News
August 29, 2025
Technology Editor
Military Embedded Systems
Brig. Gen. Jason Voorheis, Program Executive Officer for Fighters and Advanced Aircraft, Air Force Life Cycle Management Center (Staff photo)
NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland. The U.S. Air Force is increasingly banking on open system designs to keep pace with fast-moving threats and ensure new capabilities reach the field quicker, Brig. Gen. Jason Voorheis, program executive officer for fighters and advanced aircraft, told attendees at the MOSA Summit here Friday.
“Let’s not think of MOSA [Modular Open Systems Approach] as a compliance exercise again,” Voorheis said. “Let’s think of it as the single most consequential lever we can pull to ensure our future war fighters have the capabilities they need to win.”
Open architectures allow the Air Force to “adapt quickly, swapping out components and inserting new technology without having to wait for the next major milestone,” he said, adding that it also allows the service to integrate new sensors and weapons across platforms, and reduce costs by opening competition to more vendors.
To push this forward, the Air Force has stood up a Mission Systems Architecture and Systems Engineering (ACE) group, which is writing the common “rules of the road” for aircraft electronics and mission systems, he continued. Those standards are now being built into programs such as the Next Generation Air Dominance fighter and the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA). Voorheis pointed out that CCA already produced a prototype flight in less than 18 months from contract award, something he said would have been unthinkable under older acquisition models.
“The future of acquisition is absolutely a team sport where neither side can succeed alone,” he said. “Only together will we create these open architectures that have the staying power to last.”