Sorry -- agile was the wrong weird to use. I didn't mean agile as in loose engineering standards -- I meant agile as in "ability to react quickly and decisively to unexpected events". You can't possibly plan for every contingency, as the story proved, so it's crucial that your organization can quickly and easily fix problems as they come up. This has implications for both engineering and people systems. OODA loop is a better description of what I was thinking of (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop).

So having modular, cleanly separated subsystems would matter as much for hardware as for software.