Stell: Purpose-Built for Third Offset Technologies

The DoD’s Replicator initiative won’t be achieved by emailing PDF requirements documents

Intro

While America evolves to build the technological systems necessary to win the wars of the future, the tools and processes that once empowered the supply chain no longer meet the end needs of the warfighter.

Engineers building Defense and Space products have managed the increasing burden of design complexity and compliance requirements for more than 40 years. As the mound of compliance paperwork started to grow in the 1990s, early requirements management software tools like IBM DOORS were born. While Jama made major improvements on the status quo by launching a web based platform in 2009, it still fell short of creating a collaborative workspace, placing continued burden of manual requirements tracking on an often siloed systems engineer.

DOD and the supply chain must invest in new software tools to achieve the desired shift in technological process. Without incentives to improve, software and enabling tools have long been ignored in this industry - and so they have decayed.

Our solution is Stell: a systems engineering documentation tool built specifically to design, build and procure the defense technologies of the future - systems that are interoperable, proliferated, compliant, and software-defined. Stell is automating the most cumbersome and input-heavy step of the design and procurement process - ingesting PDF documents of interface requirements and industry standards and creating actionable, clear tasks for the engineering team. Where DOORS and Jama fail at collaboration and import/export of documents and data, Stell enables systems engineering teams to create and fill compliance matrices in hours instead of weeks, creating a simple interface to maintain compliance and robust engineering throughout the project lifecycle.

How We Got Here

In the 1950’s, Eisenhower developed the First Offset strategy: avoid the large expenditures of conventional forces needed to keep Russian bloc nations allied by the Warsaw Pact in check by utilizing the economic efficiency of strategic nuclear deterrence. The strategy worked until Russia achieved nuclear parity with the United States in the 1970’s, stunting the ability of the nuclear option and putting the numerical superiority of Russian forces firmly back on the table.

Instead of matching the Russians asset for asset in the 80’s and 90’s, to counter the capabilities of our cold war adversaries, America instead applied a Second Offset strategy - delivering on a small number of high quality, adaptable platforms.

When the war was won, focus was turned to deterrence against peer pacing competitors (i.e. China, Russia) in an efficient manner. The Third Offset was born, relying on incorporation of technologies like artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, and interoperable technologies to achieve theater-wide superiority. Now, a bouquet of missions once completed with a single gold-plated platform are being disaggregated into a series of small, expendable, interoperable and distributed architectures.

The F-15, for example, is a platform solution developed during the Second Offset to take on a variety of missions within a single aircraft system. Air-to-air combat, tactical bombing, electronic warfare and more were all packed in to a low volume of exquisite aircraft developed over a multi-decade period. Now, these missions are being disaggregated into a higher volume set of low cost systems that all need to integrate with each other.

Tooling for the Third Offset

Integrating Third Offset technologies, tactics, techniques and procedures into modern military norms has been no easy feat. General Slife recently acknowledged this change, saying "It's countercultural… we [now] have the ability to disaggregate these abilities… [as] transitioning to a systems level of integration is a potential step change in American military capability" [Failure is Not an Option: Confronting the Modernization Challenge, Air, Space and Cyber 2024]. Legacy systems engineering software like IBM DOORS that worked well in procuring monolith, high cost platforms in the Second Offset are useless to engineers building high-volume new technologies that needed to be procured on a fraction of the timeline and cost.

The reasons for the shortcoming of Second Offset tools in procuring Third Offset technologies stems from two main areas:

1. Second Offset tools only supported internal engineering effort at 1 large defense prime who had near-complete economic power to define interfaces, processes, and source of truth. This is in contrast to the reality now - engineers need to define and manage interfaces and compliance documentation with Government and multi-party system-of-systems providers. This will result in 10X the hours of manual import and export as interfaces compound.

2. Second Offset tools are not good at managing frequent design changes and compliance updates which are the reality for Third Offset systems - which are software-defined, iterative, and expendable. Engineering companies need to be able to make software changes almost daily - and their requirements compliance documentation should update automatically.

In short: speed wins, and our Second Offset tools are making us too slow in procuring Third Offset Technologies needed to win the wars of the future.

Stell is the first purpose-built tool capable of engineering the Third Offset technologies of the future. Stell’s requirements management software meets and exceeds these demands by providing a solution that works to digitally and securely connect engineers, suppliers and program managers across the supply chain. Teams can rapidly communicate, disseminate and organize changes to technology design and procurement process flows at a modern, instantaneous pace.

Try Our Tool Today

Curious about what Stell can do for you?

Try us out by scheduling a Demo today.