challenged by delays in capability delivery as well as program cost overruns. Rigidity in the current systems and the patterns of delivering improvements have been responsive to evolving operational engagements under only the most extreme and extraordinary circumstances, not as a matter of course and a reflection of purposeful design. Clearly, we do not lack technological innovation; it is the acquisition process that is broken. The authors have observed a wide variety of design teams that have been hampered by insufficient focus or funding two fundamental aspects of executing any large-scale cyber-physical system: the speed of integration, and up-front considerations for future adaptability. Projects are often structured as end-item completion tasks, or a ""one and done"" approach to design. This is antithetical to an environment where capability is delivered by complex systems that need to be periodically improved as a part of their lifecycle (Shenker 2021). The paper highlights the detrimental impact of tightly coupled, monolithic products that end up being fragile to changing capability requirements and highlights the need to establish a requirements strategy predicated on flexibility and long-term growth. In this context, the full range of acquisition architecture must architecture must include approaches and design patterns for future-proofing systems where designs are purpose-built to change over time. A design pattern for continuous improvement (McCarthy, 2024)."