Impact of Digital Engineering on Defense Acquisition and the Supply Chain

In 2018, the U.S. Air Force announced a new strategy for using digital engineering (DE) in its acquisition life cycle process. The policy emphasizes the importance of DE in improving the efficiency, effectiveness, cost, and quality of Air Force systems and highlights the need for a common digital thread that connects all aspects of the acquisition process and life cycle management of weapon systems. To help the Department of the Air Force (DAF) gain insight into the potential benefits, costs, and challenges of implementing DE, RAND researchers examined the use of DE in the acquisition life cycle. This report summarizes the results of a survey of industry that was designed to assess the progress of DE implementation and to identify implementation challenges and opportunities along with possible metrics for tracking DE implementation. Survey results are supplemented by an open-source literature review and discussions with key government experts. Despite the perceptions captured in the survey, the benefits of DE to date have not resulted in notable cost savings or schedule reduction, but DE has benefited the Air Force in a multitude of other ways: allowing for an expanded trade space of design alternatives, enabling increased complexity in system design, collecting warfighter feedback in a more meaningful way, and supporting more accurate and comprehensive modeling and simulation. Overall, although the benefits of DE might not be immediately apparent in terms of cost savings or schedule reduction, it has the potential to provide significant long-term benefits to defense acquisition.