The Air Force Purchases a Promise: Transforming Defense Engineering into Living Software
On February 27, 2026, the United States Air Force awarded a contract worth $8.6 million to Istari Digital to create Industry Øne, an initiative designed to break barriers in digital engineering and accelerate digital transformation within the Defense Industrial Base. The ambition is significant: enabling thousands of suppliers—each with their fragmented IT, incompatible tools, and security obligations—to collaborate without getting mired in the usual quagmire of file exports, data copying, and hoping that no one loses control of the information.
What’s relevant here is not the amount. In defense, $8.6 million is a tactical wager, not a total overhaul. The core interest lies in the type of wager: transitioning from manual and document-oriented processes to “living” engineering systems that are continuously verifiable, applying continuous integration and continuous deployment principles to engineering collaboration. Will Roper, CEO of Istari Digital and former Air Force procurement official, summarized it with a concrete metaphor: a Git-like experience “across firewalls,” where data remains locally controlled but can connect globally.
As a business strategist, I interpret this as a power move: whoever controls the “verifiable collaboration layer” in defense controls the speed, risk, and cost of programs. And in that triangle, the willingness to pay skyrockets.
The Real Bottleneck: Not a Lack of Software, But Friction Between Organizations
The Defense Industrial Base operates as an extreme supply chain: thousands of companies, various classification and security levels, and a technological heritage that often makes “sharing” synonymous with duplicating, moving, and losing traceability. Sources from the announcement state bluntly: there are fragmented IT environments, incompatible tools, and security requirements that slow down collaboration—and, by extension, the development of capabilities.
Industry Øne precisely targets that invisible cost: the cost of coordination. In practice, failed coordination manifests as endless review cycles, repeated validations, and engineering decisions made with incomplete or outdated information. That doesn’t get fixed with “another platform”; it requires an architectural shift: allowing data to remain locally controlled but to be connectable and verifiable without setting up a central repository that becomes a political and cybersecurity risk.
Roper’s phrase matters for what it implies operationally: “Data stays locally controlled, yet globally connectable.” In defense, centralization is both a temptation and a problem. Temptation, because it simplifies processes. Problem, because it concentrates risk and turns governance into a nightmare. The design Istari describes is marketed as a middle ground: collaboration without relinquishing control.
From a business angle, this elevates perceived value for a simple reason: it reduces the effort and waiting time that programs currently incur every time they onboard a new supplier. In an environment where “time” translates to deployed capability or delays, technical friction becomes a financial variable.
The $8.6 Million Contract is an Anchor: The Real Sale is Standardizing Speed
A typical mistake of superficial analysis is to view $8.6 million as the business size. It is not. It is the entry fee to prove a principle: that a common “digital playground” can be scaled across multiple contractors without turning data control into a sovereignty conflict.
Industry Øne presents itself as the natural extension of previous work: Flyer Øne (with AFRL and Lockheed Martin Skunk Works) focused on digital certification of the X-56A X-plane, and Model Øne for multi-domain collaboration. Here, the leap is in the plural: it’s not a one-time integration but an attempt to enable simultaneous collaboration with multiple players.
In pricing, when an offer reduces uncertainty and friction, it becomes “buyable” even within complex acquisitions. In defense, uncertainty is not philosophical: it encompasses compliance, security, compatibility, and auditing. If Industry Øne can convert some of the engineering collaboration into a flow that can be continuously verified—and not just in a “closed” document package—then the buyer is paying not just for software but for reduced programmatic risk.
That’s the key: the value lies not in “better collaboration” but in the ability to maintain a digital engineering standard without multiplying coordination costs. Brutally put: the potential return lies in no longer constantly paying the tax of integrating suppliers who speak different technical languages.
Where Winners and Losers Are Made: Verifiable Certainty, Not Transformation Promises
Digital transformation in defense is full of good intentions that crash against two walls: security and governance. Industry Øne proposes a design that, if executed well, addresses both without requiring a leap of faith. “Continuously verifiable” is a dangerous phrase if it doesn’t come with concrete mechanisms; it’s also the only phrase that matters.
Here, Istari's approach leans on a powerful analogy: Git behind firewalls. Git is not just version control; it’s a work discipline: history, reversibility, audit, integration. Applying that logic to engineering and certification changes what “progress” means in a program. Instead of proving compliance at the end, the system is oriented toward demonstrating compliance is being upheld all the time.
Commercially, this increases perceived certainty for the institutional buyer. But there’s a risk: if the product ends up being just another layer requiring manual adoption, endless training, or parallel processes, the friction may return through the back door. In the Defense Industrial Base, friction isn’t tolerated quietly; it manifests as workarounds: people export a file, send an email, and “we’ll solve it this way.” Each workaround undermines the model.
Thus, these types of initiatives are only justified if they reduce actual workload in daily flow, not if they add decorative compliance. The promise of “locally controlled and globally connectable data” must translate into engineers and security officers not having to take ten additional steps to achieve the same result.
Roper states that “each removed barrier made the next one easier” and that Industry Øne is where the common ground scales. The typical blind spot here is thinking that scaling means just adding contractors. Scaling in defense means ensuring that the standard survives heterogeneity: different tools, varying policies, uneven digital maturity. That heterogeneity is the real market.
Business Implications: Those Who Reduce Integration and Certification Gain the Budget
Istari Digital does not approach this contract as a stranger. Sources cite prior contracts and extensions: $15 million for Model One (AFWERX), $19.1 million for Flyer Øne (AFRL), and a modification that increased the work on the X-56A to $28.1 million under another contract vehicle. The pattern is clear: customer-funded iteration, not a one-time gamble.
This matters for two reasons. First, it indicates that the buyer is funding learning: paying to test, integrate, modify, and retest. Second, it shows a way to build an advantage: not selling “transformation” as a pitch, but accumulating credentials in use cases where value is measured by speed and rigor.
At an industry level, Industry Øne is a move to standardize the way of working, not just a tool. When a standard is established, the cost of not adopting it rises. That’s where the budget becomes defensive: funding is allocated to avoid being left out of the flow.
There’s also a power reading: in a world of thousands of suppliers, a platform that facilitates compatibility and verification could become the operational passport. And the passport is something worth paying for. Not for marketing, but because it cuts dead time, reduces rework, and lowers the risk of a program getting stuck in technical and security interfaces.
The risk for the Air Force Department is symmetrical: if Industry Øne does not achieve cross-functional traction, the initiative may end up as a sleek pilot program. In that case, fragmentation remains, and the organization keeps paying the coordination tax. Scenarios don’t need to be invented; the history of institutional software is littered with theoretically sound initiatives that did not overcome the inertia of real work.
The Direction Is Unmistakable: Price Rises When Friction Falls and Verifiability Increases
Industry Øne is an attempt to convert defense engineering into a collaborative operating system: data that isn’t “delivered” once but connects; certifications that aren’t “argued” at the end, but are maintained with continuous evidence; security that doesn’t block by default, but enables connection without losing local control.
As a business strategy, the wager is clever because it pursues the only engine that creates willingness to pay in complex markets: certainty. Certainty of compliance, of security, of traceability, of compatibility. And that certainty is only bought when it is packaged in a real reduction of everyday effort.
Digital transformation isn’t won with vocabulary; it’s won with offer architecture. When a solution reduces friction, elevates the perceived certainty of outcomes, and compresses waiting time, the buyer pays more, adopts more quickly, and defends the budget with less political maneuvering. That’s the line that separates an inevitable platform from just another tool in the stack.
