Ripples in a ‘Latent Talent Pool’
By Lieutenant Commander Ben Kohlmann, U.S. Navy Reserve
The fledgling Defense Entrepreneurs Forum conjures the spirit that brought us the Naval Lyceum (1833) and the U.S. Naval Institute (1873).
At a 2010 Technical, Entertainment, Design (best known as TED) conference, commentator Clay Shirky spoke about “How Cognitive Surplus Will Change the World.”* Over the course of the presentation, he noted that every year nearly one trillion hours of participatory contributions are up for grabs among humans sitting idle around the world. Identifying and harnessing these latent, creative energies could have a significant impact on the human experience. And, Shirky argues, the current democratization of information made possible by social media makes these idle musings ripe for harvesting.
The military has a similar latent talent pool. Junior officers and enlisted, along with many senior officers, find themselves with much to contribute to national-security conversations, but very few outlets to discuss and take action on their ideas. Many creative, competent individuals are waiting to be unleashed with potentially relevant solutions to enduring challenges. All they need is an ecosystem that empowers and encourages both them and their ideas.
An explosion of self-organized efforts has emerged within the national-security network over the past few years, especially within the Sea Services. Many who start these organizations are unpaid and champion them simply because they are passionate about making a better world. Much of today’s creative energy echoes the formation of the Naval Lyceum (and then the Naval Institute) back in the 1800s.
Among the Sea Services, enterprising junior officers looking to discuss global maritime issues started the Center for International and Maritime Security. The Athena Project, spearheaded by Lieutenant Commander Dave Nobles on board the USS Benfold (DDG-65), is a program that elicits and promotes actionable ideas from the deckplates. And the Chief of Naval Operations Rapid Innovation Cell empowers junior service members to advocate for and experiment with emerging technologies.
The other services have not been idle. Army and Marine Corps officers created the online Small Wars Journal to informally discuss counterinsurgency doctrine, and young Army captains created Company Command—an online discussion and ideas forum eventually officially adopted by the institutional Army. The Air Force also recently joined the innovation movement with its “Rat Pack” concept, bringing young airmen and officers together to solve big problems put forth by senior leaders.
To help bring these disparate efforts together and further develop the ecosystem of innovative national-security practitioners, the Defense Entrepreneurs Forum (DEF) was founded three years ago. Its goal is to create an enduring culture of creativity and innovation throughout national security by giving a voice to those who rarely have a chance to speak publicly. Whereas most defense events feature wizened panels of senior officers, DEF features young people with disparate, and sometimes controversial, ideas in 20-minute, engaging presentations. The 2014 iteration featured a Quaker who discussed nonviolence, a veteran-run start-up to sell Afghan saffron, and a history of U.S. Marine Corps helicopter innovation.
No uniforms are allowed during the forum, breaking down subtle psychological barriers among participants, and making the strength of the ideas posed by the presenter—not the rank—the means of evaluation. Finally, taking action is encouraged, and the end of the event featured an innovation pitch competition with $5,000 in cash prizes. This year, the panel of judges included the Tesla, Inc. chief innovation officer, a University of Chicago Booth School of Business professor of entrepreneurship, a senior active-duty officer, a U.S. Naval Institute representative, and a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense.
As we prepare for DEF 2015 at the Gleacher Center in Chicago from 6-8 November, we thought it appropriate to present some highlights of last year’s event. The three ideas that follow were the winning entries from the eight contestants, but more than anything else they represent a fraction of the immense creative talent within our youngest national-security professionals. Imagine what other insights are waiting to be unveiled by your own young officers and enlisted service members. You may be surprised by all they have to offer.
*www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cognitive_surplus_will_change_the_world?language=en.
The Bow Wave of Innovation
By Lieutenant Charlie Hymen, U.S. Navy, and Lieutenant John Harry, U.S. Navy Supply Corps
How can junior officers develop an idea that will enable a billion-dollar organization to function more efficiently? This is the challenge we faced in February 2014 while trying to solve a problem that commonly plagued us as junior shipboard officers and one we imagined others struggled to overcome as well: Access to the Navy’s abundance of official information is too limited.
There is no shortage of official military guidance that discusses a leader’s responsibilities pertaining to basic administration, personnel management, and professional development, but this information is often embedded in large, cumbersome documents that one must access from a computer. This proves challenging for those at sea, as computers are scarce resources on many ships. Furthermore, inexperienced officers and junior sailors have difficulty locating the correct information needed at any given time because they simply do not know where to find it.
We determined the logical solution to this problem was a mobile application that could provide access to the most commonly used Navy documents and serve as a quick reference-management and education tool for Navy leaders of all ranks. The mobile application would also extract the most important information contained in these documents and organize it in a logical, user-friendly and self-contained format, thus providing access to the bulk of information without Internet connectivity. We are proud to say that eDIVO, the embodiment of our concept, was officially released to the fleet in March 2015.
The Navy is in the process of evaluating and adapting policies to govern mobile application development. Change is happening, and in finding ourselves ahead of that bow wave of change we as junior officers had an opportunity to market our ideas in a relatively unrestricted arena. While timing was on our side, we still had many other challenges to overcome. We saw both a clear need and a practical solution; however, neither of us had any experience in moving a concept through development, production, and deployment. As former navigators and supply officers, our combined coding illiteracy only exacerbated the challenge of developing a mobile app on our own.
We knew we needed help, but didn’t know where to look. The first step and a principal tenet of life at sea, is to lean on your resources. By virtue of being stationed in Washington, D.C., we worked in close proximity to both the Navy’s decision makers and our own personal mentors. We talked to anyone who would listen to our idea. After multiple meetings with these mentors, who contacted their own colleagues throughout the Navy, we made enough connections and solicited enough interest to begin discussing ways to develop our concept. How do we gain funding? Should we try to monetize our idea? Is that even legal as active-duty naval officers?
Cold-calling our way through the Beltway, we constantly met the same dead end: good idea, don’t have the money. Not giving up and leveraging the recommendations of a mentor, we met with the U.S. Naval Institute to explain our idea and solicit feedback. We received valuable insight, determined ways to refine our idea, and kept working.
After continuing to look for a partner to help develop our concept, we eventually found a perfect fit with OPNAV N1 and the Sea Warrior Program (PMW-240). In learning about its development of My Navy Portal, a “hire to retire” application for all HR-related functions and information, we discovered a shared common vision to expand the use of mobile technology throughout the Navy. While we originally envisioned eDIVO as a project to develop a mobile app, we now understand its scope is much broader. It is a project to explore ways to streamline the adaptation of mobile technology throughout the fleet. eDIVO is not just a development of an application, it is the formulation and exploration of a process.
How did two lieutenants position themselves to take an idea from concept to reality in a year within a large, bureaucratic organization?
The first factor that led to our success was our post-sea-tour perspective and alignment with major initiatives. Working in shore jobs, away from the operational tempo of shipboard life and prolonged underway periods, allowed us to take a step back and see the bigger picture. Simply having the time to reflect proved paramount. In conceptualizing eDIVO, we recognized inherent alignment with initiatives already under way within the Navy—namely, the CNO’s Reducing Administrative Distractions, or RAD, initiative and the MCPON’s pilot program to equip junior sailors with tablets to facilitate training and education.
We also realized we needed to determine what Navy entities would be inclined to embark on our journey with us and to articulate how this project would fit with their mission. As we discovered, in our alignment with PMW-240, eDIVO is a medium through which multiple missions could be accomplished. Once we realized this, the project gained traction.
Finally, we embraced the challenge. We were determined to develop eDIVO because we understood clearly this product would make life easier for thousands of people and provide the Navy and the Department of Defense with a prototype for future development of mobile products. This vision was large enough and practical enough to warrant our time. Regardless of what challenges arose, we convinced ourselves that the journey and all the barriers we encountered were worth pursuing.
Just over one year after our first discussion, it was invigorating to know that eDIVO will enable future generations of junior officers to tackle challenges more adeptly than we were able to do ourselves. Whether conducting an inspection in the engine room, training with peers while navigating around the world, or mentoring a struggling sailor at sea, leaders will be able to provide accurate guidance to their subordinates, peers, and superiors at any time and in any place.
Lieutenant Hymen is a surface warfare officer who served his division-officer tours in the guided-missile destroyers USS Stockdale (DDG-106) and Kidd (DDG-100). He served on the Secretary of the Navy’s staff as a White House/Congressional liaison officer and is currently pursuing his master’s degree in business administration at Harvard Business School.
Lieutenant Harry is currently stationed in Washington, D.C., at Naval Reactors in the U.S. Navy Supply Corps. He served as assistant supply officer in the USS Kidd and is a graduate of the University of Connecticut.
MoneyJet
By Major Dave Blair, U.S. Air Force
In the movie Moneyball, Major League Baseball’s Oakland A’s, strapped for cash and facing formidable adversaries, realized they’d have to reboot how they thought about assessing performance if they were going to win on a shoestring budget. There was a sense shared among baseball elites about the sort of player who won games, and the few star players who fit the mold commanded commensurate salaries.
While this may have been the stuff of legend, the A’s bet that this stardom was not necessarily the stuff of wins. Instead, they used rich statistics to re-assess the value of all league players and found major mismatches between reputation and actual scoring value. Building a squad out of these undervalued players, the A’s beat teams that were paying out ten times their own budget. The MoneyJet applies a similar concept for military aviation by unlocking existing big data for assessing and improving aircrew performance.
The military is in a markedly similar but more serious situation—out of money and facing a world of challenges—and therefore we need to balance the role of reputation in assessing aircrew performance with the rich data that already exist from flights and simulators. As with professional baseball, if we judge pilots by reputation, and reputation is a function of “fit,” then we arrive at an infinite loop. Since reformers challenge the fit of a culture by definition, there can be no reformers in such a system. The Oakland A’s prospered because they could reform themselves when the rest of the league could not; we cannot afford the cost of failing to reform ourselves to keep pace with changes in warfare. Rich data can power through these innovation roadblocks.
Fortunately, this rich data already exists—and how. Every time we fly, we generate volumes of telemetry and systems data. Any veteran of a safety board can attest to how even the minutest details of systems performance are recorded for posterity. Similarly, fleets of simulators generate a plethora of information about how our aviators perform. Unfortunately, extant data is correlated to the aircraft or simulator and presently provides little analytical leverage on flying performance unless we bend metal. However, were we to restructure and store this data by aircrew, it would provide us an excellent means of illuminating performance trends.
Doing so presents two problems. First, aggregating data creates an ontology problem—how do we define data to keep apples in the apple basket and out of the orange bin? Second, making data available to crews presents an access problem: How do we make sure people are using these data appropriately, and that appropriate people are accessing it? These are problems common to any database, and therefore coding is less challenging than determining what should go with what, and who should read what and why.
As for the access problem, aggregation creates anonymity. If I want to evaluate my own performance as an aviator, I should be able to access my own records. If I’m teaching students on an instructional sortie or assembling crews as a mission commander, I should be able to read their records as well. However, as we move up the chain of command, individual metrics create too tempting a tool for rack-and-stacks; while quantitative data provides an excellent foundation for improving individual tasks, it can easily become misleading out of qualitative context. Therefore, a commander should generally only read trend data in the aggregate. For instance, a flight tends to be weak on one cluster of tasks, or the squadron compares better than equivalent units on a given aspect of flight. In this way, we prevent the data from taking on a punitive character and reduce the likelihood of it being gamed.
Concerning ontology, rather than imposing metrics on the data, we leave the interpretation of this rich data up to the operators. If we store raw data, the operators can assemble it into user-defined metrics for assessing performance in line with their best understanding of their mission. For example, if landing touchdown point is a critical metric for short-field performance, then a flyer could pull the GPS location for every activation of a weight-on-wheels switch, and compare it to a nominal touchdown point for the field in question. Over time, pilots could tell if they were consistently landing short or long of this point. Useful algorithms should be shared among flying units, or they could be approved by standardization or tactics offices at wing levels or higher. A squadron statistics-aviation resources-management NCO might manage and optimize these user-defined metrics.
Beyond the immediate benefits of self-improvement, tailored instruction, and trend analysis, rich data brings some higher-order positive implications. First, it provides recourse against scarce-data reputation problems. A pilot may have had an excellent or terrible highly memorable episode, but data history should bring context to the story and counterbalance the more pernicious effects of the rumor mill. Percentile comparisons of aircrew to their peer groups should also dampen any potential nepotism in the selection of crews for upgrades.
Perhaps more important, rich data breaks us out of a world of deceptively clean rack-and-stacks, which results in prestige hierarchies that long outlive their relevance. In a world of scarce data, people are some flavor of good or bad, but in a world of rich data, people have diverse strengths or weaknesses, and these are often cross-cutting. Someone with great hands may have poor crew leadership or vice versa, and the skills that yield success in one world may prove a detriment in another. With rich data, we can move past sloppy heuristics and identify “skill profiles.”
This changes how we view aircrew initial training. Student pilots may have the grades to fly an aircraft of their choice, but their skill profile may be distinctively suited to fly a heavy bomber. Rather than telling them that they were first in their class, and that number-one students fly a certain type of aircraft, we’d build a much healthier identity if we told students that they had an extremely high suitability to bombers as opposed to other aircraft. The students could still likely fly what they wanted, but they’d also likely view their choice in a different light. If students walked away with an array of propensity scores from any apples-and-oranges training program, and we reserved rack-and-stacks for apples-to-apples programs like mission qualifications, then we’d build a culture less focused on prestige and more focused on effectiveness.
Ultimately, this is what MoneyJet is about. In a world of scarce data, reputation is everything, but this is a weak reed for building a future force. Quantitative data alone is not itself adequate to predict aircrew performance, but it is certainly a better foundation for these assessments than the mercurial whims of the squadron bar alone. Competition improves products, and in the competition between personal impressions and rich data, we can better trust the tool of reputation. MoneyJet isn’t about replacing gut instinct, but the gut makes better decisions when it’s connected to the brain.
Major Blair serves as acting director of operations for the 3d Special Operations Squadron. He is a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy and Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and holds a PhD in international relations from Georgetown University.
Swarming Airlift in Contested Airspace
By Major Mark Jacobsen, U.S. Air Force
As a U.S. Air Force C-17A cargo pilot, I would like to think that the United States can deliver cargo anywhere in the world. Unfortunately, that’s not quite true; the United States can deliver cargo anywhere in the world with a sufficiently permissive threat environment. Our country has no reliable way of delivering cargo through heavily contested airspace without a major kinetic operation to take down air defenses.
That limitation became clear in August 2014, when the Islamic State besieged a Yazidi population on a mountaintop in Iraq. After three years of studiously avoiding entanglement in the Syrian civil war, the United States was drawn into kinetic action to secure airdrops to the Yazidis. Those first airstrikes snowballed into an open-ended war against the Islamic State. The case illustrates how the “responsibility to protect” can draw the United States into military operations that are arguably not in its vital national interests. But the alternative—leaving besieged civilians to their doom—is morally repugnant.
This dilemma became acute for me while conducting field research among Syrian refugees in Turkey the previous March. At the time, the Syrian government was engaging in mass sieges, using starvation and medical deprivation to break the will of more than 200,000 civilians. Syrians were beside themselves, wondering why the world refused to help, but the United States had no appetite for combat operations to take down the Syrian air-defense network.
I was haunted by the unfolding tragedy. It seemed inconceivable that in the 21st century, the United States could not deliver humanitarian aid through contested airspace. Surely there had to be a way. It occurred to me that if you couldn’t fly one big aircraft into contested airspace, maybe you could fly a lot of little ones. That thought became the seed of the Syria Airlift Project.
The revolution in micro unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) opens up a new paradigm for cargo delivery. The vehicles are difficult for most radars to detect, and no one aircraft is worth the price of a surface-to-air missile. The cheapest man-portable air-defense systems, or MANPADs, start around $5,000, but our reusable aircraft cost less than $500. Although these aircraft are extremely payload-limited, they can deliver critical medical supplies such as antibiotics or vaccines, and in sufficient quantities they can move greater masses of food or other supplies. Imagine an army of ants carrying away a picnic lunch.
The technology already exists. Off-the-shelf autopilots can turn any radio-controlled airplane into a UAV. Rapid advances in batteries are giving electric planes increasing range and payload capacities, while gas engines offer even more capability. It’s possible to build perfectly flyable airframes using little more than Dollar Tree foam board, hot glue, and packing tape. With unit costs so cheap, it’s theoretically possible to build a very large number of aircraft. The challenge is less about technology than about the logistics of scaling operations. But this is nothing new to air-mobility pilots; at its peak, the Berlin Airlift of 1948 saw an aircraft landing every minute.
After returning from Turkey, I founded a group called the Syria Airlift Project to research the problem of sieges and explore possible solutions. Our vision is “creative airpower to end starvation and medical deprivation as weapons of war.” We considered many different technologies—everything from catapults, to dropping gliders from weather balloons—but eventually settled on fixed-wing UAVs as the most promising way forward. We started building almost immediately, relying on a philosophy of cheap prototyping and rapid iteration.
We are still developing our technologies, but we have demonstrated the ability to airdrop a 2-pound payload at a range of 30-plus miles and return. From Turkey, this is sufficient to reach Aleppo, one of the largest and most war-torn cities in Syria. An on-board self-destruct mechanism destroys the autopilot if a crash is imminent across the border, reducing the risk of later weaponization by bad actors. We are also writing custom mission-planning tools that allow one relatively unskilled operator to generate a large number of semi-randomized flight plans, maximizing survivability. After uploading a flight plan, an operator simply throws the aircraft into the air. It takes off, flies its mission, and returns to a landing without any human input.
The project is rooted in the nonviolent logic of activists like Mahatma Gandhi and Gene Sharp. Our vision is that Syrian refugees in Turkey can build and operate these aircraft themselves. At a time when war has destroyed the social fabric of their country, the Syria Airlift Project can empower the people to work together for the noble purpose of feeding and caring for countrymen they have left behind. Through our partner nongovernmental organization (NGO) Project Amal Ou Salam, we even hope to have children involved in decorating our aircraft and packing messages with our airdrop bundles. Just as the Berlin Airlift was a symbol of hope and an act of defiance against Soviet aggression, the Syria Airlift Project defies those who use starvation and medical deprivation as weapons. By tapping into the magic of airplanes, it fires imaginations and offers Syrians a glimpse of hope beyond the darkness of war.
We are structuring the Syria Airlift Project as a nonprofit service to support medical NGOs, but we view this as a broad investment for both NGOs and for the U.S. government. The ability to deliver cargo through nonpermissive airspace would give the United States more flexible policy options for addressing humanitarian crises and could open up new options in anti-access/area-denial environments. NGOs could also employ this capability to bypass logistic bottlenecks and deliver aid to inaccessible or widely distributed populations. This capability might be especially useful in the aftermath of natural disasters.
As we refine our aircraft, software, and supporting technology, we will also be developing our concept of operations for building, maintaining, and operating the aircraft. After extensive testing in the United States, we plan to deploy trial aircraft through a partner NGO based in Turkey.
Major Jacobsen is a C-17 instructor pilot and Arabic-speaking Middle East specialist. He is a graduate of the School of Advanced Air & Space Studies and is pursuing a PhD in political science at Stanford University. He is also executive director of Uplift Aeronautics, a nonprofit corporation with a mission to empower and aid communities through innovative aviation technology.