PAE(A) MOSA experts from PMA-209 Air Combat Electronics program office invite guests to gain a solid understanding of what and where a Modular Open Systems Approach best meets critical capability needs. MOSA applies to programs and platforms cost, schedule and performance objectives goals over the lifecycle of a system. This MOSA 101 brings seven PMA-209 Avionics Architecture Team MOSA SMEs together to engage the audience with an introduction and MOSA-Enabling Concepts. Hardware, Software, Digital Engineering and how to design these in a system to be upgraded independently on platforms for decades to come. MOSA – a technical and business approach – is not an open ‘standard’, rather a collection of many open standards. Each designed to solve a specific problem. Find out how to identify the first challenge to solve (your) problem. The team is at your disposal, helping you navigate the standards maze. Educational, interaction and resource-rich.

The Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) has become a statutory requirement for U.S. defense acquisition programs, yet many organizations struggle to translate MOSA principles into practical engineering and program execution. This panel will explore how digital engineering environments can enable a holistic implementation of MOSA—from system architecture and interface definition to lifecycle governance and modular capability evolution.

In today’s rapidly evolving operational environment, the need to deliver advanced capabilities to soldiers quickly and efficiently has never been more critical. This panel will explore how the Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) is revolutionizing military ground vehicle modernization by enabling faster integration of commercial technologies. It will highlight the tangible benefits of MOSA, such as reduced development timelines, cost savings, enhanced interoperability, and increased adaptability to emerging threats. The discussion will also focus on how MOSA principles like openness, modularity, and scalability create opportunities for commercial technology providers and emerging industry players to contribute innovative solutions, fostering a collaborative ecosystem that benefits both the U.S. Government and industry.

Strategies for modernizing older, proprietary systems with modular, open components.

MOSA is defined as both a technical and business strategy for designing an affordable and adaptable system. It also demands modularity to maintain a weapons systems adaptability and flexibility for operational overmatch over its lifecycle. As the DoW pivots towards commercial solutions and shortened developmental timelines, how does industry and the USG deliver innovative and affordable solutions now? Answer-This panel using the team member from the XMA-ADT Middle Tier Acquisition for the Aerial Logistics Connector developmental effort. Team ALC is the exemplar on how to precipitate a self-formed team leveraging existing tools, expertise, and HW & SW products to rapidly field capability demanded by today’s operational environment. Using technology previously developed and delivered for other programs, Team ALC took an open systems approach to continue to added capability to answer requirements. USG personnel will highlight how to manage MOSA and talk best practices in a new go-fast environment.

This panel will discuss the practical implementation of MOSA principles to the space flight avionics industry. Experts from government and the commercial space sectors will address both the opportunities and challenges they see ahead with this approach. Traditional bespoke satellite systems are expensive, incur long development schedules, and not suited for reusability or sustainability. New mission profiles demand shorter design cycles at lower cost. Government space programs and industry manufacturers have moved towards modular systems, however the standardization and compatibility across systems and vendors remains a challenge. To enable these missions, space hardware needs to standardize designs for maximum interoperability and reuse. The commercial space market has shown a clear desire to adopt standards including VPX and VNX+ form factors and interfaces including PCIe and Ethernet, however these standards alone may not fully close the gap on providing truly modular and interoperable system components across vendors. The newly released SOSA Space Appendix aims to become the new standard interoperable hardware for space designs going forward.

How leading standards organizations are collaborating to create a more unified and interoperable ecosystem.

The Department of Defense is increasingly relying on the Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) to enable adaptable, interoperable systems across complex acquisition programs. While MOSA principles are well established in policy and guidance, applying them across real programs requires aligning digital engineering practices, system architectures, and data integration strategies across multiple organizations and technology environments. This panel will examine how MOSA is being implemented in practice across digital engineering, modeling and simulation, and operational system integration. Discussion will focus on how open standards, data architectures, and modular system design contribute to interoperability across system-of-systems environments. Topics will include the role of digital engineering in supporting MOSA implementation, approaches for integrating models and simulations with operational systems, and lessons learned when applying modular architectures across evolving defense programs. The discussion will also explore how data interoperability and architectural governance influence the long-term adaptability and sustainment of MOSA-based systems. Attendees will gain practical insight into how MOSA principles translate from policy into real system architectures, and what technical and organizational challenges must be addressed to achieve interoperability across complex defense ecosystems.

As defense and aerospace systems grow more software-defined and interconnected, cybersecurity can no longer be treated as a perimeter function. Modular Open Systems Architecture (MOSA) offers a path toward building security directly into system architecture through strong partitioning, modular design, and controlled integration of components. This panel will examine how MOSA principles can improve system security by enabling isolation of critical functions, reducing attack surfaces, and allowing independent verification and certification of system components. Panelists will discuss how separation kernels, virtualization, and modular software frameworks allow safety-critical, security-critical, and general-purpose applications to coexist while maintaining strong boundaries between them. The discussion will also explore how modular architectures enable faster security patching, technology refresh, and algorithm upgrades without requiring full system redesign. Additional topics include securing heterogeneous compute platforms (CPU/GPU), managing supply-chain risk through component modularity, and enabling zero-trust architectural approaches in mission systems. Real-world examples from aerospace and defense programs will demonstrate how MOSA enables resilient systems that can adapt to evolving cyber threats while maintaining safety and certification requirements. Attendees will gain practical insights into how security can be designed into modular architectures from the start rather than added later as a reactive measure.

As combat operations increasingly encounter challenging conditions, the integration of Degraded Visual Environment (DVE) solutions and sensor fusion technologies has become pivotal to mission success and safety. This panel at the 2026 MOSA Summit will examine how open, modular approaches are driving innovation in DVE and sensor fusion, enabling systems to adapt rapidly and interoperate across platforms. Our distinguished moderator and expert panelists will share their experiences implementing open system principles to streamline sensor integration, enhance situational awareness, and meet the Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) mandate for conformance and interoperability. Panelists will discuss real-world applications—from military aviation to ground systems to commercial aviation—highlighting lessons learned, technical achievements, and remaining challenges in deploying DVE and sensor fusion capabilities. Through an interactive format, attendees will be encouraged to engage with the panelists, ask questions, and share perspectives. By the end of this session, participants will gain practical insights into adopting open architectures for DVE and sensor fusion, empowering them to accelerate innovation, improve verification processes, and ensure system resilience in complex operational environments.

A Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) is only as effective as the tools and frameworks used to specify and exercise it. The SOSA® Approach — built on business processes, proven technical practices, and a consensus-based open standard — gives Government the precision to better define their MOSA and enables Industry to better execute it. This panel brings together Government and Industry voices to explore how the SOSA Approach delivers real, tangible benefits to both sides of the acquisition relationship: reducing lifecycle costs, accelerating technology insertion, and enabling a competitive, interoperable supplier base. Attendees will leave with a clearer understanding of how to leverage the SOSA Technical Standard in their programs today.

As MOSA-aligned processing subsystems—driven by SOSA™, CMOSS, and FACE™ standards—become the norm, the focus must shift from physical interoperability to operational management. While modular hardware ensures components fit, it does not guarantee they behave coherently in complex, multi-vendor environments. This panel explores why standardized system management (software-defined interfaces, health monitoring, configuration, orchestration, and unified security) is critical to realizing the full potential of MOSA. Experts will discuss how standardized management reduces integration bottlenecks, accelerates capability insertion, and enables automated, real-time health diagnostics across high-performance computing subsystems. Without standardized management layers, we risk replacing "stove-piped" hardware with "stove-piped" management software. Join industry and government leaders as they define the path forward for unified, interoperable management frameworks that ensure system readiness, resilience, and true plug-and-play capability for the warfighter.Key Discussion Points: - Moving from physical standards (hardware) and reference system architectures to system-level implementation standards (management/software). - Standardizing health monitoring, network administration, configuration, orchestration, diagnostics, and security. - The role of MOSA in simplifying system management of multi-vendor subsystems.

Large Language Models (LLM) prompt volume has grown 80% this year, and now a full one-third of all consumers rely entirely on the AI summary. Agentic AI, capable of setting its own goals, making decisions, consuming resources, and executing tasks – is dominating trends and pushed heavily into the public and private sectors. But ask yourself: what do LLMs and agentic AIs have to say for certifying conformance in MOSA? How reliable are their claims? This panel will explore these questions. Our distinguished moderator and panelists are experts in applied MOSA standards and reference architectures. Using a structured rubric, we will evaluate the top 3 LLM responses against common conformance questions in the MOSA community. Then, we’ll compare and score those answers against expert testimony. The panel will present our experiences applying AI to evaluating conformance to open systems standards and give pointers for future applications. We share our findings and let you be the judge. A unique, eye-opening discussion not to be missed!

Modern C5ISR missions increasingly depend on multiple commercial and government networks: GEO, MEO, LEO, airborne relays, tactical radio meshes, and terrestrial backbones. Today, these networks are integrated in ad-hoc, bilateral ways that are fragile, slow to change, and often vendor-specific. The Outernet Council’s Federation API defines a vendor-neutral way for peer networks to advertise interconnect opportunities, expose time-varying performance and reachability, and fulfill on-demand requests for capacity and coverage. This panel will explain how Federation’s abstractions for physical interconnectivity, path/SLA metadata, and cost allow MOSA-compliant mission systems and SDN controllers to reason about “which partner network should I use, when, and on what terms?” We will walk through concrete scenarios such as: backstopping a LEO constellation with a partner GEO network, dynamically sourcing ground stations as a service, and enabling agile multi-constellation user terminals to roam based on policy. Government and industry panelists will explore how this open specification can align with existing DoD architectures and standards, support JADC2-style interoperability, and reduce lock-in by separating mission applications from any single transport provider.

Panel members from industry and government will share MOSA execution best practices in contracting, requirements, integration and testing to ensure MOSA benefits are realized.

Radio frequency signals underpin communications, navigation, sensing, and other critical systems, yet they remain difficult to interpret with traditional tools. Most radio activity is viewed through spectrum analyzers that present two-dimensional slices of an inherently multidimensional domain. As new technologies like 5G, IoT, and satellite networks proliferate, these flat interfaces are increasingly inadequate for understanding dense and dynamic signal conditions. This session explores how AI-enhanced modeling reveals patterns, direction-finds emitters, and uncovers relationships that are difficult to detect through manual analysis. By fusing multiple measurements with contextual data, these approaches reconstruct richer representations of radio behavior, capturing congestion, interference, and network interactions across training and operational scenarios. As a result, anomalies and signal relationships can be identified far more quickly than through expert-driven analysis alone. We will examine how mixed-reality visualization translates these modeled datasets into immersive spatial views, allowing users to perceive emitters and networks within their natural three-dimensional context. Together, these approaches reduce cognitive burden, improve spectrum awareness, and enable more effective training, simulation, and mission rehearsal. Practical examples will illustrate how advanced spectrum analysis techniques and XR visualization improve decision-making in contested electromagnetic environments.

Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) is fundamentally transforming how the Department of War (DoW) designs, builds, and sustains its warfighting systems. Moving beyond a mere pursuit of efficiency, MOSA is now a primary driver of combat capability, enabling the DoW to out-innovate and defeat adversaries. This panel will examine how MOSA is being operationalized to deliver a direct competitive advantage to the warfighter. At its core, MOSA is the critical "enabling tissue" that allows the rapid transition of prototypes from labs to the front lines at a pace measured in weeks, not years. By enforcing open standards and ensuring interoperability, the DoW’s Acquisition Transformation Strategy (ATS) breaks historic vendor lock-in, drives down costs, and allows the U.S. military to integrate the best available technology from a diverse industrial base. As MOSA becomes a mandatory component of program planning, Program Managers are now required to develop comprehensive MOSA strategies. This panel will investigate how MOSA is being operationalized across the defense acquisition enterprise to accelerate modernization and interoperability. We will also examine how successful MOSA strategies are being tailored to integrate both technical and business imperatives across the defense acquisition enterprise.

Watch as top innovators compete to deliver cutting-edge solutions that advance Modular Open Systems Architecture. This challenge showcases breakthrough ideas designed to accelerate modernization, improve interoperability, and meet mission-critical needs. Join us to see who will win the MOSA Innovation Challenge and help shape the future of defense innovation.

Acquisition Transformation places a renewed emphasis on how the Department of War drive MOSA into our weapon systems. This panel seeks to provide an update to the MOSA community on how the services and DOW are progressing in implementing against this strategic intent. Ongoing coordination and collaboration across the services, and with the DOW staff, is driving accelerated sharing of information and streamlined implementation of MOSA policy, guidance, and enabling support. This panel will share the latest updates on how the DOW is tackling MOSA implementation at the strategic level across various line of effort.

A unique opportunity to meet and hear from Mr. Jason Thomas, CSEP, supporting warfighter needs across all domains. His expertise and areas of experience include modular open systems approach/open architecture/open standards; data analytics, model-based engineering, model engineering, digital transformation, and program management.

Watch as top innovators compete to deliver cutting-edge solutions that advance Modular Open Systems Architecture. This challenge showcases breakthrough ideas designed to accelerate modernization, improve interoperability, and meet mission-critical needs. Join us to see who will win the MOSA Innovation Challenge and help shape the future of defense innovation.

Advanced technical solutions that adhere to a MOSA standard are only as relevant as how efficiently we can deliver them to operators. Acquisition professionals must understand and adopt sound program management and systems engineering practices that leverage model-based engineering to ensure that adoption of cutting-edge technologies is not hampered by extended acquisition timelines or unnecessary red tape. This panel will explore the topics of accounting for MOSA contracting and acquisition strategies, modern methods in acquisition transformation, and execution of an acquisition program leveraging Model-based Systems Engineering to streamline and enhance the acquisition process. We aim to demonstrate to the audience how to leverage fields such as MBSE and PLM to streamline acquisition timelines, reduce program and technical risk, and ultimately achieve cost-savings across the board. Panel members will include government representatives from the the DoW, FFRDC partners, the Defense Industrial Base, and Technical Experts in advanced MBSE toolsets.

The Acquisition Transformation Strategy’s imperative to employ Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) for the promotion of interoperability, competition, technology insertion, performance improvements, and reducing life cycle cost. We are responsible for ensuring our acquisition workforce has the opportunities and support needed to strengthen their MOSA expertise and drive successful implementation. We will examine how MOSA is being operationalized across the defense acquisition enterprise to accelerate modernization and interoperability through acquisition workforce development, cross-Service alignment, and real-world implementation lessons that translate policy and standards into measurable outcomes. Panelists will share practical insights on integrating MOSA into acquisition and sustainment strategies, managing technical and business tradeoffs, and aligning contracting, engineering, and program management communities. Grounded in Department policy and guidance, acquisition workforce MOSA implementation pain points data, including the MOSA Guidebook and coordinated IP guidance, the session will explore how MOSA is being scaled beyond compliance to enable interoperability, competition, and rapid technology insertion. Attendees will gain actionable perspectives on workforce readiness, enterprise implementation challenges, and opportunities for deeper government–industry collaboration to drive sustained, enterprise-wide MOSA success.

The Department of War (DoW) is accelerating its shift toward acquiring weapon systems and subsystems from commercial suppliers. Commercial firms are seen as rapid innovation leaders, manufacturing in higher quantities that generate lower costs while quickly discarding even recent 1- to 2-year-old technologies to stay competitive. Military firms design systems for obviously military purposes and interoperability, prioritizing smaller quantities, long term sustainment, military-grade hardening and military specific testing. This mismatch creates a structural challenge: How can the DoW continuously integrate new commercial capabilities into long lived military vehicles? This panel will explore the use of MOSA to allow that to happen, what will incentivize military and commercial suppliers to support it, and what the military can do within the acquisition process to accelerate it.

Share the Air Force approach and progress towards public releasability of Air Force owned open architectures and standards (including Open Mission Systems (OMS), Universal Command and Control Interface (UCI), Agile Mission Suite Government Reference Architecture (AMS GRA), and more). Aligning with SECWARs Acquisition Transformation Strategy and public law, the Mission Systems Architecture and Systems Engineering (ASE) Group is driving the proliferation and adoption of open architectures via the public release of these standards at the Distribution A level. This unlocks unprecedented industrial base competition, unleashes commercial innovations, and drives accelerated international collaborations.

We are at the point in MOSA implementation where different approaches have provided industry experts with the evidence to compare and contrast details and rationale for decisions. With an emphasis on the "A" in MOSA, this panel will aim to provide various perspectives relative to the challenges in implementation & integration of various Modular Open Systems Approaches. The panel will also explore how those challenges can be mitigated in future development activities based on experiences of the participants in trying to implement MOSAs.

This panel will delve into the tools the Weapon Open Architecture (WOSA) Team has developed to drive modularity and determine latency limitations based on weapon program performance requirements in the Air Force. Developed tools include 1) WARPIGS: a 6 degree-of-freedom (6DOF) simulation environment separated into containers based on WOSA Domains, 2) REaCT: software that can ingest a Cameo model, map out hidden coupling, and identify interfaces where modularity could be employed, and 3) a Simulink analysis script that takes airframe parameters and determines maximum latency between WOSA domains before performance degradation is seen. Developed tools are Government-owned and were built to support and defend MOSA decisions as well as drive requirements backed with hard S&T data.

Explore the transformative impact of Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) on Intellectual Property (IP) and Data Rights (DR), and how its proper implementation can reduce the need for government requests for IP/DRs. This panel builds on the success of the highly attended 2025 MOSA Summit IP/DR session, diving deeper into actionable strategies and best practices. Engage with key thought leaders and decision-makers, including members of the Office of the Secretary of War Intellectual Property Cadre and senior Army, Navy, and Air Force Acquisition executives who are shaping IP/DR policies. Gain critical insights into how MOSA can streamline acquisition processes, foster innovation, and strengthen collaboration across government and industry.

US Army Aviation HADES program has leveraged MOSA to enable digital backbone capabilities, accelerating advanced ISR capabilities to the warfighter. Using open architecture technologies such as time sensitive networking (TSN) and a FACE conformant RTOS reduces integration and testing time, facilitating faster future system upgrades. Panel members will include representatives from US Army Aviation, DDC-I, TTTech and NAI sharing digital backbone development and integration experience. HADES is an example of MOSA enabled Army capabilities.

MOSA means many things to many stakeholders. We'd like to draw a few lines in the sand to return to first principles; why are we all "doing MOSA"? And ask the question, are the actions being taken in industry, and in DoW acquisition truly aligned to those principles?

The era of one-on-one electromagnetic warfare engagements is all but over. As adversaries enhance their electronic protection capabilities, modern battlefields increasingly rely on collaborative operations involving sensors, jammers, and decoys distributed across diverse platforms such as drones, aircraft, ships, ground vehicles, and dismounted soldiers. To enable the increasing level of collaboration required for battlefield dominance, electromagnetic warfare systems must feature standardized interfaces to streamline communication and interoperability across the battlespace. Without common interfaces built on open architecture and Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) principles, integrating and testing the multitude of systems and system configurations found on the battlefield will be too complex and costly to be practical. This panel will explore how existing and emerging MOSA and open standards are driving the future of collaborative electromagnetic warfare. Expert panelists will address key challenges, share their insights, and discuss opportunities to develop flexible, scalable, and interoperable solutions for tomorrow’s multidomain EMSO battlespace.

This panel addresses the Navy's urgent requirement for resilient navigation in GNSS-denied environments through Colvin Run Networks' FALCON Testing Open System Architecture (TOSA). Developed in support of Navy SSP's Multi-Service Advanced Capability Hypersonic Test Bed (MACH-TB), FALCON serves as a universal test harness for alternative PNT technologies. Panelists will show how FALCON applies MOSA standards to decouple sensor-specific logic from the navigation core behind stable, well-defined interfaces hosted on modular, heterogeneous hardware. This enables inertial, magnetic, optical, signals-of-opportunity, and emerging PNT payloads to be integrated and evaluated without reengineering core interfaces. The session highlights innovations engineered for the thermal and vibrational extremes of Mach 5+ flight: a real-time hybrid Kalman-ML estimator that pairs a rigorous Bayesian filter with learned bias correction; a deterministic edge runtime built for hard real-time execution on embedded compute platforms; resilient handling of out-of-order sensor delivery across a DDS data fabric; automated digital-twin generation; and edge-first telemetry visualization. Attendees will see how marrying open-architecture standards with ML-augmented fusion enables software- and hardware-in-the-loop evaluation against ground-truth datasets, reducing integration risk and accelerating flight-test readiness for hypersonic platforms.

Air Force success stories implementing open architectures/standards on legacy weapons systems. Architectures, without adoption, are only mildly interesting. This panel seeks to provide ground truth insights and experiences in driving adoption of open architectures within specific weapon systems. This panel will give targeted weapon system exemplars and talk through various successes and failures in driving open architecture adoption across air force platforms.