New Army office aims to quickly develop and scale soldier ideas

A new Army organization aims to meld service leaders’ mandates to cut bureaucracy and adopt a venture-capital mindset with their push to turn soldiers’ ideas into manufactured gear. 

The Pathway for Innovation and Technology is another office, yes, but its director says it will bring together the Army’s innovation and rapid acquisition hubs at the service’s headquarters level, putting muscle behind what until now have been siloed efforts, and coordinating them with the Program Acquisition Executives, who have the funding and authority to turn ideas into programs.

“I sit at the table with the PAEs. I communicate directly with them to express what we are seeing. I also serve as a tech scout for them,” Col. Shermoan Daiyaan, PIT’s director, told reporters Friday. “What we’ve had is unit-driven innovation. We’ve had lab-driven innovation with [program managers] and PAEs. But in this case, the gloves are off and we can inject that capability.”

Within PIT sits the Army’s FUZE program, Joint Innovation Outpost and Global Tactical Edge Directorate, who through Daiyaan now have a direct line to the acquisition offices.

“What I think is really interesting here is these divisions and corps have had these innovation hubs or labs for a while now, and they would find ideas, but there was no path to go take it to scale,” said Chris Manning, the Army’s deputy assistant secretary for research and technology. “And so [members of the PIT organizations] are there on the ground and saying, ‘Hey, what are the most promising things coming out of there? And how do I connect this to the broader acquisition enterprise?’ ”

One of the top issues they’d like to tackle is power generation and integration, particularly for unmanned aerial systems, Daiyaan said.

“With us doing multiple vendors of UAS, multiple vendors of different capabilities, they all may have a different battery,” and it might be nice to have “one charger to charge them all,” he said.

Ideally, a PIT-lead program development might look like an xTech competition to get a bunch of companies working on a problem the Army wants to solve, select maybe 10 companies and award them prize money, get their prototypes in the field with soldiers for a 30 or 45 days, and then award Small Business Innovation Research contracts for another six months of development. 

From there, they could use FUZE’s Tech Maturation Program to buy five, then 20, then maybe 100 pieces of equipment, while working on a Program Objective Memorandum that would lay out a five-year acquisition plan.

“All of that, in maybe a year now, we have moved the needle faster than we ever could, because we would have still been studying the problem” under the Army’s old acquisition model, Daiyaan said.

He couldn’t put a number on the number of different programs PIT is trying to get off the ground, he said, but there are hundreds.

“We’re 90 days in—check back with us this time next year,” he said. “We probably should talk about what we transitioned into programs.”