2024 DSP Achievement Award Recipients

Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

Mr. Chris Paquette

This inaugural Lifetime Achievement in Standardization award recognizes Mr. Christopher Paquette for his profound 40-year career, in transforming the Navy's engineering culture and significantly advancing standardization across the Department of the Navy and DoD. Through his dedicated leadership, particularly as the Department of the Navy Standardization Officer, Mr. Paquette not only developed and championed critical technical standards—from nuclear quality assurance to submarine fabrication—but also institutionalized policies for engineering and technical authority, ensuring that standards are user-centric, rigorously applied, and continually improved. His efforts have directly resulted in billions of dollars in savings by streamlining processes, reducing supply chain variation, preventing costly rework, and fostering a culture where technical expertise is preserved and leveraged, ultimately delivering more capable, interoperable, and affordable systems to the warfighter with greater speed and efficiency.

Distinguished Achievement Award Winner

U.S. Army, Army Futures Command (AFC), CMOSS/SOSA

Mr. Jason Dirner's pivotal leadership has revolutionized military systems by spearheading the development and transition of the Common Modular Open Systems Approach (CMOSS) and Sensor Open Systems Architecture (SOSA™) standards. These critical standardization efforts address the long-standing challenges of costly, time-consuming, and redundant integration kits for new warfighting capabilities, which previously resulted in oversized, underpowered, and unaffordable platforms. By establishing a "Universal A-Kit" infrastructure, CMOSS and SOSA™ enable modularity, shared resources, and enhanced interoperability for C5ISR/EW/PNT systems, significantly reducing lifecycle costs, fostering competition, simplifying logistics, and allowing for rapid technological upgrades across U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and allied Ministry of Defence programs. This standardization is projected to deliver over $100 million in lifecycle savings, dramatically improving readiness and accelerating the fielding of cutting-edge capabilities.

Achievement Award Winners

• The MIL-HDBK-542 Cold Spray and Nondestructive Testing Methods for Quality Assurance Team

Developed in FY2024 by a joint team of Army, Navy, and Air Force subject matter experts, the Department of Defense Handbook, Cold Spray Nondestructive Testing Methods for Quality Assurance (MIL-HDBK-542) provides critically needed guidance for ensuring quality in Cold Spray applications across the DoD. This essential handbook standardizes nondestructive testing (NDT) methods—including visual, liquid penetrant, magnetic particle, eddy current, ultrasound, radiography, and thermography—for Cold Spray repairs, a rapidly growing process vital for restoring damaged, worn, or corroded military assets. Its introduction significantly enhances the safety and readiness of DoD weapon systems, enabling the reclamation of expensive components and is projected to save the Department of Defense over $100 million annually by expanding the efficient and reliable use of Cold Spray technology across all services and with allied nations.

Team members honored include: Adam D. Barrett, Brandi Briggs, Victor K. Champagne, Jason E. Hansel, and Jason B. Wolf

• U.S. Navy Generic Instrumentation and Control Team

This award-winning team transitioned the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program (NNPP) to generic instrumentation and control (I&C) systems, addressing unsustainable rising costs of obsolescence management and growing non-recurring development and qualification costs due to lack of commonality between designs. This strategic standardization directly tackles the escalating costs of obsolescence management and development for complex digital I&C systems, achieving remarkable 40-60% reductions in non-recurring development and qualification expenses. Crucially, it enables "life-of-ship" systems, eliminating the need for costly technology refreshes and is projected to save over $500 million for the Virginia Class alone. With components logging over 2 billion cumulative hours of energized use, this standardized approach not only ensures a common, efficient operational experience for sailors and streamlined supply chain management but also significantly enhances reliability, accelerates development, and delivers profound long-term cost savings across the entire nuclear fleet, proving standardization as a critical driver for efficiency and readiness.

Team members honored include: Brian McNamara, Victor Harris, Jennifer Hahn, Nicholas Venanzi, and Michael Dodson.

• U.S. Air Force Open Architecture Management Technical Team

The Open Architecture Management (OAM) Technical Team's leadership in standardizing Modular Open System Approach (MOSA) principles has a profound impact on the Department of the Air Force's modernization and its ability to maintain technological superiority. By managing critical standards like Open Mission Systems (OMS), Universal Command and Control Interface (UCI), and Sensor Open Systems Architecture (SOSA), the OAM Team enables the rapid integration of new capabilities into over 30 weapon systems in days rather than years, directly enhancing warfighter effectiveness and outpacing adversaries. This standardization dramatically improves interoperability, allowing diverse systems to seamlessly work together for multi-domain operations, and fosters hardware modularity through commercial off-the-shelf components, leading to significant cost reductions—including an estimated 85% less source code for modern platforms and substantial savings in component acquisition. Ultimately, these efforts deliver a more agile, adaptable, and cost-effective approach to defense acquisition, directly contributing to national security and strategic advantage in Great Power Competition.

Team members honored include: Stephen R. Brooks, Vahid Rajabain-Schwart, Trenton M. Kline, Devin W. Wisdom, and Erin Rogers.