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In large endeavors in business and war, competitive advantage often requires capabilities that result from the interoperability of many systems and the integration of many processes. To succeed in these endeavors, enterprises seek to create and maintain their best capabilities (considering performance, cost, risk, and agility) under rapidly evolving circumstances. While achieving the best capabilities within budget and schedule constraints may be straightforward for individual systems with documented performance requirements, it is more difficult to achieve for functions that are enabled by multiple systems (i.e., systems-of-systems) and even more difficult to achieve across large, multi-functional enterprises. DOD is faced by these challenges at multiple scales within and across many interacting functional areas and across its enterprise. To facilitate progress, it effectively (and sometimes explicitly) designates specific SOSs and associated controlling authorities at the OSD, military service, and functional levels. It also introduces integrating concepts (such as architectures), processes (such as functional capability boards), and SOS-related concepts (such as portfolio management). This paper presents a theoretical framework for thinking about SOSs on a large scale, a net-centric approach to SOS engineering, and a way ahead for DOD.