This article is based on reporting originally published at fcw.com. The original photo credit is: U.S. Air Force photo by J.M. Eddins Jr., showing a software development team at the Boston office of Kessel Run, a program within the DOD’s Defense Innovation Unit.
From Bespoke Muskets to Interchangeable Software
In 1801, Eli Whitney demonstrated the military value of interchangeable parts to President John Adams and President-elect Thomas Jefferson by disassembling several muskets and reassembling one working firearm from randomly selected parts. Before Whitney’s demonstration, muskets were bespoke, artisanal creations — each component custom-fitted to a specific weapon. Replacing a single part required a skilled gunsmith.
Today, interchangeable parts are taken for granted across every domain of manufacturing, from rifle bolt carriers to vehicle alternators. Yet government information systems frequently suffer from the same problem Whitney solved more than two centuries ago: they are bespoke, tightly coupled constructions that require specialist teams to configure, deploy, modify, or repair when something breaks.
To address that problem, the Department of Defense (DOD) has been accelerating adoption of DevSecOps — an approach that aims to bring the same standardization, repeatability, and resilience to software that interchangeable parts brought to manufacturing.
What Is DevSecOps?
DevSecOps combines three disciplines — Development, Security, and Operations — into a unified culture supported by integrated processes and tooling. The goal is to enable more efficient delivery and ongoing management of secure software at pace.
The critical distinction between DevSecOps and conventional DevOps is the treatment of security. In traditional software development processes — including many Waterfall-era models — security is a checkpoint: a gate the project must pass before release. In DevSecOps, security is a first-class citizen woven into every stage of the lifecycle, from initial design and code review through automated testing, deployment, and post-release monitoring.
Federal adoption is broad. Agencies including the General Services Administration (GSA), the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Army, and the U.S. Navy have active DevSecOps programs.
The Three Pillars of DevSecOps
1. Processes
From a process perspective, DevSecOps extends beyond the software development lifecycle practices of agile and Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) to encompass operational behaviors of the running system — including security posture.
A key enabler is configuration as code: expressing infrastructure and environment configuration in version-controlled files rather than through manual, undocumented procedures. When operational tasks are defined as code, they can be automated, reviewed, tested, and repeated reliably. The practical result is push-button automation — the ability to redeploy an entire infrastructure component, from bare metal to full operational capability, by triggering the appropriate automation playbook. That kind of repeatability dramatically increases system resilience and reduces mean time to recovery.
Iterative delivery also shifts the risk profile of a project. Rather than investing months or years before any working software reaches users, teams release smaller increments, gather real-world feedback, and course-correct continuously. This is the principle of moving risk left — catching problems early, when they are cheapest to fix.
2. Tools
No single product constitutes a DevSecOps platform. There is no “DevSecOps box” you can install in a data center. Successful programs assemble a toolchain covering several functional categories:
- Source code version control — tracking changes and enabling collaboration (e.g., Git-based platforms)
- Build automation — compiling, packaging, and publishing software artifacts on every commit
- Test automation — unit, integration, and end-to-end tests that run without human intervention
- Security validation — static analysis (SAST), dynamic analysis (DAST), dependency scanning, and container image scanning integrated into the pipeline
- Performance testing — load and stress testing to validate that deployments meet operational requirements
- Configuration management — tools such as Ansible, Terraform, or similar that codify infrastructure state
- Project management — issue tracking, backlog prioritization, and team collaboration tools
The emphasis should be on selecting the right classes of tools for your organization’s mission and maturity, rather than replicating another organization’s exact stack. Tooling choices will vary across agencies, classification environments, and mission sets.
3. People and Organizational Culture
The people dimension is often the most challenging aspect of DevSecOps adoption in the federal government. Conway’s Law observes that organizations tend to produce system designs that mirror their own communication structures. Agencies organized into functional silos — separate development, security, and operations branches that communicate primarily through formal ticketing systems — will naturally produce siloed, tightly coupled systems.
DevSecOps requires a different structure. Effective adoption calls for cross-functional product teams in which developers, security engineers, and operations staff work together continuously toward a shared goal: successfully shipping and sustaining a product. Many government agencies are actively flattening hierarchies and reorganizing personnel around products rather than around technical roles.
This restructuring drives results-oriented outcomes. When everyone on a team shares accountability for the security, reliability, and delivery of the same product, the incentives align and velocity improves.
Key Advantages of DevSecOps for Government IT
Shorter Time to Value
Traditional Waterfall development front-loads extensive requirements documentation and design before a single line of production code is written. This approach can lock teams into delivering a large feature set at the first release — features that may not all deliver meaningful value to end users. By contrast, DevSecOps’s iterative feedback loop allows agencies to release smaller, higher-impact increments and measure their effect before committing to the next set of capabilities. The result is a shorter gap between investment and operational value.
Faster Fielding of New Capabilities
Automated pipelines reduce the manual effort required to build, test, and deploy software. With security validation integrated into automation rather than handled as a separate manual review, the time between writing code and having it running in production shrinks substantially. For the DOD, this means new warfighting capabilities or mission-critical tools can reach users in weeks rather than years.
Moving Risk Left
Integrating security testing, compliance checks, and vulnerability scanning into the CI/CD pipeline means defects are found when they are introduced — not months later during a pre-release security audit. Catching a vulnerability during development is orders of magnitude cheaper to fix than discovering it in a production system under operational load. This “shift-left” approach to security is one of the most concrete risk-management benefits DevSecOps delivers.
Increased Resilience Through Automation
When infrastructure configuration is expressed as code and deployments are fully automated, recovery from failures becomes a repeatable procedure rather than a heroic manual effort. The same automation that performs a routine deployment can restore a failed system to a known-good state — reducing downtime and the dependence on individual specialist knowledge that makes bespoke systems so fragile.
Conclusion
Whitney’s interchangeable parts made it possible for soldiers in the field to maintain their own weapons without a gunsmith. DevSecOps pursues an analogous goal for government information systems: standardized, automated, and resilient platforms that can be maintained, extended, and recovered by cross-functional teams rather than bespoke specialist configurations. With broad adoption underway across the DOD and the wider federal government, DevSecOps is no longer an experimental approach — it is becoming the operational baseline for modern government IT delivery.