Engineered Resilient Systems: A DoD Perspective

TLDR

DoD systems must be trusted, effective, adaptable to new conditions, degrade gracefully, and be manufacturable, deployable, sustainable, modifiable, and cost‑effective, collectively defining resilient DoD systems. The paper investigates the properties and trade‑offs of engineered resilient systems in the military context and identifies promising research themes to enable affordable, adaptable, and effective systems. It reviews resilience perspectives, overlays DoD requirements, and outlines challenges to rapidly fielding resilient systems while highlighting research directions. The authors conclude by discussing specific DoD systems that could benefit from resilience and emphasize the need to sustain a community of interest in this area.

Abstract

Department of Defense (DoD) systems are required to be trusted and effective in a wide range of operational contexts with the ability to respond to new or changing conditions through modified tactics, appropriate reconfiguration, or replacement. As importantly, these systems are required to exhibit predictable and graceful degradation outside their designed performance envelope. For these systems to be included in the force structure, they need to be manufacturable, readily deployable, sustainable, easily modifiable, and cost-effective. Collectively, these requirements inform the definition of resilient DoD systems. This paper explores the properties and tradeoffs for engineered resilient systems in the military context. It reviews various perspectives on resilience, overlays DoD requirements on these perspectives, and presents DoD challenges in realizing and rapidly fielding resilient systems. This paper also presents promising research themes that need to be pursued by the research community to help the DoD realize the vision of affordable, adaptable, and effective systems. This paper concludes with a discussion of specific DoD systems that can potentially benefit from resilience and stresses the need for sustaining a community of interest in this important area.