The Modernization Challenge
Historically, mission planning systems have relied on tightly coupled, hardware‑dependent architectures that are costly to sustain and slow to evolve. Long refresh cycles and legacy design constraints have limited the speed, adaptability, and responsiveness required to support the warfighter in dynamic and contested operational environments. When combined with fragmented tooling and siloed development teams, these limitations reduced delivery predictability and increased integration risk. Ultimately, this impacts the timely fielding of critical mission planning capabilities. Modernization of these systems is not only critical, but long overdue. The objective for DS2 was straightforward: transition legacy weapons planning systems (WPS 1.x/2.x) to Next‑Generation Open Mission Services (NOMS), a cloud‑native, microservice‑driven architecture. The challenge, however, lies in executing this modernization in a way that reduces sustainment risk and accelerates warfighter readiness—without disrupting ongoing mission planning operations that operators depend on daily.
As a small‑business, engineering‑first organization supporting Air Force, Navy, and Army customers across mission‑critical software portfolios, DS2’s experience spans hardware‑centric legacy architectures to modern, cloud‑deployable microservices. The team consists of more than 40 engineers, veterans, and program managers delivering desktop, enterprise, microservices, and cloud‑native solutions.
Embracing The Challenge
To enable the successful migration of legacy weapons planning software, DS2 applied disciplined SAFe/Scrum hybrid practices to align delivery cadence across multiple teams. Rather than simply assessing legacy components, DS2 fully decomposed them into a comprehensive technical model that directly informed the modernization strategy. The team worked closely onsite with weapons planning subject‑matter experts to gain a deep understanding of operational nuances, while collaborating with UX specialists to ensure the resulting user experience met operator needs. This approach enabled delivery of the right increment of value at each stage.
Legacy logic was refactored into layered components, allowing core mission functionality to operate independently of exposed, enterprise‑conformant APIs. APIs were then layered on, followed by NOMS governance components, enabling modular, reusable capabilities that could be packaged and shared across implemented requirements. This effort included transitioning legacy technologies—such as WinForms, WPF, .NET, SQL, and WCF/COM—to modern stacks including React, TypeScript, Java, Spring Boot, Postgres, and RabbitMQ, deployed within a Kubernetes environment. To ensure quality and security, new development flows through DevSecOps pipelines within WarpDrive, providing automated quality gates and consistent, repeatable delivery. To enable rapid feedback for development teams, NOMS pipelines were mirrored locally for development and test, with integrated metrics to ensure seamless alignment and integration with WarpDrive.
Keeping the Warfighter Operational
While designed and implemented cloud‑deployable, microservice‑oriented architectures DS2 is simultaneously sustaining legacy weapons planning platforms, enabling modernization without disrupting operations. DS2 has consistently demonstrated interoperability between legacy systems and next‑generation services using bridging techniques that enable mission planning data to move seamlessly from old architectures to new.
DS2 is also at the forefront of working hand‑in‑hand with government clients to build and deploy Kubernetes‑based solutions on portable hardware, enabling mission planning activities to extend from the operations center to the cockpit. This effectiveness has positioned DS2 to provide architectural leadership and insight across the broader mission planning enterprise; serving not only as a delivery team, but as a team that helps elevate and enable others. DS2’s deep technical mastery across both legacy sustainment and modern cloud‑native architectures represents a rare dual competency, reducing modernization risk by sustaining legacy systems while delivering the complete modernization path.
The Road Ahead
Looking ahead, the path forward for these platforms increasingly includes the thoughtful and responsible application of artificial intelligence. DS2 is actively pursuing ways to incorporate Generative AI into the software development and sustainment lifecycle to reduce friction, improve delivery predictability, and strengthen mission outcomes. Current focus areas include AI‑assisted Interface Control Document (ICD) analysis, automated pipeline test optimization, and the capture of critical tribal knowledge that is often lost across long‑running mission planning programs.
Rather than applying AI in isolated pockets, DS2 is taking a holistic, mission‑planning‑enterprise approach by identifying where friction exists across people, process, and technology, and applying AI precisely at those pressure points to change the slope of the mission planning delivery challenge. Central to this strategy is the definition of practical, clearly bounded, and defensible AI roles within the development and sustainment process with the goal to augment engineers and testers where it improves speed, quality, and understanding, without introducing operational risk.
DS2 looks forward to the challenges ahead. We will continue to modernize mission planning systems while applying these same proven approaches across other critical areas of the Department of War.
