The year digitalization and heightened cybersecurity change the course of defense operations

Story

May 08, 2025

Rob Mather

IFS North America

The defense sector is heading on an increasingly digitalized path in 2025 and beyond. There are several factors and developments driving changes in the defense sector: the MRO skill shortage gets a helping hand from artificial intelligence (AI), Industry 5.0 in manufacturing brings back the human element, uncrewed aerial systems (UASs) are set to reshape the naval warfare landscape, and cybersecurity compliance realizes it must step up its game.

New technology, principles, and assets are driving change in the defense industry throughout 2025 – whether it’s artificial intelligence (AI), autonomous vehicles, or Industry 5.0, there are many factors defense organizations will need to embrace to enhance operations and workforce efficiency. To define: Digitization is the system of changing information from analog to digital form, while digitalization is usually described as the steps taken to integrate digital technologies into business operations to optimize processes, enhance customer experiences, and drive innovation. In any event, what will all of these changes need? A cybersecure backbone.

Prediction 1: Industrial AI is here to enhance current technicians and the MRO industry in its skill shortage battle

The ever-present skills gap in defense MRO continues apace in 2025. The defense industry is seeing an influx of next-gen platforms, as more global defense forces adopt the F-35 and completely new aircraft – like the B-21 Raider, a more technologically advanced subsonic strategic bomber – enter the fray, bringing the need for an entirely new maintenance knowledge base.

The workforce numbers bear this assertion out: According to national-security newsletter War on The Rocks, the U.S. Air Force alone is currently short 1,800 maintenance personnel, with the U.S Government Accountability Office (GAO) highlighting continuing challenges meeting aircraft readiness targets. A Deloitte defense-industry outlook views 2025 as a pivotal year during which defense organizations consider the role AI technologies will play in enhancing traditional talent strategies.

Industrial AI will enhance human-machine interaction

One obvious application of AI is optimization, which offers several key industrial AI use cases that can directly help organizations accomplish more with existing resources, including:

Schedule optimization: Increasing the maintenance yield by scheduling all activities to as close to their deadline as possible. Overall, this means over the lifetime of an asset, less total maintenance will be done, which reduces the total work for technicians.
Task order optimization: AI can analyze data to ensure the order in which tasks are performed is optimized to make the most of the resources and technicians available and perform maintenance in the most efficient order, minimizing unproductive time.
Optimization of technician assignment: MROs can even optimize the assignment of the technician to the task, dependent on the technician’s skills, availability of assets requiring maintenance, and even geography/location on the aircraft, again, lowering unproductive time and maximizing utilization of the most valuable personnel.

Beyond optimization, giving technicians access to specialized AI agents through mobile devices can help them quickly navigate complex technical information and manuals, particularly those for new and less familiar aircraft types. Specialized AI can also help reduce time spent troubleshooting by providing root cause and repair suggestions and enhance data entry, thereby empowering a single technician to accomplish more.

Prediction 2: A humanized defense-manufacturing factory floor

It’s not just in the hangar where technology is directly helping human workers in the defense industry. Defense manufacturing in 2025 will see increasing adoption of the core principles of Industry 5.0 and its humanizing influence on factory processes, including how workers train for and execute work on the factory floor and beyond.

Some schools of research describe a “meta-operator,” defined as industrial workers that follow the principles of Industry 5.0 – described by Forbes as systems designed to create more responsible factories while maintaining all the benefits of the Industry 4.0 digital-transformation years – and interact with industrial metaverse applications and with their surroundings through advanced extended-reality (XR) devices.

XR is already being used as part of training, enabling defense organizations to encounter scenarios that are very rare in the real world and therefore take much more time to accrue experience against in conventional programs. XR is already making its way onto the defense-organization floor as well: Digital overlays comparing final product to spec, instructions overlaid on the product itself providing visual next steps, accessing the health information of the manufacturing machinery being used in their field of vision, and even gesture control to access technical documentation are all examples of XR empowering a more efficient and effective worker.

New forms of interacting with systems extend into the aftermarket as well, once assets are manufactured and deployed in the field. Companies – for example, BeastCode – are developing 3D models of assets, such as in-service naval ships so that when technicians are executing maintenance on the ships, they can navigate straight to the part in question via the 3D model to look at it, investigate, manipulate it, and understand how it interfaces with other parts on the ship. These systems form an intuitive navigation model in which technicians are able to move around the 3D model to easily navigate the system and access all the pertinent information. This approach takes digital twins to the next level for an experience straight out of science fiction.

Prediction 3: Autonomous capabilities are high on the naval operations agenda as drones add a new dimension of attack

The impact of drones and uncrewed systems on naval warfare is clear to see. We have no further to look than the conflict in Ukraine to see that no longer are multibillion-dollar aircraft fleets or submarines required to disable large ships. Ukraine has disabled as much as perhaps one-third of the Russian Black Sea fleet largely utilizing small, remotely piloted sea drones. As a result, the makeup of naval fleets and the design of naval vessels is changing: More of the ships being developed in the future will be autonomous or have minimal crews based on the capability of automated systems available today. Conventional aircraft carriers are being joined by uncrewed aerial system (UAS) carriers – exemplified by recent orders and testing of UAS carriers from Portugal, Turkey, and the U.K. – that enable the launch of drone attacks from the sea. We are learning that bigger does not necessarily mean better.

Uncrewed systems are also high priority in the U.S. DoD Replicator initiative – which the DoD and Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) launched to field thousands of uncrewed systems by August 2025 – to augment “the way we fight, using large masses of uncrewed systems which are less expensive, put fewer people in the line of fire, and can be changed, updated, or improved with substantially shorter lead times.”

Autonomous capabilities will be in high demand. In one example, shipbuilder Austal – working closely with the U.S. Navy and Australia’s navy – won a $44 million autonomous design and construction contract with the U.S Navy to deliver autonomous capabilities to the Expeditionary Fast Transport (EPF13). This ship is a multi-use military platform capable of rapidly transporting troops and their equipment, can support humanitarian relief or operational efforts, and is capable of handling in shallow waters. Supporting such a level of autonomy means being able to collect and analyze vast amounts of data from sensors and other sources and produce actionable insights that improve mission success. As such, while capital ships will continue to form the core of large navies worldwide, more and more of the fleet mass will begin to shift to ships with minimal crews and will call for smaller, faster, cheaper, uncrewed vessels.

Prediction 4: Increased digitization and digitalization call for cybersecurity to be ramped up

With increasingly digitized assets come increasingly tightened digital-compliance requirements across the defense industrial base, with cybersecurity top of mind for U.S. and allied defense departments. In October 2024, the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) Program Final Rule was published (expected to come into effect in mid-2025), with the Five Eyes nations aligning their own cybersecurity programs to the CMMC framework.

The U.S. DoD outlined in the Final Rule: “The purpose of CMMC is to verify that defense contractors are compliant with existing protections for federal contract information (FCI) and controlled unclassified information (CUI) and are protecting that information at a level commensurate with the risk from cybersecurity threats, including advanced persistent threats.” With the Five Eyes nations aligning to CMMC requirements, organizations in the defense supply chain that have not prioritized compliant levels of cybersecurity run the risk of losing contracts and their place in the defense industrial base.

Cybersecurity requirements compliance gets real

Imposing more stringent requirements across the defense industry is needed to harden digital defense against external threats, such as IP theft, which can seriously erode hard-won technological advantages on the battlefield.

Alongside the CMMC requirements is the need for cloud-based solutions to adhere to Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), which provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring. Although not necessarily a true requirement for all cases, FedRAMP is fast becoming a de facto security standard for doing business in the U.S. defense supply chain.

To ensure this success, defense organizations need to make sure they are supported by manufacturing software architecture that adheres to military regulations now and into the future. With a secure managed cloud or hybrid enterprise software environment for critical compliance areas such as CMMC, FedRamp, or International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), defense organizations can operate and know that they are in compliance with federal cyber regulations.

Rob Mather is Vice President, Aerospace and Defense Industries at IFS. He is responsible for leading the IFS global A&D industry marketing strategy and for supporting product development, sales, and partner ecosystem growth. Rob has over 15 years of experience in the A&D sector, starting out in the field and having held a number of strategic R&D, presales, and consulting positions at IFS, Mxi Technologies, and Fugro Aviation.

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