Systems Engineering requirements for legacy DoD hardware upgrade and sustainment requirements definition, analysis, and validation

Modernization and sustainment efforts for legacy Department of Defense (DoD) electronic systems present systems engineers with unique challenges and opportunities to potentially increase or optimize legacy system performance. These efforts sometimes take the form of complete, top-level system replacement, but significant effort is often expended in updating and/or upgrading subsystems and circuits via replacement of specific obsolete components. This paper presents the motivation for applying systems engineering (SysE) efforts during the course of sustainment, discuss specific, relative engineering approaches, and provide examples of systems engineering applied to military electronic systems.