Integrating Commercial and Government Software for GEOINT Superiority: A Strategic Framework for Congress and Senior DoW/IC Leaders

Editor’s Foreword: Why Project Geospatial is Publishing This

Sometimes, the most necessary conversations are the ones traditional organizations hesitate to host. This white paper by Keith Barber doesn't pull its punches. It takes a hard, critical look at the systemic failures of Government-Off-The-Shelf (GOTS) software acquisition and argues aggressively for a commercial-first reality. The author deliberately uses the historical and provocative moniker "Department of War (DoW)" to underscore a critical point: the bureaucracy of "Defense" must urgently refocus on the lethality and speed required for "War." At Project Geospatial, we believe in providing a platform for bold, unfiltered thought leadership. Read the full paper below, and stick around for our exclusive "So What" analysis at the end.

Executive Summary

The United States has reached a decisive moment in software-enabled national security. As adversaries accelerate their adoption of commercially derived technologies, the Department of War (DoW) and the Intelligence Community (IC) must ensure that U.S. forces benefit from the same speed of innovation. Yet many acquisition organizations continue to build Government-Off-The-Shelf (GOTS) capabilities that duplicate what already exists in the commercial market with Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) capabilities. Government programs routinely demonstrate bias against licensed software and preference for software development based on “Free Open Source” technologies, resulting in brittle, custom code that is unaffordable to scale or harden. This long-standing pattern, once merely inefficient, now poses strategic risk. Additionally, GOTS systems place the full burden on the DoW and require constant re-baselining, upgrades, and resource commitments. COTS technologies distribute development and sustainment costs across thousands of customers.

Secretary Hegseth’s 2025 Acquisition Reform Directive demands a new approach. For the first time, the Department has established enforceable expectations for software acquisition: commercial solutions (COTS) must be the starting point for all programs; GOTS development requires a Secretary-level waiver; and meaningful capability must be delivered within 12 to 24 months. The intent is not just to reform process, but to ensure that warfighters receive modern, relevant tools at a pace aligned with today’s threats.

This paper reflects Secretary Hegseth’s shift from passive policy preference to active enforcement. It provides a unified narrative that draws on prior analysis to articulate a clear, comprehensive necessity for a COTS-first model.

The Strategic Imperative: Speed, Scale, and Competitive Advantage

From cross-domain data fusion to precision targeting workflows, the effectiveness of U.S. forces relies on tools that reflect the latest advances in analytics, automation, cloud architectures, and artificial intelligence. The private sector invests an order-of-magnitude more into Research & Development than the government, generating these advancements far more rapidly than traditional government development cycles can match.

Global competitors like China have recognized this reality. They are not attempting to recreate complex software ecosystems through government development alone; they are purchasing, adapting, and integrating commercial tools at unprecedented speed. In this environment, the U.S. cannot afford multiyear acquisition processes or duplicative government programs that trail commercial innovation by entire development cycles.

The challenge is not a lack of policy authority. Federal acquisition law has long required maximum use of commercial technology, and recent executive orders have reinforced that mandate. The legal and policy framework governing federal acquisition has long prioritized commercial procurement. The Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act of 1994 requires agencies to procure commercial technology whenever practicable. Executive Order 14265 (April 2025) reinforces this directive by mandating maximum use of commercially available products, including those that can be modified or adapted. The problem has been inconsistent implementation and cultural inertia at the Acquisition Program and Contracting Officer level. Secretary Hegseth’s directive represents a decisive step toward correcting this misalignment.

A Case Study in Opportunity Cost: The DIEE Program

The development of the Digital Image Exploitation Engine (DIEE) by the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division illustrates the institutional habits this reform seeks to change. The program was designed to improve imagery exploitation workflows, yet it duplicated COTS products like SOCET GXP, RemoteView Pro, and ERDAS, that already offered mature tools providing the same capabilities, including mensuration, image registration, advanced rendering, and targeting support. The rationale? The COTS products did not meet 100% of the entire requirements set.

Rather than integrating or adapting these commercial systems for the specific functional requirements they did meet, the government committed to creating its own parallel platform in total. Years passed before the system approached the functionality available from commercial vendors at the outset. Meanwhile, commercial platforms continued evolving, incorporating cloud-based capabilities and advanced machine learning-driven analytics that left DIEE lagging behind.

The consequences were not limited to schedule delay. The government assumed full lifecycle costs; engineering resources were diverted from mission-unique problems; and the resulting system lacked innovation momentum due to technological stagnation because of constraints of limited sustainment resources. Under the Secretary’s new directive, a program like DIEE would not qualify for a waiver and would be redirected to a commercial or hybrid approach. Ironically, this approach succeeded as part of DIEE’s predecessor program, the early 1990s Target Materials Workstation System (TMWS), which demonstrates the success of a hybrid COTS/GOTS model grounded in commercial-first principles.

Why a COTS-First or Managed Open-Source Model Strengthens National Security

A shift toward commercial adoption is not simply about saving money; it is essential to maintaining U.S. technological superiority. Commercial firms operate in a competitive environment that incentivizes rapid iteration and continuous product improvement. Their development cycles are shorter, their investment levels higher, and their innovation pipelines aligned with emerging market opportunities, including those with direct national security relevance. Commercial providers exemplify the model the DoW must embrace: rapidly evolving, commercially funded, continuously modernized software that delivers operational advantage at a fraction of GOTS cost. In the midst of the ever-changing commercial environment, while commercial providers do encounter setbacks and failures, a major difference is that they identify those early, learn and adjust accordingly, and keep moving forward at the speed of the market.

Government-developed systems cannot match this tempo. They move through multiyear funding cycles, limited sustainment budgets, and complex requirements processes. As a result, capabilities often reach operators years after the underlying technology has become outdated. Worse, duplicating commercial products distorts the competitive landscape, discouraging private investment and weakening the industrial base on which the DoW and IC depend.

By contrast, leveraging commercial technologies allows government programs to focus scarce engineering talent and resources on truly sovereign needs. Engineering resources must transition from developing software to focus on the process of integration, testing, security hardening, and data interoperability to deliver mission capability. Doing so will result in improved integration of both COTS and GOTS capabilities, data, and secure mission workflows. This also ensures that government development prioritizes those functions that only the government should perform.

Once commercial capabilities have been identified and the government determines a development course accordingly, a managed open-source software model also offers several benefits that can significantly enhance the government’s operational efficiency and innovation capabilities. Some key advantages are:

• Cost Efficiency: Managed open-source services often reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) by eliminating the need for in-house expertise to manage and continuously optimize complex systems. This includes automation of repetitive maintenance tasks, freeing up resources to focus on strategic initiatives.

• Continuous Innovation: Access to the latest features, integrations, and enhancements ensures that organizations remain at the forefront of technology trends, all while delivering a seamless user experience to end-users.

• Community Support: Managed open-source services leverage the global community and faster innovation that open-source projects offer, providing the government with access to a collaborative global network of developers and organizations.

By adopting managed open-source software with commercial providers, the government can focus on its core competencies while leveraging the latest features and security measures, reducing costs, and remaining agile in a constantly evolving market.

The Role of Hybrid Approaches

Hybrid solutions—where commercial platforms serve as the foundation and government-unique extensions add necessary functionality—are the critical and preferred approach. However, under Secretary Hegseth’s directive, they are appropriate only when a commercial product can satisfy most requirements within an 18-month window and when additional development is limited and time-bounded.

When used correctly, hybrid models leverage the best of both worlds: commercial innovation cycles and government control over sensitive logic, workflows, or data pathways. The successful integration of commercial capabilities into earlier targeting systems demonstrates the value of this approach. That said, hybrid solutions should not become a loophole for recreating large-scale GOTS systems through incremental expansion.

Policy Actions to Implement the Secretary’s Directive

To ensure this commercial-first posture is realized in practice, Congress and senior departmental leadership must reinforce the directive through oversight, budgeting, and organizational policy and procedure expectations.

First, acquisition organizations should conduct a structured assessment of whether commercial products can meet mission needs before initiating new software programs. As directed in FAR 1 and 10, system decompositions must be utilized to determine if commercial technology can meet requirements down to the sub-component level. This assessment must be documented and reviewed as part of market research supporting milestone decisions. Second, any proposal to develop new GOTS software must include a waiver signed by the Secretary of War certifying that no commercial or hybrid alternative can meet operational timelines. Elevating this approval to the Department’s senior leadership ensures that GOTS development is an exception rather than a default.

Additionally, programs must be structured to deliver operational capability within 12 to 24 months. This requires breaking down requirements into achievable increments and using acquisition pathways such as OTAs, CSOs that include FAR clauses, and the Software Acquisition Pathway designed for fast integration of COTS. Oversight entities, including congressional committees, can reinforce this shift by examining cycle time performance and by encouraging reuse of COTS across programs and services. Establishing delivery milestones that only can be met through COTS or Hybrid approaches are practical steps in realizing the government policy. Offerors or programs that present a development-based approach will be unable to meet these aggressive milestones.

A sustained focus on workforce incentives and culture is also essential. Program managers, contracting officers, and technical authorities must be encouraged and empowered to favor commercial adoption. Professional development programs should emphasize commercial product evaluation, integration engineering, iterative fielding, and agile acquisition practices.

Conclusion

The software-defined battlespace demands faster and more adaptive capabilities. The United States possesses the most innovative commercial geospatial and analytic software ecosystem in the world. Leveraging it fully is not only consistent with acquisition law, it is vital to preserving the nation’s national security and technology advantage. Secretary Hegseth’s directive transforms commercial-first from policy guidance into enforceable doctrine: begin with commercial solutions, adapt them rapidly, use hybrid approaches judiciously, and reserve GOTS development exclusively for mission elements that cannot be achieved any other way.

Congress and senior leaders within the Department of War and Intelligence Community play a critical role in ensuring that this transformation takes hold. By aligning policy, oversight, and resources with a commercial-first model, the United States can deliver faster, more capable tools to its warfighters—strengthening deterrence, accelerating operational decision-making, and maintaining decisive advantage in a software-defined era.

A commercial-first acquisition posture is essential for sustaining U.S. GEOINT dominance and ensuring that taxpayer dollars fund mission-unique capabilities, not the reinvention of existing commercial technology. The GEOINT enterprise must embrace this shift by eliminating duplicative GOTS development, accelerating commercial integration, and aligning government engineering to tasks that truly require sovereign capabilities. Only by leveraging America’s commercial innovation engine can our GEOINT Enterprise maintain dominance and ensure rapid, decisive advantages for the warfighter.

References:

• The GOTS Dilemma: Shifting Resources from Geospatial Solution Duplication to Dominance, GeoSurreal, Oct. 21, 2025

• Secretary of Defense Memorandum: Directing Modern Software Acquisition to Maximize Lethality, Mar. 6, 2025

• Inside Defense: DoD to “Redouble” Efforts to Favor Commercial Procurements, May 28, 2025

• Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act of 1994, Pub. L. 103–355.

• Executive Order 14265, April 16, 2025.

Project Geospatial's "The So What"

Why does this matter, and what does it mean for the geospatial industry?

Keith Barber’s white paper isn’t just policy critique; it’s a warning flare for the entire geospatial intelligence ecosystem. For decades, the default mechanism for major defense acquisition has been to build custom, insulated GOTS platforms from the ground up, under the illusion of ultimate security and bespoke functionality. Barber rips the band-aid off that mindset, highlighting what many in the industry have whispered behind closed doors: We are paying a premium to reinvent the wheel, and getting a slower, less capable wheel in the process.

Here are the key takeaways for our community:

• The Death of the "100% Requirements" Myth: For too long, government PMs have used the excuse that a COTS product only meets 85% of their requirements to justify spending billions building a custom solution to get that last 15%. Barber correctly points out that by the time the custom build is done, the commercial market has evolved three generations ahead. The "So What" here is a cultural shift: good enough today beats perfect tomorrow. The DoD and IC need to start modifying their internal workflows to fit commercial software, rather than forcing software to fit their legacy workflows.
• A Windfall for the Commercial Geo-Sector: If the Hegseth directive is strictly enforced (requiring Secretary-level waivers for GOTS), the floodgates will open for commercial geospatial vendors. Companies providing mature mapping, targeting, data fusion, and analytic software no longer have to compete against the government's own R&D labs. The mandate is clear: buy first, build only when absolutely desperate.
• The Role of the Integrator is Changing: Traditional defense contractors can no longer rely on endless "development and sustainment" contracts for monolithic government systems. The new sweet spot is in integration. The most valuable players in the space will be the ones who can take commercial tools (like SOCET GXP or modern cloud-native GIS architectures) and seamlessly knit them into classified environments using hybrid approaches.
• Words Matter: The deliberate use of "Department of War" rather than "Defense" is more than a rhetorical flourish, it’s a mindset reset. The focus is shifting away from bureaucratic self-preservation and back to lethality, speed, and fielding systems that actually work in a contested environment.

Join the Conversation: What’s your take? Is the government finally ready to let go of its GOTS addiction, or will institutional inertia find a way around these new directives? Let us know in the comments below.