The Unintended Straitjacket: How MOSA and SOSA Are Smothering Innovation

For decades, open standards have been a rallying cry for those of us working in the defense electronics ecosystem. The idea is simple: create interoperable systems, reduce redundancy, and maximize reuse—ideally while driving down costs and speeding time to field. On paper, it’s hard to argue against initiatives like the Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) and the Sensor Open Systems Architecture (SOSA). They promise elegance through standardization and agility through modularity. But on the ground—inside engineering labs and on drawing boards across the industry—the story isn’t quite so rosy.

What began as a framework to empower innovation has, in many respects, ossified into a rigid doctrine that hampers it. As MOSA and SOSA mature, they’re becoming less a set of guiding principles and more a list of inflexible prescriptions. Instead of enabling smart, lean design, we’re watching engineers bend brilliant solutions into awkward shapes just to remain compliant.

Let’s be clear: the vision behind these standards is laudable. No one disputes the value of interoperability, reduced vendor lock, and lifecycle affordability. But the current execution—particularly in the form of hardware slot profiles, connector specifications, and backplane configurations—is increasingly at odds with what the services say they need most: smaller, lighter, more power-efficient systems that can be fielded quickly and perform reliably at the tactical edge.

This is where the contradiction comes into sharp relief. SWaP-C (Size, Weight, Power, and Cost) is still the gold standard by which system success is measured. Every program, from soldier-borne sensors to autonomous vehicles, is under pressure to minimize footprint and energy consumption while increasing computing density. Yet MOSA-aligned architectures often demand large form factors, generous thermal envelopes, and fixed interface rules that conflict with those very SWaP-C imperatives.

We’re seeing it again and again: engineers are forced to sacrifice optimal design paths in order to shoehorn capabilities into SOSA slots. Boards are made larger than necessary. Unused I/O channels must be routed just to check compliance boxes. Thermal margins are wasted because the spec mandates more headroom than the application requires. In some cases, it feels as if we’re designing systems not for the mission, but for the standard.

And here’s the deeper concern: when compliance trumps performance, innovation suffers. Startups with bleeding-edge solutions are sidelined because their breakthrough doesn’t fit within a legacy mechanical envelope. Prime contractors invest more time in documentation and certification than in experimentation or field testing. It’s the classic bureaucracy trap—standardization for the sake of itself, rather than for the warfighter.

We are not advocating for a free-for-all or a return to stovepiped solutions. The goals of MOSA and SOSA—interoperability, reuse, agility—are more relevant than ever. But they must be treated as enablers, not constraints. The standards must evolve to allow for mission-driven flexibility, not just platform uniformity. SWaP-C realities should not be subordinate to the shape of a card edge connector.

What’s needed is a course correction. Not a wholesale rejection of open architectures, but a recalibration of their purpose. The services must demand that compliance never becomes a substitute for performance. Industry must push back when smart designs are punished for thinking outside the card cage.

Our military doesn’t win by conforming. It wins by out-innovating. Let’s make sure our standards don’t forget that.