What’s the Best Way to Improve Multi-Domain Interoperability in Defense?

Modern defense operations don't respect boundaries. Air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace often converge in real time, simultaneously, and under extreme pressure. This evolution toward multi-domain operations has elevated interoperability to a mission-critical requirement. Defense leaders now face mounting pressure to deliver integrated, data-driven capabilities that work together seamlessly across platforms, services, and partner nations.

The Department of War has made digital interoperability a cornerstone of its strategy for decision advantage and operational speed. According to the Defense Logistics Agency, interoperability enables commanders to act faster and with greater confidence, directly contributing to mission success.

The challenge is most acute for program leaders managing complex portfolios that include unmanned, autonomous, and hybrid platforms. These systems are often integrated with decade-old legacy assets, joint command-and-control architectures, and digital infrastructure that's changing faster than ever. Improving multi-domain interoperability is a strategic imperative.

Multi-Domain Interoperability Remains a Challenge

Despite widespread acknowledgment of its importance, achieving multi-domain interoperability at scale remains stubbornly difficult. The biggest culprit is siloed development.

Programs typically execute within their own domain-, contractor-, or application-specific boundaries. Each is optimized for its immediate needs but fails to align with the broader enterprise. Requirements, data models, and interfaces get developed in isolation, which inevitably creates integration headaches down the road. Legacy systems make matters worse.

Most existing platforms were not designed for the kind of rapid data sharing, open architectures, or continuous integration that modern operations demand. They might struggle to support operational concepts that depend on real-time data fusion and cross-domain coordination. Defense analytics and decision systems are particularly hindered by fragmented data pipelines that undermine their potential.

The growing use of unmanned and autonomous systems adds another layer of complexity. These platforms must operate across domains and integrate with legacy systems and cutting-edge technology. Without a coherent interoperability strategy, each new system adds technical debt.

The consequences of poor interoperability are real and expensive. It’s estimated that government programs already spend nearly half of their annual IT budgets just keeping older systems running. This is not about reducing technical debt; it is about maintaining it. The impact is considerable:

• Limiting funds that could otherwise be used for innovation
• Delaying integration projects and extending timelines
• Doing expensive late-stage rework to ensure interoperability

For commanders, this can result in:

• Incomplete situational awareness
• Slower decision cycles
• Lack of trust in data

In short, a lack of interoperability across domains reduces flexibility in the field when it is needed most. In contested environments, margins are already thin. Data shortcomings can directly affect mission success.

Engineering Forms the Foundation for Interoperability

Improving interoperability starts with disciplined systems engineering.

Interoperability is fundamentally an engineering problem. It requires a regimented alignment of requirements, interfaces, architectures, and mission objectives throughout the entire system lifecycle. Without this foundation, digital tools and integration efforts become reactive band-aids rather than strategic solutions.

Systems engineering provides the necessary structure to translate operational needs into real-world technical solutions, ensuring that interoperability requirements are defined early and validated continuously.

Just as important is lifecycle engineering support. Many interoperability failures occur not because requirements were missing but because integration was pushed into late testing or deployment. Lifecycle engineering moves risk earlier in the process, when changes are still manageable. Addressing integration and data exchange during design and development handles interoperability challenges before production.

When interoperability is embedded into the engineering lifecycle, you can more easily spot conflicts, validate assumptions, and adapt architectures earlier. This reduces rework and helps control costs by eliminating the need for workarounds, enabling systems to evolve with mission requirements.

Digital Engineering and MBSE: Enabling Seamless Integration

Traditional, document-centric engineering approaches can't keep up with the complexity of multi-domain systems. Static documents are hard to maintain and difficult to iterate rapidly when needed. You require a different approach that keeps pace with modern defense challenges.

Model-based systems engineering (MBSE) replaces scattered documents with integrated system models that serve as a single source of truth. These models capture:

• Requirements
• Architectures
• Interfaces
• Behaviors
• Constraints

MBSE does so in a structured, traceable manner that is easy to reference. This improves interoperability in several meaningful ways.

Shared Understanding Across Domains

MBSE creates a shared understanding across domains and stakeholders. Engineers, operators, and decision-makers work from the same models, eliminating the misinterpretation and misalignment that plague document-based approaches.

Early Virtual Integration

By modeling system interactions and interfaces up front, teams can evaluate interoperability risks and run trade studies before building physical components. This is especially valuable for unmanned and autonomous systems that need to integrate across diverse platforms and networks.

Faster Integration

Digital engineering supports faster iteration and less rework. Changes to requirements or architecture can be evaluated quickly within the model, enabling you to adapt without creating new downstream liabilities. Over time, this approach reduces lifecycle costs and makes systems more resilient.

Testing, Validation, and System Integration at Scale

Even with a strong engineering foundation, interoperability still requires testing and validation, as many failures don't surface during design. Instead, they emerge during real-world system integration.

End-to-end integration testing is essential and requires validation across domains. Beyond validating systems and subsystems, you’ll need to validate their performance across domains and a wide range of operational scenarios. Testing needs to account for:

• Data flows
• Timing constraints
• Human-machine interfaces
• Degraded or contested conditions that stress the system

Digital models and simulations are vital, leveraging engineering artifacts to simulate mission scenarios, stress-test interactions, and evaluate performance before you move from production to deployment. This significantly reduces risk and supports better decisions.

Continuous Integration and Testing

As systems evolve, continuous integration and testing become even more crucial. Interoperability isn't a check-box; it requires ongoing maintenance as software updates, new platforms, and shifting mission requirements enter the picture. Adopting a continuous testing framework is essential to ensuring that you can sustain interoperability over the long term.

Operational and Programmatic Benefits

When you address interoperability with an engineering-led, digital approach in multi-domain environments, the benefits are clear and extend beyond technical performance.

Interoperable systems deliver greater mission flexibility and adaptability. Commanders can integrate capabilities across domains more effectively, respond to changing conditions, and leverage emerging technologies without extensive reengineering.

From a programmatic standpoint, better interoperability means lower lifecycle costs. Early integration and virtual validation catch problems before they become costly, eliminating deployment surprises, schedule delays, or budget overruns. You get greater predictability and reliability.

Interoperability also:

• Strengthens operational cohesion across joint and coalition forces
• Enables partners to operate together, enhancing collective effectiveness
• Aligns with the Department of War’s priorities for rapid capability delivery and digital modernization
• Meets evolving mission demands while maintaining technical and fiscal discipline

Interoperability Requires an Engineering-Led, Digital Approach Across System Lifecycles

Improving multi-domain interoperability is one of the defining challenges facing modern defense programs. You can’t solve these challenges with policy declarations or wait until late-stage integration. It requires an engineering-led, digitally enabled approach across the entire system lifecycle to successfully integrate across multiple domains.

Operational complexity will continue to grow. With legacy systems still in use and new digital solutions being added constantly, defense program leaders must take a structured engineering approach to interoperability to deliver resilient, adaptable solutions.

Partnering with Sumaria provides a strategic advantage through cutting-edge unmanned systems engineering and digital solutions tailored to defense programs. Our expertise helps you reduce development time, lower costs, and improve system reliability, ensuring that your programs meet critical deadlines and security standards. We are dedicated to supporting your mission objectives with innovative technology, experienced personnel, and a focus on long-term sustainment and upgradability. Let us help you achieve operational superiority and strengthen national security through advanced engineering support. If you'd like to speak with one of our specialists, feel free to book a one-on-one call.