Air Force Funds 'Internet of Models' to Unshackle Defense Innovation

ARLINGTON, Va. – February 27, 2026 – The Department of the Air Force (DAF) has awarded an $8.6 million contract to Istari Digital, a company led by a former top Air Force acquisition official, to build a revolutionary digital infrastructure aimed at breaking down longstanding barriers within the U.S. defense industry. The initiative, dubbed Industry Øne, seeks to create a secure, interconnected digital engineering environment that could fundamentally accelerate how the nation develops and sustains its most critical military hardware.

This investment directly confronts one of the most persistent challenges in defense: a sprawling network of thousands of contractors and suppliers, each operating with its own incompatible software tools behind heavily guarded corporate firewalls. The result is a fragmented and sluggish system that relies on the manual, high-risk process of copying and sharing sensitive data, slowing innovation and hindering collaboration.

The Pentagon's Digital Dilemma

The Department of Defense's own Digital Engineering Strategy highlights the urgent need to move beyond archaic, document-based processes. The strategy calls for an integrated approach using "authoritative sources of system data and models" to connect people and capabilities across the entire lifecycle of a weapon system. However, the reality has long fallen short of this vision.

Currently, when a prime contractor needs to integrate a component from a smaller supplier—such as a sensor or a piece of software—it often involves exchanging static files, spreadsheets, and PDF documents. This manual process is not only slow and prone to error, but it also forces companies to surrender control of their valuable intellectual property, creating significant security risks. These digital roadblocks are a major factor in the long timelines and high costs associated with developing new defense technologies, a critical vulnerability in an era of renewed great power competition.

This fragmentation has created a digital chasm. While the Pentagon pushes for agility and speed, its industrial base remains tethered to siloed systems that prevent real-time collaboration. Industry Øne aims to build the bridge across that chasm.

A 'Git for Defense' Without Centralization

At the heart of the Industry Øne initiative is Istari Digital's unique technological approach, which it calls an "Internet of Models." The platform is designed to enable secure, policy-enforced access to engineering data without ever centralizing, copying, or storing it outside the owner's firewall. In essence, it separates the act of connection from the need for data control.

"Data stays locally controlled, yet globally connectable," explained Will Roper, Istari's CEO and the former Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics. "That's the infrastructure the defense industry has been missing: the experience of Git across guarded firewalls."

This analogy to Git, the distributed version control system that powers modern software development, is key. Just as Git allows thousands of developers to work on the same codebase without overriding each other's work, Istari's platform allows engineers from different companies to have their digital models interact in a controlled, auditable environment. An engineer at a prime contractor could run a simulation that incorporates a live model from a supplier's secure server, getting the results without ever seeing or possessing the supplier's proprietary underlying data. This vendor-neutral, zero-trust framework treats data as a place to compute rather than a file to be moved, enabling Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) for complex hardware systems.

Building on Proven Success

The $8.6 million contract for Industry Øne is not a leap into the unknown. It represents the next logical step in a series of progressively ambitious pilot programs that have already demonstrated the viability of Istari's approach. This new initiative builds directly on the foundations laid by two prior efforts: Flyer Øne and Model Øne.

Flyer Øne, a partnership between the Air Force Research Lab and Lockheed Martin's legendary Skunk Works division, is a trailblazing effort to achieve the first-ever digital airworthiness certification for the X-56A experimental aircraft. This program proved that complex verification and validation could be performed within a shared digital environment.

Simultaneously, the Model Øne initiative broke down barriers to cross-domain collaboration, demonstrating that models from different security levels and organizations could interact securely. Industry Øne is designed to take the lessons from both of these successes and scale them across the entire Defense Industrial Base, involving multiple major contractors and their supply chains simultaneously.

"Every barrier we've removed has made the next one easier," Roper stated. "Industry Øne is where we scale a level digital playing field across the Defense Industrial Base."

Reshaping the Defense Industrial Base

The strategic implications of this technology extend far beyond simple efficiency gains. By creating a common, secure digital utility, Industry Øne has the potential to reshape the competitive landscape of the defense sector. For decades, smaller, innovative companies have struggled to integrate their technologies into major defense programs due to the high technical and bureaucratic barriers to entry. A standardized, secure platform for collaboration could dramatically lower those barriers.

This could allow the Pentagon to tap into a much broader ecosystem of innovation, fostering greater competition and enabling smaller, more agile firms to contribute their cutting-edge solutions without having to be acquired by a larger prime. By enabling seamless data flow between organizations of all sizes, the initiative promises to create a more dynamic and resilient supply chain. This shift from manual, document-driven processes to live, continuously verifiable engineering systems represents a fundamental change in how the nation conceives, develops, and fields its defense capabilities, promising to deliver new tools to the warfighter faster and more securely than ever before.