When Secretary of War Pete Hegseth addressed the National War College on November 7, 2025, he issued a clear and urgent mandate: MOSA should be the operational backbone of modernization across every warfighting domain.
His call emphasized three imperatives:
Lynx meets that mandate today. We are delivering the Secretary of War’s vision for a modular defense future.
Lynx: Purpose-Built for MOSA
Since 2019, LYNX MOSA.ic has been a modular software framework of choice, designed for mission-critical systems that demand safety, security, and certifiability. It enables deterministic hardware partitioning on multi-core processors and supports mixed-criticality workloads.
Unlike vendors that retrofit MOSA goals onto legacy monolithic products, LYNX MOSA.ic is the industry’s most advanced modular, open, and secure foundation for mixed-criticality systems—architected from the ground up for the modernization priorities Secretary Hegseth outlined: speed, openness, modularity, and resilience. Lynx is not just MOSA-compliant. It is MOSA-by-design.
The U.S. Army’s Future Long Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) program is redefining vertical lift. LYNX MOSA.ic is at the core of this innovation, chosen by Bell Textron, Inc. as the trusted operating environment to help power the Army’s next-generation aircraft and the MV-75.
How LYNX MOSA.ic Turns the DoW’s Vision Into Operational Reality
1. The Fast Path to Multicore Certification
Lynx enables faster, lower-risk certification than any other platform because its LynxSecure separation-kernel hypervisor is uniquely packaged with a unikernel. LynxSecure is a true separation-kernel hypervisor built on a minimal, Rushby-defined architecture, one that isolates change, prevents ripple-effect retesting, and allows each component to be certified independently. With the addition of the LynxElement unikernel, MOSA designs gain even tighter encapsulation and dramatically smaller trusted computing bases, enabling deterministic behavior, simpler evidence generation, and repeatable certification outcomes that scale as systems evolve.
DoW programs are slowed by platforms that couple OS services, drivers, and applications into a monolithic privileged layer. Any change forces recertification of the entire system.
The Lynx platform eradicates those pitfalls with:
Precisely partitioning hardware resources: The Lynx Platform’s separation kernel hypervisor, called LynxSecure, is the only true Rushby separation kernel. LynxSecure supports multicore CPUs by precisely partitioning hardware resources to meet strict safety and security needs is the only hypervisor in the embedded and edge-compute markets adhering to the original Rushby model, formally constrained, mathematically minimal, and uniquely resistant to unintended interactions.
Other software stacks in the market cannot match this combination of formal minimality, determinism, and isolation due to architectural decisions made decades ago.
2. Extreme Scalability and Multicore Support with Unikernel-Based Design Competitors Simply Don’t Offer
A major differentiator of the LYNX MOSA.ic platform is LynxElement, a unikernel guest framework that allows each application or service to run in a lightweight, purpose-built OS environment.
This enables:
Lynx is the only vendor to pair a formally constrained separation kernel with a production-grade unikernel component model purpose-built for certifiable MOSA systems, delivering a unique combination of modularity, portability, and reuse that other architectures cannot replicate.
3. Rapid Integration Through True Modularity
Because LynxSecure enforces strict spatial and temporal isolation and LynxElement minimizes what runs inside each partition, LYNX MOSA.ic provides the fastest path to integration across:
Each becomes its own certifiable “building block,” inserted or updated independently without system-wide regression testing. This reduces integration cycles from months to days.
4. Cross-Domain Interoperability Built on Open Standards
Beyond MOSA, LYNX MOSA.ic exposes clean, standards-aligned APIs based on:
This ensures:
5. Banishing Vendor Lock-in
LYNX MOSA.ic reduces vendor lock-in not just at the OS layer, but across the entire architecture. Programs gain full flexibility to mix vendors, swap components, and refresh technology without recertifying the system.
How Lynx does this better than competitors:
With Lynx, each component is replaceable without touching the hypervisor. Other proprietary frameworks, privileged-layer drivers, and tightly coupled stacks force long-term vendor dependence. Lynx avoids this through its unique architectural design.
6. Reinforcing the Secretary’s Supply Chain Mandate
LYNX MOSA.ic strengthens supply-chain freedom and domestic manufacturing resilience by:
Lynx enables architectural sovereignty, not vendor dependence; it’s exactly what we understand Secretary Hegseth outlined.
7. Empowering the New PAE (Portfolio Acquisition Executive) Model
The shift from program-centric acquisition to portfolio-centric acquisition is meant to streamline governance, speed decisions, and force modular, open architectures (MOSA) across families of capability, not just within single programs.
As MOSA becomes a portfolio mandate, not a program choice, PAEs by design can enforce:
In short, the Lynx portfolio of products offers:
The Pentagon’s modernization priorities are unambiguous: speed, openness, modularity, and resilience. LYNX MOSA.ic is how defense programs achieve those priorities today, safely, predictably, and with certification rigor that competitors cannot match.
Let's operationalize the Secretary’s MOSA vision together and deliver on a vision for a modular defense future.
Schedule an Architecture Discussion