The USS Winston Churchill, the first Arleigh Burke class destroyer of the United States Navy equipped with a virtual Aegis system. Recently, the United States Navy's first Arleigh Burke class destroyer equipped with a virtual Aegis system, the Winston Churchill, completed relevant tests. At the same time, the US Navy is conducting testing and upgrading plans for an additional six destroyers of this class and four land-based Aegis system stations. The virtual Aegis system is a software component of the US Navy's Aegis system, which can reduce the deployment requirements of the Aegis hardware system on ships, improve the utilization efficiency of the system, and expand its platform usage scope. What is the Virtual Aegis System? The Virtual Aegis System is a development program supported by the Automatic Test and Retest (ATRT) project of the US Navy's Sea Systems Command, and it is also the first pilot program to achieve a breakthrough under this project. The "Automatic Testing and Retesting" project is a concept demonstration project initiated by the US military in 2006, with the aim of using commercial automatic testing technology to reduce the development cost of US Navy combat system software, improve software quality, and shorten software certification time. After the project entered formal research in 2009, the US Navy Marine Systems Command injected funds into the project through the Small and Micro Enterprise Innovation Program and selected Aegis Combat System, Ship Self Defense System, and Offshore Combat Ship as pilot projects to develop a virtual Aegis system. The virtual Aegis system is the virtualization of software, data resources, and tools from the original Aegis system. The virtual computing environment it builds includes all the software in the existing Aegis system, with the ultimate goal of completely separating the software of the Aegis combat system from the underlying computer hardware, so that the Aegis system software can run on general hardware servers without the need for specific hardware servers, greatly saving hardware server costs and improving the comprehensive combat capability of ships. For small ships, land vehicles, and stations that cannot be equipped with Aegis systems, corresponding combat capabilities can also be obtained by equipping them with virtual Aegis systems. The virtual Aegis system has unbound the software and hardware in the original system, which is beneficial for accelerating the generation of system capabilities. Due to the use of commercial computer hardware, its servers are very compact and only require simple air-cooled equipment, greatly reducing the installation threshold for platforms such as ships. In March 2019, the US Navy conducted live fire interception tests using the virtual Aegis system for the first time on the Arleigh Burke class destroyer Thomas Hardna. In September 2020, the US Indo Pacific Command used the virtual Aegis system to transmit target information to Army and Air Force units for use by the US Army's high mobility rocket artillery system and Patriot-3 missile defense system. In 2022, the US Indo Pacific Command successfully paired the "Diamond Shield" combat management system with several virtual Aegis systems hundreds of miles away during the "Valiant Shield 2022" exercise, sending precise targeted intelligence to the frontline "Patriot-3" segmented enhanced missile and "Hamas" rocket artillery systems. On December 15, 2023, the US Navy completed the first onboard test of the virtual Aegis system and is expected to increase the number of test vessels in the future. The US Navy believes that the emergence of the virtual Aegis system will greatly promote the speed of software development for the Aegis system. In the past, when developing new software functions for the Aegis system, preliminary testing was usually conducted in an onshore laboratory, and when the software reached a certain level of maturity, it was tested on board. The R&D team will modify, certify, and conduct the next round of testing based on the test data, and the entire process will take 18 to 24 months. After the emergence of the virtual Aegis system, this process was greatly accelerated. Before entering the specialized testing program, the new software can be tested on board in a live fire exercise environment, obtaining various data from the ship's sensors and subsystems to test the new software's functions. The entire process will not affect the ship's combat mission and will not incur additional costs. In addition, the virtual Aegis system greatly expands the application scope of the Aegis system. The installation standards for virtual Aegis systems are much lower than traditional Aegis systems, and their combat functions are not affected. The system can also be installed and used on unmanned vessels to enhance their combat capabilities, which will provide significant support for the US Navy in building a distributed maritime combat mode. The emergence of the virtual Aegis system has also enabled rapid upgrades of the Aegis system. Based on the current iteration cycle of the Aegis system, the US Navy releases the latest version of the Aegis system software every two years, and ships installing the Aegis system need to queue up for upgrades, with a waiting time of about 6 to 9 years. The emergence of the virtual Aegis system will completely change this situation, as it enhances the combat capability of the Aegis system with near real-time software update speed. Therefore, the virtual Aegis system provides a new direction for the development of the US Navy's combat capabilities. The US Navy believes that as the system gradually integrates into various combat stages and is promoted for deployment on small platforms, all platforms of the US aircraft carrier fleet may be equipped with a virtual Aegis system to achieve joint reconnaissance and observation of communication, early warning, situational awareness and other intelligence, as well as remote real-time sharing of multi service target intelligence. Its impact deserves further attention. (New Society)