Shield:

Software Defines Tactics: Structuring Military Software Acquisitions for Adaptability and Advantage in a Competitive Era by Jason Weiss and Dan Patt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Based on a work at https://github.com/Hudson-Institute-DC/peo-acts.

Table of Contents

The six ACTS and their corollaries (graphic)

While the body of the report is critical in framing the ACTS, if you seek to jump straight into the ACTS themselves:

• ACTS 1: Evaluate Existing Software Factories before Building Your Own
• ACTS 2: Partner with an Authorizing Official to Realize a Continuous Authorization to Operate
• ACTS 3: Own Your APIs, Even More So Than the Implementation
• ACTS 4: Behave Like a Software Recruiter
• ACTS 5: Think in Service Levels
• ACTS 6: ACTS 6: Define Zero-Trust Outcomes within Software Applications

There is a profound recognition that the principles and corollaries captured in the ACTS will evolve and change over time, just like software. In Introduction, we openly disclosed that the focus of this report is primarily the software arm of the digital triad, inviting those with rich industry expertise in data and AI/ML to build on this body of work to support PEOs with actionable principles. In The Modern Software Factory, we introduced and discussed the value of documentation as code.

We are taking a novel approach with this report, opting both to publish the static PDF and to establish a GitHub repository that contains the ACTS and their definitions in markdown format along with its graphical images. It is our sincere hope that experts in data and AI/ML will literally build on this body of work. Adopting GitHub provides a lightweight consensus mechanism supported via threaded discussions associated with individual pull requests to ensure highly refined contributions.

Each member of the digital triad—software, data, and AI—is proverbially a mile deep and a mile wide. Software is the primary focus of this work, and therefore we openly invite those with rich industry expertise in data and AI/ML to build on our body of work in this report to support PEOs in the other two members of the digital triad.

We invite and encourage the broader community, including those in the DoD as military members or part of its civilian workforce and those who are part of the broader defense industrial base, to suggest edits and offer new ACTS using git branching and pull requests. Through collaboration, it may be possible to enhance the material and ensure its relevance over time. This approach also provides an opportunity to pivot away from social platform paradigms, like LinkedIn, that offer only a forum for academic dialogue and constructive criticism without an opportunity for meaningful follow-up actions.

The GitHub repository can be found in this location:

https://github.com/Hudson-Institute-DC/peo-acts