A business model for drones

What: The Defense Department's "Open Business Model for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Ground Control Stations," which provides acquisition professionals with a business framework for a common ground control station (GCS) for unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), with the goal of cutting costs while enhancing warfighter capabilities.

Why: The open business model for a common GCS is built on lessons learned from the Navy's open architecture methods for submarine acquisition. Those acquisitions, the report states, were done in a similar environment of emerging threats and declining budgets.

According to DOD, budget cuts and advances in IT offer an opportunity to rethink how it acquires, designs and builds unmanned systems. DOD's new acquisition model, made public in late February, adopts an open business model to support the implementation of an open architecture for UAS GCS. The Pentagon said it maintains a UAS portfolio of 11 programs of record across the armed services. It has six prime integrators that support UAS GCS.

Verbatim: "DOD will develop acquisition strategies across the UAS portfolio that are built on continuous competition and reuse of services within the GCS architecture. The goal is to create an environment where innovative technology providers and integrators -- both large and small -- can freely and openly participate in the competitions for a wide range of services or systems domains. There are two different integration models for UAS GCS: the contractor integration model in which the contractor serves as the integrator and the government integrator model in which the government acquires services from multiple contracts but serves as integrator for those services."

Full report: Click here