This is part 1 of an occasional series of practical lessons harvested from the U.S. Army’s Rapid Equipping Force. REF existed as an innovation cell in the Department of Defense from 2002 - 2021 to address urgent requirements on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan in days and weeks. Many of REF’s solutions derived from combining government off-the-self equipment with rapidly emerging commercial capabilities. This is one of them.
The misidentification of friendly forces has always been a problem on the battlefield. In the Gulf War up to 17% of US casualties were the result of friendly fire. In the opening days of Operation Iraqi Freedom 6 Soldiers were killed and 25 others were wounded in action in a single friendly fire incident. In 2004, Ranger Pat Tillman lost his life in a friendly fire incident.
While battlefield tracking technology (Blue Force Tracking or BFT) improved in the years between the Gulf War and OIF, the technology was bulky, power hungry and unsuitable for dismounted operations. By 2010, the BFT network provided real-time locations of vehicles, planes and helicopters, but not for individual dismounts. In a rugged environment like Afghanistan, dismounted Soldiers were ubiquitous and increasingly at risk of being targeted accidentally by their brothers in arms.
This was not a new problem to the Army. In fact they had a requirement and program of record working on a solution called the Objective Control Unit (OCU). Unfortunately the Army had been working on the OCU for over 10 years and had yet to deploy a solution. Meanwhile the iPhone and its Android partner from Google had taken the world by storm.
It is with this context that a conversation with then 10th Mountain Division Deputy Commander Brig Gen Steve Townsend in Afghanistan in late 2010 led to the search for a solution to the problem of tracking dismounted forces on the battlefield. Sadly, just before we locked in a solution in April 2011, two Marines were killed in a friendly fire incident in Helmand Valley. Their deaths became the catalyst for ensuring a solution made it to the battlefield sooner rather than later.
By September 2011 at a cost of less than $5M we delivered the 1st Brigade set of Blue Force Tracking capable systems to the battlefield, shaving two years off the OCU program of record and saving the Army more than $1.5B over its budgeted fielding.
This experience in successfully bringing a simple and immediate solution to troops in less than a year is just as relevant today as it was 15 years ago. The experience and our lessons from it have served as a guide rail for much of the work BMNT does today.
Sharing to help others do more faster, here are my five universal lessons from this episode in REF history, which saved the military time, money, and most importantly, untold lives.
1. An active curiosity is critical for innovators
While it may sound rudimentary, the often overlooked first step in solving any problem is deeply understanding it. Without a sense of curiosity and wanting to see the problem from multiple angles, that understanding won’t become a reality.
In Afghanistan, I didn’t stop after speaking to the Generals and Colonels in charge. I spoke directly to the young men and women at the very tip of the spear, who were experiencing inadequate visibility on dismounts, leading to confusion and unnecessary mistakes. They described how the moment a Soldier stepped away from a vehicle, they simply disappeared from radio radar and could easily be confused for approaching enemies on foot. These young Soldiers also shared how frustrating this problem was, in a time when cell phones and constant connectivity were the norm for them and their friends back home.
I also talked to technical experts and program managers in the Army about the solutions they were working on, almost all of which seemed to be light years behind Google and Apple.
Between the conversations, I felt instinctively that there had to be a simple solution, but I wasn’t coming up with one. In my frustration I eventually drew a diagram of the problem on a dry erase board in my office, welcoming ideas from anyone willing to engage.
It would be three months before an accidental engagement in front of that dry erase board yielded a pathway toward a solution.
2. Your networks create opportunities, your bias for action creates solutions
You never really know who you may stumble across while you explore the problem from every angle. In this case, we happened to have a few visitors in the office who saw the dry erase board. One was an engineer from Harris Radio, the other from General Dynamics. Both were developing competing radio innovations for their companies.
In the course of a short conversation in front of the sketch of the problem they defined a solution: a simple, inexpensive cable to connect an android-based cell phone to a Soldier’s radio allowing the personal location information from the phone to be transmitted across the radio network to other phones connected to radios in the same network. I was skeptical at first, but they agreed to come back and prove it would work.
A month later they were back with a fully capable demo and we ran with it.
Had those two engineers not been in the office on that given day, I might have spent months talking to the wrong people about the wrong technical problem. Had they not been willing to work together despite being from different companies, and had they not come back with a viable option, none of this would have happened.
Serendipity doesn’t come from luck. It comes from engaging a network and enticing people to work together for something greater than their own parochial self interests.
3. Stakeholder mapping is critical
Our cord solution would never have happened had it not been for senior leaders in the military believing in our work, trusting in our experience, lending their insight and championing our efforts.
Once we had a solution that we believed worked, we shifted our focus to stakeholder mapping and outreach, a key step you cannot overlook when trying to get a solution into the hands of the people who need it.
Early on we identified the stakeholders in the community who we would have to recruit to champion the effort. These included not just potential champions but also those we expected could be saboteurs to the effort. Ultimately our list included everyone from the requirement writers and Program Executive Office (PEO) responsible for the Blue Force Tracking program to the Department of the Army Management Office (DAMO) responsible for funding radio programs. Our list also included the senior officers responsible for test centers and exercises we might need to engage to refine our solution.
As expected the requirements and acquisition leaders involved were dismissive of our efforts. Surprisingly, the general officer responsible for funding the Army’s radio programs was supportive and provided us with the authority to buy radios to fully test our application. Later he would become an outright champion as he moved millions of dollars to support equipping the first brigade set of devices in Afghanistan.
It would take the combined leadership of the Network Integration Exercise at Fort Bliss, Texas, that year to block the acquisition community's efforts to keep us from testing the devices in a field environment. Ultimately their efforts enabled us to demonstrate the solution to the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, who shortly after demanded the entire community to terminate other dismounted BFT efforts and accelerate our solution Army-wide. That decision knocked two years and $1.5 billion off the cost of the original program.
The lesson here is two-fold. First, it is critical to establish a list of stakeholders and potential saboteurs at every level from the user to the buyer, senior leaders with decision authority, those with budgets and those working in adjacent spaces. Understanding their mission and learning from them how your project will help or hinder them is job No. 1. With that information at hand it is much easier to predict where you will find help and where you will run into roadblocks.
Second, it is important to constantly update the stakeholder map. Noting that as the project moves along or runs into problems, stakeholders’ attitudes change. Some will become more supportive, others less so. Communicating facts and insights from your learning is key to keeping your stakeholders engaged and the No. 1 way you will flip a saboteur into being a supporter.
4. Solve the problem, not the requirement
In the military, stagnant requirements are ever-present obstacles. When an agency produces a requirement, the context may not survive the test of time. The initiator may have only understood one fraction of the situation, leaving room for ample misinterpretation.
In the case of our friendly fire problem, the requirement referenced needing more digital access to Soldiers on the battlefield. To solve this, the Army spent 10 years and hundreds of millions of dollars building a heavy, large box they expected Soldiers to lug around with them so connectivity could be maintained. They called it the Objective Control Unit. It was huge and cumbersome.
In the same amount of time, commercial innovators like Apple, Google had released game-changing smart phones that could have done the same job better, faster and cheaper. Yet in the environment of military acquisition that had been built and nurtured, no one was given the tools or incentive to take a step back and admit that there was a better way to do this.
In a dynamically changing environment like a battlefield, we have to be ready to pivot on a dime when capabilities emerge and details shift. In 10 years, our battlefield had reinvented itself in multitudes as our nimble adversaries constantly adjusted their methods. The Pentagon was pouring money into a solution that not only wouldn’t work, it wasn’t needed anymore.
When we stepped in, we were able to look at the battlefield as it was at that moment, with every individual Soldier already carrying a smart phone in their pockets. One small tweak in adding a cable to those phones saved every dismounted servicemember from friendly fire for the remainder of that war.
Next came taking that solution and seeing where else it could apply beyond the first problem. We learned that this same cable could immediately help the Army in Africa keep track of small teams in civilian clothes. One simple solution for multiple complex problems. This holds true in the commercial and defense spaces. Once a solution exists, there is usually a broad application for it. Get creative in finding how to put your ideas to work across dual-use areas.
5. Your personal experience can be a great mentor
Throughout the process of delivering a solution to friendly fire, we came across people who were super supportive and some who were completely not supportive. But because we had done our homework, I could speak factually and with emphasis to people at every level, saying, “Here's what we're doing and here’s how it impacts other programs,” and then use data and facts to enable them to go get money to support the work.
The combination of getting a deep understanding of the problem by talking to Soldiers at the forward edge of the battlefield and intimately knowing their frustrations, of mapping stakeholders, and of testing and talking to engineers, led us to success.
I also brought my own background knowledge. I'm an operator. I knew exactly what the problem was because I've lived it. My experience allowed me to tell the story the way it needed to be told to recruit champions to the cause. The data we collected enhanced the story and helped us defend our decisions.
The speed of innovation with a ‘pipeline’ mindset
We acknowledged this was a problem we wanted to solve in September 2010. By May 2011 we knew we had the answer. By September 2011, the solution was in the hands of the first brigade set in Afghanistan. In just under a year, we went from pointless deaths from friendly fire, to getting a ready solution into the hands of our troops.
What started as a common sense of fury over a frustrating problem became a relentless pursuit of a simple solution. Ready, passionate experts and champions ran alongside us and paved the way for success. By using the innovation pipeline as the foundation for our work, we took a challenge and broke down parochial barriers, fought bureaucratic inertia and delivered a simple, effective solution, at speed that is still saving lives today.
