Articles

By Andrew Park | 2026-05-28 Part 2 of a series following “Inside PAE Maritime Industry Day.” Acquisition terms are defined in the glossary at the end. If you sell into Navy shipbuilding, submarine sustainment, shipboard power, propulsion, test-site modernization, or data-rights tooling, this is one of the clearest early demand signals the Navy is likely to give you before the RFP. At Industry Day, PAE Maritime told the room the operating model changed. Schedule is the scorebo

By Andrew Park | 2026-05-15 PAE Maritime’s first Industry Day this Wednesday wasn’t a routine government outreach event. It was a transmission event. Two days earlier, on May 11, the Navy released its May 2026 Shipbuilding Plan. The scale of ambition hasn’t been seen since World War II. Over $300 billion in shipbuilding investment across the next five years [1]. The Industry Day on May 13 was where the Navy explained to industry how it plans to execute that plan. I attended P

By Andrew Park | 2026-04-28 The Department’s AI investment is optimized for connected environments. The fight that matters most isn’t. The Department’s move to establish the Maven Smart System as a formal program of record is proof that AI-enabled operations have entered the acquisition mainstream.[24] What’s missing is an equal commitment to military-specific Small Language Models (SLMs) for the use cases where frontier LLMs dependent on persistent connectivity to remote co

By Andrew Park | 2026-03-03 Author’s note: This article is written for leaders in the Defense Industrial Base and acquisition community who want a clearer view of the strategic shift shaping U.S. defense modernization and what it should mean for capability priorities, operational experimentation, industry alignment, and long term positioning. Over the last few years, Ukraine has rightly captured enormous attention across the defense community. It's driven rapid innovation, ac

By Andrew Park | 2026-02-09 Last Thursday, Nicholas Carlini at Google DeepMind published something that made even AI skeptics pause: a functioning C compiler, built almost entirely by coordinated AI agents. Not a demo. Not toy code. A real compiler (software that translates human-readable code into instructions a computer can execute) that could build real-world programs and pass serious test suites. When I first saw the headlines, I was genuinely amazed. Impressed. Surprised

By Andrew Park | 2026-01-21 How the Air Force Divested Its Weapons Innovation Capability Executive Summary The Air Force faces a persistent acquisition challenge: major programs routinely fail during the transition from development to operations, despite meeting technical specifications. This article documents the root cause: the 1992 elimination of a specialized career field that once owned integrated product risk across the full acquisition lifecycle. Without this capabilit

By Andrew Park | 2026-01-05 What this shift means for PEOs, program managers, O-6s, and industry partners I. Why Everything Feels Different If you work in Navy acquisition, you might be a little confused right now. Programs are being consolidated. Offices are shutting down. The Disruptive Capabilities Office is gone. NavalX is gone. The Maritime Accelerated Response Capability Cell is gone. In their place: something called the Department of the Navy Rapid Capabilities Office

By Andrew Park | 2025-12-19 President Trump signed the annual defense bill (FY26 NDAA) into law today, December 18, 2025, ending 3D printing's status as an "experiment" and making it a requirement. The legislation mandates that the Department qualify 1 million part designs for 3D printing by 2027, a direct response to a vulnerability that's been quietly devastating America's military readiness. Over the past decade in U.S. war games against China, the United States has lost a

By Andrew Park | 2025-12-09 I attended the Department of the Navy Rapid Capabilities Office (DON RCO) kickoff today at the Capital Factory building in Washington, DC. It was standing room only. The office is so new their website went live today. For those who couldn't make it, here's what the Navy communicated about their new approach to rapid capabilities acquisition. Executive Summary The Navy launched a new Rapid Capabilities Office designed to deliver technology to warfig

By Andrew Park | 2025-12-01 Many founders enter defense tech through dual use products, venture backed prototypes, or commercial AI tooling. Early on, you’ll hear government labs, innovation groups, or advisors mention CRADAs. They’re not paid engagements. They’re a collaboration tool that shows up when technical maturity and government interest start to intersect. Understanding what they are helps you avoid wrong assumptions and plan your path inside the Department. Defense

By Andrew Park | 2025-11-17 This article is a follow up to "The New Acquisition Landscape: Implications for the Defense Industrial Base" [1]. For nearly two decades, DoD has pushed the Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA), which is a strategy for designing weapon systems with interchangeable parts and open interfaces. Every major prime contractor framed itself as MOSA compliant. Lockheed Martin highlighted modularity across its naval, air, and missile portfolios. Northrop Gru

By Andrew Park | 2025-11-13 On November 7, 2025, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth launched a sweeping transformation of DoD's acquisition and requirements systems in his address, "Rebuilding the Arsenal of Freedom." This marks the most significant shift in U.S. defense acquisition since the Cold War. The reforms are intended to shift power from prime contractors to defense tech startups and suppliers, in order to dramatically accelerate the pace of procurement. Multiple comp

By Andrew Park | 2025-11-11 Why Defense Acquisition Reform will create the biggest demand for Product Managers since the tech boom The Department of Defense (DoD) just announced the biggest change to how it buys weapons since World War II. If you work for a defense contractor or you’re a Product Manager thinking about joining the defense industry, everything is about to change. The Pentagon is prioritizing speed over compliance, and they’ll need an army of Product Managers to

By Andrew Park | 2025-11-11 On November 7, 2025, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth eliminated the institutional machinery that enforced Waterfall development in defense acquisition and mandated Agile + DevSecOps for all software. For software engineers studying the history of their profession, this is the day the last major Waterfall stronghold finally fell. What Just Happened: A Historic Moment On November 7, 2025, the Department of Defense (DoD) released two documents that

By Andrew Park | 2025-10-26 Executive Summary The Project Management Institute's PMBOK Guide 7th Edition (2021) represents a fundamental paradigm shift in how software project management is conceptualized and practiced. This isn't a minor update. PMI has reconceptualized project management to integrate product thinking throughout the standard, moving from a 34 year old process based approach to a principles based, value delivery framework. This shift is most pronounced for so

By Andrew Park | 2025-10-16 The F-35 Joint Program Office adopted Agile-based methods in 2018 and DevSecOps practices shortly thereafter, while Lockheed Martin began implementing Scaled Agile Framework in 2013 and stood up its Software Factory with DevSecOps methodology [Fli20, Dov18, Loc25]. Over a decade of methodology adoption later, the results tell a damning story. In January 2025, the Pentagon's test office reported the F-35 program "has shown no improvement in meeting

By Andrew Park | 2025-10-14 How to Leverage No Code Tools, RPA, and AI Agents Effectively Across the Department of Defense, automation is becoming an operational necessity. Whether the goal is reducing manual workload, increasing mission readiness, or modernizing outdated workflows, the question is not whether to automate — it is how. There are three major categories of automation tools in use today. Each is suited to a different type of work. Choosing the right category up

By Andrew Park | 2025-08-19 Vendor lock-in has sunk some programs and made others heroes. What separates the two? Throughout my career working with defense programs, I've observed these same dynamics play out across different vendors and contracts. The F-35 program perfectly illustrates how this cycle begins. In the early 2000s, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter was awarded to Lockheed Martin with a contract structure that gave the prime contractor extensive control over the airc

By Andrew Park | 2025-08-07 Throughout my career, I’ve had conversations with many Engineering VPs and CTOs who’ve shared a common frustration: “Our developers have never been great at documentation, and it’s leads to a lot of technical debt problems.” But there’s a new twist now. Over the last year I’ve heard some of these same leaders placing hope in AI tools to solve this once and for all. This is a seductive belief, and it’s also one of the most dangerous myths in modern

By Andrew Park | 2025-08-01 How the Buyer-User Disconnect and Weak Product Management Put Mission Success at Risk Throughout my career, I’ve heard countless DoD operators say the same thing about their software systems: they’re slow, hard to use, unreliable in the field, and rarely match how the mission is actually executed. These recurring problems stem from deep flaws in how DoD software is acquired, funded, and managed, starting with the fact that the people buying the sof