The directed energy \u201creference architecture\u201d now in the works will not impose mandatory technical standards, Behre said. Instead, he told a Booz Allen Hamilton webinar<\/a> today, the goal is to get in on the ground floor, before<\/em> different services buy a host of different systems from different manufacturers that use incompatible components, and establish a modular open systems approach<\/a> that all the programs can abide by.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s going to allow for identifying components and subsystems that we can standardize around,\u201d Behre said. That will both reduce costs \u2013 by allowing different programs to come together to buy shared tech in bulk, and ease future upgrades \u2013 by creating plug-and-play interfaces that allow old components to be replaced with new and improved ones as they become available. It could even improve the chances for small companies to compete against the big prime contractors, since a small firm will be able to focus on developing a particular niche component that \u2013 as long as it follows the standards \u2013 can be bought and used by multiple programs.<\/p>\n A crucial concern, DoD and industry experts at today\u2019s webinar agreed: creating a system strict enough to encourage companies to build compatible components, without discouraging innovative new ideas.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re not seeing capital-S standards<\/em> anywhere in this documentation,\u201d Behre said. \u201cWe\u2019re looking for guardrails, if you will, to help guide things \u2014 not hard requirements that are going to stifle the innovation that people are concerned about.\u201d<\/p>\n But now is the time to take standardization seriously, he said. Directed energy weapons have a huge advantage in that there\u2019s a lot of different experiments and prototypes to draw technical data from, but none of them has yet entered mass production. That means you can apply a modular and open approach from the start, rather than having to sort through decades of entrenched and incompatible equipment from different vendors.<\/p>\n When people try to apply modular open systems approaches to other areas of technology, \u201cthey\u2019re having extreme challenges with changing things that have been in place for a long period of time, and we have an opportunity to try and get ahead of that curve a little bit,\u201d Behre said. \u201cWe have many years of prototypes and demonstrators to leverage, but we\u2019re ahead of the first programs of record.\u201d<\/p>\n For the reference architecture, \u201cthe draft version is pretty well fleshed out,\u201d Behre said. \u201cWe anticipate coming out with version 0.5, probably sometime early in calendar year \u201921.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOver the next eight or nine months,\u201d he said, \u201cI think that\u2019s the point where we would open it up for comment from industry and the acquisition offices.\u201d<\/p>\n The other government panelist at the webinar, Air Force Research Laboratory laser physicist Sean Ross, sounded a note of caution. While the Pentagon can come up with the guidelines, they\u2019ll go nowhere if the services and industry don\u2019t embrace them as their own.<\/p>\n \u201cIn my career in the government, I can recall any number of government initiatives, [and] if they don\u2019t make sense, then we just kind of give them lip service and they go away,\u201d Ross said. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of like when you tell your kid to clean up their room, and they just shove it all under the bed.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/grafico.jpg\")