No Free Lunch with Open Mission Systems

There has been a rapid growing interest in open architectures (OAs) within the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) over the last few years. This interest in open architectures still requires balancing with the trust we place in the system. OAs can reduce cost, speed technology insertion, and reduce system lifecycle costs, but it is necessary to still maintain a high level of trust in the system. This is especially true for the DoD systems. In some ways open architectures and trusted systems can be competing goals. In this paper, the No Free Lunch principle is used to show why open architectures are not free for end users and how the broader community can benefit from fully understanding the required tradeoffs. The focus is on Open Mission Systems (OMS) and how it applies to building trusted systems.