AI-enabled spectrum reconnaissance, 3D printed drones, and autonomous combat vehicles. These are no longer the dream ventures of Silicon Valley startups; these are products being created by soldiers at Army bases across the country thanks to the explosion of tactical innovation throughout the service. What started as a few soldiers with simple prototypes in ad hoc makerspaces has transformed into formal innovation cells operating out of research and development labs embedded within operational units. A handful of creative inventions has grown to multimillion-dollar portfolios of products scaling across the Army. As the grassroots efforts grow, kudos and accolades from senior leaders have shifted to calls for accountability and apprehension about these disruptive teams’ breaks from bureaucracy. With every success of tactical innovation, the demand signal for increased resourcing grows louder, but matching its crescendo is the question from the bill payers: What is the ROI—the specific return on this investment?
Impactful tactical innovation requires investing money, people, and space—and most importantly underwriting of risk—into an inherently entrepreneurial venture that is uncommon in the Department of Defense. The return on these investments has been disproportionately high, but difficult to quantify. Understandably, this gives leaders at every echelon hesitation about further investing in these efforts. Much of this concern comes from a discrepancy in expectations. We have had the opportunity to explain tactical innovation, and the expected return on an investment in it, to countless leaders by framing it in terms of three outcomes.
Outcome 1: Talent Development and Management
The Army is a people business. The next war will undoubtedly be won by the military force that can develop and integrate technological solutions at the tactical edge and scale solutions from the bottom up. To do this, the US Army needs soldiers at every rank who are capable of analyzing complex undefined problems and comfortable with using cutting-edge technology to produce solutions. These are not considered basic warfighting skills and therefore are not being taught during the Army’s share of the nearly $14 billion DoD spends annually on institutional training. They are, however, being practiced every day inside tactical innovation labs. Within these labs, soldiers are collaborating with DoD contractors, academia, and industry to learn and implement skills in coding, additive manufacturing, computer-aided engineering, and agile design thinking by solving real problems. In addition to developing new skills, these labs serve as an excellent recruiting and retention tool for those who already possess technology and innovation skills. An investment in tactical innovation recruits, trains, and retains the unique talent required to win on tomorrow’s battlefield. As a result, an important way of measuring ROI is in terms of technically skilled soldiers in operational formations, equipped for the complexities of the modern battlefield.
Outcome 2: Stopgaps and Surrogates
Yes, there are a plethora of ongoing and heavily funded initiatives to develop new battlefield technology. And yes, a few soldiers working away in a makerspace are at best duplicating efforts, and are at worst putting time, effort and resources into a solution that won’t come close to what a few billion dollars and a lab full of PhDs could develop. But, in the likely event these same soldiers are sent forward into enemy territory tomorrow, will they be satisfied when told to wait five more years for that perfect solution being developed elsewhere to make its way through the bureaucracy and down to them? When that solution eventually arrives, will they have the training with or confidence in the technology to properly integrate it and employ it to its maximum effectiveness? No and no. Tactical innovation affords the opportunity to produce stopgap solutions to emerging issues, allowing soldiers to train with a surrogate in garrison and have an immediately available asset in their hands if sent forward. The design methodology practiced in tactical innovation labs lowers the barrier to entry for soldiers who have ideas for new products but lack the resources or skills to develop them on their own. An investment in tactical innovation turns soldiers’ ideas into reality and expedites the process of delivering technology into the hands of soldiers. A second way the Army should measure ROI, then, is in terms of new technology in soldiers’ hands for near-term implementation while waiting for long-term solutions to be fielded.
Outcome 3: Informing Soldier-Centric Acquisitions
The key tenet of engineering design: Define your problem and allow your stakeholders to continually refine it. The industry standard process in product design prioritizes consistent interaction with stakeholders and experiments that put prototypes in users’ hands. The agile approach allows design teams to gather data directly from end users and adjust requirements and designs to fit the end users’ changing needs before putting too many resources into a mass-production-level product. This is nearly impossible to properly practice within the confines of traditional Army processes. Tactical innovation labs leverage their proximity to operational units and their regular training exercises to experiment with new technology and get immediate feedback from end users in the actual environment where they will be using the technology. This feedback is invaluable and incredibly difficult for Army research and development and acquisitions programs to acquire on their own or in a timely manner. An investment in tactical innovation gets actionable feedback from end users to adequately design and acquire new technology. So a third way to measure ROI is in terms of the degree to which requirements are influenced by direct soldier feedback.
A Last Point: Rethinking Transitions
There is one important discrepancy in expectations that must be addressed in order to fully appreciate the ROI on tactical innovation: the definition of a technology transition. Traditionally, programs are evaluated as successful when they have transitioned their products to formal programs of record. The tactical innovation methodology was not created purely to develop program of record solutions. Instead, it allows us to think of technology transition as a spectrum. An innovated solution to a simple local problem, such as the hubcap removal tool invented by a mechanic in the 3rd Infantry Division, should be celebrated as a successful transition. Distributing the CAD files for a novel device to expedite camo net emplacement to all mechanized units so they can produce prototypes locally should be celebrated as a successful transition. Handing off the results of tactical-level experimentation with a locally developed prototype to a capabilities requirement writer should be celebrated as a successful transition. Even better than that, reshaping the vision of a future product to better meet soldiers’ needs should be celebrated as a successful transition. Instead of implementing a binary measure of success when evaluating transition of tactical innovation projects, the Army should adopt a reframed set of expectations built around a fundamental question: Did this help a soldier? Let’s reconsider what level of return is expected in the context of a relatively low-cost investment in tactical innovation.
Tactical Innovation requires a unique investment with an expectation of nontraditional returns. Unlike traditional DoD investments that are directly tied to predefined outcomes, the investors of time, money, and people into grassroots soldier innovation, and the underwriters of the associated risk, must see the value of the process and, more importantly, the unappreciated value of failure. We have countless pathways that can deliver a solution given a requirements document, but now is the time to value the return on investing in the development of soldiers’ innovative solutions to problems we can’t yet foresee, and accepting that this does not follow a straight path. This requires developing and resourcing not only a culture but an infrastructure of grassroots innovation. Leaders should continue to resource tactical innovation at all levels and should evaluate ROI based on key but too often unappreciated outcomes: more soldiers with technical problem-solving skills, rapidly developed stopgaps and surrogate solutions, and actionable feedback provided to the acquisitions community from real soldiers. The next war will be won by the nation that can narrow the gap between problems at the operational edge and the resources to develop technical solutions to those problems; tactical innovation is bridging that gap for the United States Army.
Captain Chris Aliperti is an instructor within the US Military Academy’s Department of Civil and Mechanical Engineering. Chris additionally serves as an associate director in the department’s Center for Applied Engineering and is a cofounder of the Tactical Innovation Institute.
Captain Eden Elizabeth Lawson is the deputy innovation officer for the 101st Airborne Division. She is a 2020 USMA graduate who has served in the 101st as an engineer officer and in both the brigade- and division-level innovation officer positions.
Captain Chris Flournoy is currently a student at the Maneuver Captains Career Course. He previously served as the director of the Marne Innovation Center at Fort Stewart, Georgia, and is a cofounder of the Tactical Innovation Institute.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Sgt. Jameson Harris, US Army