MOSA becoming the go-to-market path for defense suppliers, experts say

News

March 06, 2026

WASHINGTON, D.C. The Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) is no longer just a government acquisition goal -- it's now a business strategy for defense suppliers trying to move technology into the field faster, said panelists at the Military Embedded Systems MOSA Virtual Summit on Feb. 26.

During the session “Making the Business Case for MOSA,” speakers from The Open Group, Raytheon, and Curtiss-Wright described open architectures as a way for companies to reduce development risk, widen market access, and avoid building supporting infrastructure around a single product from scratch.

Alicia Taylor, program director for The Open Group’s FACE Consortium, emphasized that MOSA should not be viewed as a single architecture or fixed checklist. “It’s an approach, not an architecture,” she said. “It’s a strategy.” She said the requirements companies often associate with MOSA tend to come from open standards such as FACE and the Sensor Open Systems Architecture, or SOSA, Technical Standard.

Taylor also argued that MOSA now carries more weight because it is backed by law, policy, and implementation guidance. She pointed to statutory language in Title 10, National Defense Authorization Act changes, Department of Defense guidance, and service-level implementation documents. In her view, that policy backdrop is pushing open approaches beyond a technical preference and into the center of program planning and supplier decisions.

She said the business case extends to both government and industry. For suppliers, she described the benefit as “you invest once, and you sell many,” linking open standards to product-line development and reuse across military aviation, commercial aviation, ground vehicles, maritime platforms, and space.

Jonathan Cain, vice chair of the SOSA Consortium steering committee and an engineering manager at Raytheon, added that the government remains the main force behind that shift, using policy and mandates to drive what he called “inorganic vertical disintegration.” He said the original goals centered on affordability and time to field, but that the rationale has widened.

“We are adding that robustness and the broadening of the defense industrial base as a why for most of them,” Cain said. He argued that MOSA can help open the market to more participants, including nontraditional suppliers, while giving programs more flexibility to insert technology during a system’s life cycle instead of locking in a single vendor for long periods.

Cain cautioned against treating openness as a universal answer. “It’s not a one size fit all solution for everything,” he said, adding that vertical integration will continue to play a role in systems where performance demands are high and interfaces are less settled. In his framing, the industry is moving toward a mix of approaches: open, modular ecosystems where horizontal markets make sense, and integrated development where performance margins still demand it.

David Jedynak, vice president of strategic planning and a technical fellow at Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions, tied MOSA to the challenge of getting new technology through the defense “valley of death.” He argued that many startups and emerging defense firms make the mistake of trying to build not only their differentiating capability, but the entire environment needed to support it.

He described VITA and OpenVPX as part of an existing defense technology stack that newer entrants can build on instead of recreating.

Jedynak aimed that message at investors as much as suppliers. “If you’ve got founders out there in your portfolio, you should be asking them this question: how are you using the VITA defense tech stack to accelerate over the valley of death?”