Integration Advantage: What America's First Warships Still Teach Us About Defense Tech

For generations, warfare had clear boundaries—land, sea and air. Today, those boundaries have disappeared. We're being challenged across every domain simultaneously, from the deepest ocean trenches to the farthest reaches of space, from the battlefield to the boardroom. We must confront not only the sophistication of these threats, but a pace of change unlike anything in our history. The speed at which technology evolves now rivals the threat itself.

As a former naval surface warfare officer, I’ve seen how quickly the battlespace can shift. But what’s happening today is more profound. Low cost drones in Ukraine and the Middle East, adversary cyberattacks, and rapid breakthroughs in AI are eroding traditional advantages and redefining how militaries fight.

This moment is unprecedented in many ways — but America has faced these types of transformational challenges before. Nearly 250 years ago, our young nation learned a lesson that still holds true: innovation matters, but integration wins.

After the American Revolution, our nation faced an urgent, existential threat. With British naval protection gone, pirates targeted American merchant ships with impunity. Trade, the lifeblood of our new economy, was at risk.

America innovated. We built the nation's first large frigates—fast, powerful ships crafted from dense, live oak that made them more resilient to decay and cannon fire than anything our adversaries sailed, as recounted by historian Ian Toll in Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy.

But the innovation was not the American timber. Rather, it was what we had to do to make that timber into a sophisticated naval system as its strength and weight created significant integration challenges. Axes literally bounced off the logs. Saws dulled instantly. Nails were nearly impossible to remove. Our shipbuilders had to rethink vessel design, construction, rigging configurations and training. They even built full scale prototypes of ship components and dragged them through forests to identify trees with closely matching shapes — an early example of adapting processes, tools and expertise to integrate a new material into an effective warfighting system.

This integration innovation, once realized, delivered a decisive military advantage — one that helped defeat piracy and later outclass much larger British battleships in the War of 1812.

Of course, modern defense systems are exponentially more complex than 18th century frigates. Hundreds of interconnected technologies — sensors, software, secure networks, autonomous systems, satellites and combat platforms — must be intricately stitched together to enable a synchronized force to operate as one. When brought together successfully, these individual pieces create critical, time-sensitive, life-saving information.

As Lieutenant General Jeth Rey recently stated at GDIT’s Battlespace of the Future event, data has become the decisive munition — as critical as a shell or missile. The advantage in modern warfare is no longer just firepower; the force that can connect, interpret and act on data the fastest will prevail.

This complexity is not theoretical — it appears every day in contested airspace. The exponential increase in drones and highly maneuverable missiles poses new challenges for conventional air defenses. Even with advanced detection capabilities from radar, satellites and reconnaissance drones, warfighters often operate multiple screens to monitor data from different sources, delaying decision making when every second counts.

To close this gap, GDIT partnered with Amazon Web Services to develop the Defense Operations Grid Mesh Accelerator (DOGMA). By integrating artificial intelligence, cloud computing and satellite connectivity, the solution can process millions of data points into a single operational picture. Instead of 30 minutes, warfighters can identify and respond to threats in under three seconds.

This breakthrough didn’t come from any one technology. It came from the integration of many — securely, at speed, and tested in real world conditions.

This is the lesson that has echoed across our history, from our earliest shipbuilders to today’s technologists: America’s strategic advantage has never been a single platform or innovation. It has been our ability to integrate technologies into mission ready systems — and to keep evolving them.

Today, we have a front row seat to the most significant technology transformation in a generation, from AI, full spectrum cyber and software development to autonomous systems and quantum computing. As we celebrate our nation’s 250th anniversary, we should remember that our greatest strength has always been our people and our capacity to innovate. But our future advantage will come from something more: the ability to continuously integrate new technologies into the systems that protect our nation and way of life.

That is America’s invisible advantage — and it will determine the next era of national security.

Amy Gilliland is the President of General Dynamics Information Technology and a former Surface Warfare Officer in the U.S. Navy.

This Perspectives article originally appeared in Forbes.