Ars Technica looks at the defense industry of tomorrow, when secure factories are replaced by crowds of tinkerers:
[T]he agency’s Adaptive Vehicle Make project may reinvent manufacturing itself, and seed the workforce with a new generation of engineers who can “compile” innovations into new inventions without having to be tied to a manufacturing plant.
“The direction we’ve been going in defense acquisition can’t last,” DARPA AVM deputy program manager and Army Lt. Col. Nathan Wiedenman said in a press briefing attended by Ars Technica. “The systems we build are more complex, but the way we do it hasn’t changed much in 50 years.” He pointed out that the Army alone had spent $22 billion over the last 10 years on programs that got cancelled. He said that DOD wasn’t far off from a tongue-in-cheek statement made by former Lockheed Martin president Norman Augustine—one of “Augustine’s Laws”—that by 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase one aircraft.
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“In the open source software world, anybody can go in and modify the design, and check it in, and the community can recompile it and see what the impact is,” [DARPA Tactical Technology Office program manager Paul] Eremenko explained. “That process has proven itself and has yielded very high quality software.” The barrier to doing open source with physical complex systems, he said, is that while it’s easy enough to set up a shared “drawing tree,” there’s been no way to get an understanding of the impact of design changes as there is when software gets compiled. “Our META tools function as a compiler,” he said—providing a way to assess those changes as they are checked in against models.
The META tools are still in development, so it may be a year or so before VehicleForge.mil gets off the ground. But when it does, DARPA plans to launch a series of design challenges to use the open-source approach to design the Fast Adaptable Next-Generation Ground Vehicle (FANG).
They also plan to hold competitions for high schoolers to help overcome some design challenges. That’s right. The next generation of weapons could be designed by the kids down the block.