System safety engineering is an engineering discipline that employs specialized knowledge and skills in applying scientific and engineering principles, criteria, and techniques to identify hazards and then to eliminate the hazards or reduce the associated risks when the hazards cannot be eliminated.

MIL-STD 882E, DoD Standard Practice System Safety is a key element of systems engineering that provides a standard, generic method for identifying, classifying, and mitigating hazards.

DoD is committed to protecting personnel from accidental death, injury, or occupational illness, including mitigating risk to civilians from harm, and to safeguarding defense systems, infrastructure, and property from accidental destruction or damage while executing mission requirements of national defense. Within mission requirements, the DoD also will ensure the quality of the environment is protected to the maximum extent practical. Integral to these efforts is the use of a system safety approach to identify hazards and manage the associated risks. A key DoD objective is to expand the use of this system safety methodology to integrate risk management into the overall systems engineering process rather than addressing hazards as operational considerations.

DoD engineers use the systems engineering process to influence system designs during all stages of the defense acquisition life cycle to mitigate identified hazards. The system safety engineering process applies to both hardware and software within the system or its associated system of systems (SoS).

With the increase in autonomous systems, artificial intelligence features, and the growing volume and complexity of software within systems, it is imperative to further develop and optimize the system safety engineering discipline to address these challenges.