Elodie Collins
John Parkes, CEO of Parry Labs and a 2025 Wash100 Award winner, said the 2024 grounding of the F-35 Lightning II fighter jet highlights systemic challenges at the Department of Defense in delivering timely software upgrades to military platforms.
In a profile published by NextGen Defense, Parkes said he founded Parry Labs to create software infrastructure that enables military systems to quickly integrate new capabilities and become as adaptable as a smartphone.
His company’s product platform Stratia, the executive explained, can simplify software delivery for systems that have “safety criticality, cyber criticality, that have all sorts of networked interdependencies.”
He added that he wants the technology to make software delivery in the military simple and scalable, much like what Amazon Web Services did for the cloud.
“We want to bring that same ease of integration to complex military platforms, but purpose-built for the safety, security and mission speed requirements of the warfighter,” he shared.
The Challenge of Increasingly Complex Military Platforms
According to Parkes, modern military platforms increasingly grow complex due to separate computers controlling various equipment that require extensive custom integration to make them interoperable.
“Historically, that environment has not been made simple,” he explained. “In fact, it’s almost been intentionally made complex because the people who own those complex systems were able to create long-enduring vendor lock.”
The Pentagon’s push for the implementation of the Modular Open Systems Approach, or MOSA, allows different vendors to collaborate to ensure that different components can operate together without requiring custom integrations.
He said MOSA reduces the time and cost required to develop new capabilities.
