The Marine Corps is in the early stages of a transition to buying “agnostic hardware” where physical platforms are decoupled from the software they run on, giving the service freedom to outfit its systems with the best software for the task at hand.
“You typically would buy a capability, you would buy some hardware, and the software would be installed on it. I think going forward, what we're marching toward is agnostic hardware,” Col. Jason Quinter, commanding officer of Marine Air Control Group 38, said today during a Defense News webinar.
“So, the hardware meets a certain performance specification for memory, processing, compute, storage [and] you're agnostic to what company built it. It's just commodity hardware, and that hardware can support the software that we would want to run on it,” he continued.
This idea is still at least five to 10 years away, Quinter said, but the Marine Corps is beginning to establish a foundation to make it a reality. Eventually, the concept could improve interoperability across the Defense Department by enabling more systems to talk to one another.
Currently, many programs of record have hardware interface issues that prevent them from communicating, Quinter said. But in a hardware-agnostic world, the Marine Corps and other service branches could implement their own software fixes to solve these issues.
“The way we're going to make the systems interoperable is through a development and use of [application programming interfaces] or we're going to stitch that software together to fix some of the interoperability problems ourselves,” he said.
The Navy is also taking steps to establish an autonomy baseline for its uncrewed systems, tasking technology company SOLUTE with building an archive of commercially available software and hardware for autonomous surface and undersea systems to help the service select and pair the best capabilities.