What is digital acquisition? Or digi - tal engineering? Why are they signifi - cant? According to DoD Instruction (DoDI) 5000.97 of Dec. 21, 2023, digital engineering is defined as the “means of using and integrating digital mod - els and the underlying data to sup - port the development, test and evalu - ation, and sustainment of a system.” Although there is no formal definition of digital acquisition from a DoW pol - icy perspective, the Warfighting Ac - quisition University (WarU) defines digital acquisition as “the Warfight - ing Acquisition System’s data-driven, AI-enabled, model-centric approach to rapidly delivering integrated ca - pability by unifying requirements, resources, experimentation, engi - neering, and contracting into a con - tinuously monitored digital decision environment.” These two technologi - cal components serve as catalysts to achieve the ATS goals. Who clears the path for the use of digital acquisition and digital engi -
neering? Our acquisition workforce. More specifically, making ATS a reality requires strong acquisition leadership within the acquisition community of practice and perhaps rethinking how the acquisition community is orga - nized within the DoW. The authors of this issue’s article “Digital Acquisition: The Problem, the Stakes, and the Core Solution” explore leadership and organiza - tional concepts that leverage mod - els to shift the mindset from a bu - reaucratic, risk-averse approach to a more mission-focused, life-cycle thinking with a portfolio-of-capabil - ities perspective. This type of lead - ership change sets the conditions to help make digital acquisition’s efforts more mission and operationally rel - evant. It also facilitates and strength - ens digital engineering as an enabler in building digital threads (analytical frameworks that seamlessly expedite the controlled interplay of techni - cal data, software, information, and
knowledge in the digital engineering ecosystem) and digital twins (com - puterized sets of models that serve as real-time digital counterparts of physical objects) of systems, and sys - tems of systems. However, Digital Engineering can only take you so far in creating the digital twin or thread. There is a re - quirement to build out the digital thread beyond a single competency to include all acquisition competen - cies or functional areas. This idea con - verges with two concepts advocated by DoW: the movement away from compliance to risk-informed decision- making and from siloed, document- driven, static acquisition life cycles to a cross-competency, dynamic acqui - sition enterprise. To realize this dynamic acquisition enterprise, architectures are needed to guide the building of robust digital threads and twins. The article “Digital Acquisition: The Problem, the Stakes, and the
SEPTEMBER –OCTOBER 2026 | DEFENSE ACQUISITION MAGAZINE 51
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