Will Roper is the former Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology, & Logistics. He is currently on the advisory committee for the Defense Innovation Board and, since he founded the company in 2022, is the CEO of Istari, Inc. To coin a phrase, Roper is part of the “AFWERX Mafia” that has branched out into the NatSec innovation ecosystem to found companies – thinking really differently about classic procurement and acquisition challenges – and the tough tech and deep tech opportunities ahead.
Istari, Inc. brands the “metaverse” and “digital twins” as another subcategory – “digital approaches to design and development in the digital domain for large scale physical world systems” – which the company calls “digital engineering.” The evolution of Roper’s experience and thinking is provided here, including his positioning of Formula One racing as the best in class business model generation and value proposition design which the Pentagon should strongly consider as a DoD-wide model for the future: “There will be myriad learning events on the way to Formula One prowess at this new tradecraft,” says Roper. “The government needs to buckle up, pun intended, and get ready to learn and decide is it really in the business of innovation? Or does it like talking about it, knowing that somehow innovation is always denied to the public sector.”
Formula 1 vehicle racing digital engineering practices inspire US Air Force’s Roper (December 2020)
“Roper wants…to lower modernisation and sustainment costs while infusing new technologies into weapon systems via rapid prototyping and competition.”
The US Air Force’s (USAF’s) acquisition executive is drawing inspiration from a Formula 1 racing team’s digital engineering practices as he tries to apply these concepts to the service’s next-generation aircraft. Will Roper, USAF assistant secretary for acquisition, technology, and logistics (AT&L), said on 18 December that Formula 1 teams perform digital engineering across a racing season from their first conversation. These racing teams, he said, deal with 85% parts obsolescence year to year and digitally design, spiral, and evolve cars around such obstacles. They even optimise their vehicles for individual race tracks.
Roper wants into infuse digital engineering into future USAF aircraft to lower modernisation and sustainment costs while infusing new technologies into weapon systems via rapid prototyping and competition. Instead of making a single downselect before moving into a 30 year acquisition, as is common now, the USAF, with digital engineering, would immediately start new competitions every six to eight years and buy aircraft in smaller lots.
“A Formula 1 race car on the ground is not that different [from] a fighter, it might be as close to a fighter on the ground as you can get,” Roper said during a Defense Writers Group event. “Certainly the competitive nature of racing, and the fact that safety also depends on those designs, align it really well with the USAF mission.”
Digital twins: Flying high, flexing fast
“Digital design and product development can provide new ways to solve complex problems. Getting implementation right means thoughtfully translating big ideas into boots on the ground…McKinsey partner Kimberly Borden and senior adviser Dr. Will Roper [have] a conversation about the value of digital technologies in production applications. Their discussion, which examines the use of digital approaches to design and development in Formula One racing and in aerospace and defense, shows how a software development style can have a big impact on the production of hardware.” An interesting read.
Defense Business Brief: Will Roper’s New Startup
“I see the path now for making hardware act like software, for bringing agile into physical systems in their improvement.”
When Will Roper left his position as head of U.S. Air Force acquisition, creating his own startup wasn’t on his bucket list. “Government burns you out, so you don’t think, ‘I’m going to go leave and found a company,’” Roper said in an interview last week. But after consulting for some companies about ways to digitally transform their businesses, it became clear to him that there was no software—or company—that tied together all the different types of modeling and simulation that’s done when designing and building something. “The thing that pushed me over the goal line for starting the company was realizing that if a company was trying to solve this fundamental problem of plugging and playing models and simulations together … wouldn’t they have found me when I was running $60 billion of purchasing potential?” Roper said. Roper created Istari in 2022, but the company operated in secret until earlier this year. Its first investor was former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who has been a champion of commercial technology companies working with the military, and more investors followed, Roper said. The company’s website touts how it’s “building the engineering Metaverse.”
“The team has made breakthroughs in plugging and playing models and sims that I never would have thought were possible in the Air Force,” he said. “I see the path now for making hardware act like software, for bringing agile into physical systems in their improvement.” Like many sci-fi-named Pentagon offices created under Roper’s tenure, the company’s name comes from fiction: the Istari were wizards in the Lord of the Rings.
“When your digital and physical twin overlap, it’s like beast mode or superhuman strength for you,” Roper said. “When it doesn’t, it’s like kryptonite.”
In the Pentagon, Roper emphasized using digital technology to design the military’s future weapons. That technology has shown promise, allowing companies like Boeing to design and build two pilot training jets in just three years. But it still has its limits, which Roper’s company is trying to mitigate. Tying together and automating the modeling and simulation process could speed the weapons design and development process up exponentially, something much desired inside the Pentagon. The technology could also allow weapons to be iteratively improved more quickly. And it will allow smaller companies to do things that were previously only possible for large firms with lots of engineers.
“What we’ve done is create a way that you can easily move things in and out of a digital thread without having to have an army of people do it,” Roper said. “That’s going to open this up to companies that are not major [companies].” Roper likens the potential of the technology he’s developing to how Formula 1 racing has used digital technology to transform racing. Data collection sensors on race cars allow them to coexist in the real world and the digital world—something that doesn’t happen in the military today. “We don’t have that in aerospace and defense, but we will,” Roper said. When we do, we need a mechanism to take the data back from the physical system and improve the underlying digital twin, and decide, does that force a change to be pushed back to the physical, and where that will be of greatest value is in operationalizing algorithms.” It’s going to take time before this concept becomes a reality. But essentially, the digital world overlaps with the real world when the simulations are spot on. “When your digital and physical twin overlap, it’s like beast mode or superhuman strength for you,” Roper said. “When it doesn’t, it’s like kryptonite.”
What Next?
Why Will Roper still believes the Pentagon should work more like Formula One
“Formula One is amazingly complex from an aerodynamic perspective. And in my opinion, it’s more complex than what we do in aviation.”
It’s been over two years since Will Roper left the Pentagon as the Air Force’s acquisition czar, and though senior service leaders seem to have moved away from some of his more ambitious ideas, Roper is not giving up on the digital design tools that he claims are critical for the United States to keep ahead of China. “Imagine if China makes this pivot,” Roper said of a revolution in digital design, where data-rich models can enable quick refreshes of complex weapon systems like aircraft. “Well, their designs may not be perfect between digital reality and physical, but if they have a way to iterate and tighten those gaps, then they will be exploring at an echelon far beyond us,” he warned Breaking Defense in an August 4 interview.
The Push for Formula One
“There will be myriad learning events on the way to Formula One prowess at this new tradecraft. The government needs to…get ready to learn and decide is it really in the business of innovation? Or does it like talking about it, knowing that somehow innovation is always denied to the public sector.”
After leaving the Pentagon in 2021, Roper co-founded a startup called Istari…Istari is offering a platform for clients to pursue their own digital engineering journey who may not otherwise have the resources or knowledge for how to do it themselves. “What we’ve done is take the system engineering function that is the digital thread as well as a huge degree of potential automation and turn it into a software platform available to everyone,” Roper explained.
Roper is inspired in large part by one industry that has already seized on the concept, which he talked up frequently in his Air Force days: Formula One racing.
F1 cars, Roper explained, extensively use digital engineering to rapidly iterate designs, leading to constant improvements to give drivers an edge — including in real time on race day.
“Formula One is amazingly complex from an aerodynamic perspective. And for my opinion, it’s more complex than what we do in aviation,” Roper said. “They are dealing with micro forces that they need to predict to within a millisecond of lap time, and they’re able to do that.” Roper also pointed to a key tradeoff F1 drivers make to inform their digital models by rigging their cars with hundreds of sensors, a lesson he said is applicable to aircraft. Though each of these gizmos carries a weight penalty, the sacrifice is worth it, he said, “because the data coming off of it is more valuable.” The same should be true for aircraft, where designers are often extremely sensitive to considerations like weight to maximize performance. “If I were building aircraft today, I would instrument them as much as my tolerances would allow,” Roper said.
There will be failures along the way as the Pentagon slowly incorporates digital engineering, Roper said, and officials will need to think differently about challenges like cybersecurity and pushing ahead with software updates forged in a digital environment. Ultimately, a key challenge will be embracing digital models as a “source of truth,” which must be backed by enough data to make the models reliable. It’s a change that won’t happen overnight, Roper said, though he assured the same was true for Formula One, which has already passed that milestone. “There will be myriad learning events on the way to Formula One prowess at this new tradecraft,” he said. “The government needs to buckle up, pun intended, and get ready to learn and decide is it really in the business of innovation? Or does it like talking about it, knowing that somehow innovation is always denied to the public sector.”
Additional OODA Loop Resources
Technology Convergence and Market Disruption: Rapid advancements in technology are changing market dynamics and user expectations. See: Disruptive and Exponential Technologies.
The New Tech Trinity: Artificial Intelligence, BioTech, Quantum Tech: Will make monumental shifts in the world. This new Tech Trinity will redefine our economy, both threaten and fortify our national security, and revolutionize our intelligence community. None of us are ready for this. This convergence requires a deepened commitment to foresight and preparation and planning on a level that is not occurring anywhere. The New Tech Trinity.
Benefits of Automation and New Technology: Automation, AI, robotics, and Robotic Process Automation are improving business efficiency. New sensors, especially quantum ones, are revolutionizing sectors like healthcare and national security. Advanced WiFi, cellular, and space-based communication technologies are enhancing distributed work capabilities. See: Advanced Automation and New Technologies
Rise of the Metaverse: The Metaverse, an immersive digital universe, is expected to reshape internet interactions, education, social networking, and entertainment. See Future of the Metaverse.
