The next 60 days will offer an opportunity to spring into action on MOSA implementation, thanks to the updated Tri-Services Memo that requires all defense acquisition professionals to engage.

It is worth making a connection between the legal requirements of Title 10 MOSA Chapter 327, Subchapter I, which lays out an orderly approach and top level guidance, to the action taken by DoD leadership in the Tri-Services memo. I always encourage people to just follow the link and read the legal requirements directly. It is broken into 3 parts:

• Section §4401 has the definitions, especially the core of what “approach” means and what the rationale should be
• Section §4402 lays out the design requirements on programs, particularly that the focus is about the program lifecycle, not at all about the standards used to achieve that approach.
• Section §4403 lays out the support for interfaces, which empowers the government work with standards agencies to ensure that the points of seperation in the system have open definitions.

Here is the actual Tri-Services Memo itself. Very brief by contrast of the 15+ pages of actual legal requirements. Below, I will flesh it out a little.

There is an emphasis on the “5 Pillars” – but those are not spelled out in the Title 10 legal requirements, so what is the connection? Let’s go!

Pillar #1: Employ a Modular Design

This harkens back to the very first section of the legal requirement in  §4401, directly quoting the language in summary form.

Pillar #2: Designating Modular Interfaces

Again, clear link back but in this case to the language of  §4402, so the important point here is that an Interface is NOT the same thing as a module. What is not obvious is that this is the BIG section of the law that covers the Intellectual Property dynamic – the job of the Acquisition professional is to determine where the boundary line is between the module (with an open interface) and the innovation (inside the black box). The link between interfaces and standards is pretty clear in the law – so if you are a product vendor don’t settle for “I want the whole internals of your black box to conform to Standard X”. Conversely, if you are a government Program Manager, remind the supplier or OEM in no uncertain terms that “You will, by law, give me an open interface to replace that black box with an alternative source of supply!” The work of the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense (OUSD) for Acquisition and Sustainment (A&D) Intellectual Property Cadre has a bunch to say on this subject.

Pillar #3: Leveraging Consensus Based Standards

I wrote a whole article on this one, ultimately to become a series of articles on various kinds of standards and why they exist. This Pillar is a little more confusing to link back to the Title 10 requirements. It does create clear guidance for DoD program managers, but can be misunderstood as a bit of an easy button. Standards are mentioned in both  §4401 and  §4403, so the link is clear, but how to leverage those standards is left to the guidance section of  §4403 – so the clarification of the Tri-Services memo is to create the cross-program coordination efforts. Hey, that’s what the MOSA Network is all about!

Pillar #4: Establishing Enabling Environments

That’s us! However, it is important to recognize this is a plural statement; there is more than one environment, just like there is more than one standard. This allows for the flexibility needed to have very small working groups as well as very large cross-communication hubs like the MOSA Summit. A ton of work has been done here on the Digital Engineering side. Less so on the professional networking side, so that is what this venue is all about.

Pillar #5: Certifying Conformance

This is the area that needs the most work. Note that it cannot be just one standard or just one environment, so there are some loose ends to tie up in the future implementation guidance. Army Aviation has a good start with this by having a MOSA Conformance Plan process within their Enterprise Architecture Framework (subject of a future article), and there are conformance elements in standards like FACE. However, it is very important to recognize that this is, in it’s purest form, a response to the requirement from Congress to the Service Secretaries directly in command of the singular word “Ensure” that occurs multiple times in  §4403 of the legal requirement. Conformance is how they will answer “Ensure” actually occurs.

OK, that’s my $0.02 on the Tri-Services Memo. I expect that by the end of Februrary 2025 there will be a whole lot more coming from the conversations in the community. Feedback welcome!