Customers ship their equipment to ONEIL so the company can take it apart.
The technical documentation firm runs two large teardown facilities at its headquarters in Miamisburg, Ohio. Staff disassemble whatever arrives, learn how it operates and learn how to troubleshoot it. Then they write the manual.
“That’s a really big thing, to have that and see what happens if you disconnect the wire here or there,” Chris Mofield, ONEIL’s Defense Business Manager, told The Defense Post, on the sidelines of AUSA 2026 in Washington. “That’s something that I’ve always felt really differentiates ONEIL from some of our competitors.”
So is who does the writing. “One of the things that I’ve always felt differentiates us is we don’t necessarily hire technical writers,” Mofield said. “We hire mechanics, technicians, the people who have actually used our manuals, worked on the equipment.”
The company can teach them how to write and how to work to the specifications, he said, “a lot easier than we can teach a writer, a professional writer, how to turn a wrench or how to understand how something works. We’ve always felt that that’s one of our biggest differentiators.”
ONEIL, formally O’Neil & Associates, Inc., has been writing manuals since the 1950s. Larry E. O’Neil, an aerospace engineer who had worked at Douglas Aircraft and at Wright Field in Dayton, founded it in 1947 as a five-person mechanical design engineering firm, and technical manual preparation was added a few years later. Today it develops technical publications, training and product support solutions, and the equipment it documents tends to be the kind that costs a lot, lasts for decades and cannot be allowed to fail: aircraft, tanks, locomotives, construction equipment. It has been 100 percent employee-owned since 2015, and its defense work sits alongside aerospace and commercial clients.
Writing to the Spec
Mofield’s description of the defense side of the business starts with the paperwork.
“From a high level, we create the technical documentation that’s needed to support the equipment that the Army buys,” he said. “Or the Army, or any branch of service, really. All that documentation has to be prepared to specific formats and specifications. So we’re experts in compliance with those specifications. We know them, we have tools to help us ensure compliance.”
Most of that work comes through the companies that build the equipment, not the government that buys it. “We have a few contracts directly with the military, but mostly we work with equipment manufacturers who have these requirements,” Mofield said.
Asked whether ONEIL plans to go after more direct work with the services, he said it does. “We would definitely like to, and we look for opportunities.” The one direct contract it has today is with the Air Force, he said, for an electronic manual viewing solution built to the S1000D specification, “which is the most used specification within the aerospace industry, as well as in Europe and other countries overseas.”
S1000D is the international standard for technical publications developed by Europe’s aerospace and defense industry association, ASD, and maintained jointly with its American counterparts. Instead of page-based manuals, it breaks content into data modules held in a common source database, which is what lets a viewer pull up exactly the procedure a technician needs rather than the chapter it sits in.
ONEIL has described one such Air Force program publicly. In November 2024, the company announced it had been selected through the Air Force’s Small Business Innovation Research process to field an interactive electronic technical manual for the KC-46 Division using its ONeSOURCE S1000D viewer, which it called the largest IETM in the Air Force inventory. The company says the same viewer has also been used on the Air Force’s MQ-9 program.
Why Manufacturers Don’t Do It Themselves
Why do manufacturers hand this work to ONEIL rather than keep it in house? Is it compliance, or is it staff hours? “A little of both,” Mofield said.
“The compliance is a big part of it, because there’s a lot of specialized tools, software tools, that have to be used, and you have to be expert in them to use them and publish, to make sure that that documentation complies to the specification.”
“But also because this is all we do. Technical documentation is all that we do. We are experts, and we can save hours over doing it internally.”
Before they came to ONEIL, he said, a lot of companies had their engineering staff writing the documentation. “Well, you don’t want to pay engineers to write. You want to pay them to design stuff.”
The Army Wants Its Data
The Army has spent the past year and a half trying to get more control over the technical data behind the equipment it buys. In an April 2025 memo on Army transformation and acquisition reform, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed the service to seek right-to-repair provisions in existing and new contracts. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll has pressed the case since, telling the Senate Armed Services Committee in May that contractors’ claims the Army could not be trusted with sensitive data were among the more preposterous things he had heard, and that the Army wants to buy the data, not take it. In June, the House Armed Services Committee voted to add right-to-repair language to its version of the fiscal 2027 defense authorization bill, requiring the Pentagon to retain government purpose rights to technical data when it purchases equipment. The Army has also been surveying existing contracts for places where limited access to technical data keeps soldiers from fixing their own equipment.
For a company that lives on manufacturers’ technical data, Mofield said the push is “some of both,” help and hindrance, though what he went on to describe was mostly upside.
“It does help, because the companies that we work with, we’re very reliant on their technical data. Their engineering drawings, their bills of material, things such as that. And if they don’t have those up to snuff, it makes our job much harder.”
“So yeah, we do like it when there are those technical data requirements put down by the Army, because that ensures that we’re going to get really good data.”
AI, Without Letting the Drawings Out
The question for any company that produces manuals by the thousand pages is what happens when the people using them would rather search than page.
“AI is something we’re starting to investigate more,” Mofield said. “We’re starting to utilize more of the tools.” ONEIL already uses it extensively on the software side of its business, he said, and is looking for ways to implement it on the operations side and the documentation side.
The limit is the customer’s data. “We have to be very careful, because what’s most important to us is protecting our customers’ data,” he said. “We cannot expose that to a public-facing AI that could post somebody’s engineering drawings on the web for anyone to copy.”
Where it does fit, in his view, is quality control. “What we’re seeing is it’s a way to enhance our services, to ensure consistency, to help with that compliance piece, to make sure that things are compliant.”
“We’re very conscious of the safety of the people that are using our products,” Mofield said. Using AI on the data to make sure everything is safe and presented correctly “is something that we’re looking at.”
Waiting on the Army for S1000D
ONEIL demonstrated its ONeSOURCE S1000D viewer last year. The Army, Mofield said, has not yet bought it.
“The Army has not bought S1000D yet. They are investigating, and some of the Army PMs that we work with have been asking about it and talking about it,” he said. “We felt that our Air Force products we fielded were very well positioned for that.”
The Army’s manuals are built to its own standards, the MIL-STD-40051 family, rather than S1000D. Mofield’s case for the switch comes down to how the two handle equipment that keeps changing. S1000D, he said, is a lot more robust in its ability to handle equipment once it is in service.
“If you think of aircraft that are bought in large numbers, there are regular design updates to those as it goes through its life cycle,” he said. “So with S1000D there’s a very robust applicability tagging structure that allows you to get to a finer level of granularity than the tools the Army is using.”
In plain terms, applicability tagging lets a manual know which version of a part sits on which tail number, so a technician working on one aircraft sees only the procedures that apply to it.
ONeSOURCE is an umbrella rather than a single product. “We have a number of other products under the ONeSOURCE umbrella,” Mofield said. The one in widest use across the company’s customers is ONeVIEW, an intelligent schematic tool.
“When a mechanic is taught how to troubleshoot a system, they’re given a paper schematic and a highlighter, and told to trace the circuits,” he said. “Well, this does it in an automated, electronic fashion on their screen. They can click on a wire and it will highlight that entire circuit, to help them diagnose an issue with a wire, a switch, anything that’s within that circuit.”
“That’s one of our big products,” Mofield said, along with the S1000D viewer. “While the US Army isn’t using it yet, we are using it for a number of international programs where some of our customers are selling their equipment internationally. And because that is very prominent in Europe, we already have that solution ready for them.”
A Subscription Product for Smaller Customers
Asked where the growth comes from over the next two to three years, Mofield pointed to software.
“We have some growth planned on the software side of our business,” he said. “For the first time ever, we’re productizing our software into a subscription service.”
The target is “a smaller customer that maybe can’t afford our services to write, but they still want to publish, and they still want to house all their data and have it look coherent and structured,” he said. “It’s a software that will help facilitate that aspect, to author your data, be able to publish it with your branding and everything.”
“That’s probably the thing we’re most excited about,” Mofield said. The product is due out this fall. “We already have, I believe, six customers signed up for that.”
