There's a new US Army office 'getting in the dirt' with soldiers and trying to quickly turn their ideas into real battlefield tech
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US Army photo by Master Sgt. JaJuan S. Broadnax
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- The US Army has a new office designed to swiftly turn soldier ideas into reality at scale.
- The Pathway for Innovation and Technology office bridges a gap that has long existed in the service, officials said.
- Soldier involvement and feedback are key in the process, something the Army has been keen on recently.
The US Army is trying to develop weapons and technologies faster by testing early and often, gathering repeated soldier feedback, and widening the pool of companies it works with.
The Pathway for Innovation and Technology office, about 100 days old, is designed to bridge the gap between invention happening across the service and the money and authority to turn ideas into real programs of record.
On the Army website for the office, it says that "the Army can't afford to wait. SPEED IS KING!" Indeed, the speed at which weapons technology is evolving in conflicts like the ongoing war in Ukraine has driven a growing interest in revamping the way the military buys weapons and how it makes sure it's relevant for troops.
PIT, the site says, is aimed at speeding things up by "getting in the dirt with the Soldier."
Chris Manning, deputy assistant secretary of the Army for research and technology, said there are two principles that guided the establishment of PIT.
"Number one is speed takes priority over perfection. We can iterate to get to operational capability," he told reporters earlier this month.
And the second, he continued, "is that early soldier feedback is critical in order to make sure we're getting the right technology for the future fight, and then we want to be able to prove the demand signal before we spend big dollars on programs."
Until now, structural problems siloed different efforts to build new weapons and technologies quickly.
The Best Drone Warfighter competition included an innovation lane focused on evaluating soldier-made drones.US Army photo by Sgt. Aaron Troutman
Bureaucracy, officials said, has long slowed down progress, and the Army has often spent a lot of time thinking about how it would use a new technology and detailing specifications for a program before even building it.
Creating PIT, the office's director Col. Shermoan Daiyaan said, helps formally cut the red tape.
"What we've had is unit-driven innovation. We've had lab-driven innovation with PMs [program managers] and PAEs [program acquisition executives]. But in this case, the gloves are off, and we can inject that capability," he said.
The goal is to connect those fragmented efforts and give promising ideas a clearer path to funding and fielding.
The office intends to work across the Army with soldiers who come up with new ideas or feedback on new systems, non-traditional companies and startups that aren't established in the defense industrial base, other Army organizations that want faster solutions, and larger Department of Defense acquisition leaders.
PIT now establishes a pipeline for other Army hubs or labs that didn't necessarily have a path for scaling new ideas, Manning said. The office doesn't have an exact number of potential programs and problems it's looking into, but officials said the list runs into the hundreds.
One example might be figuring out a common charger for different types of uncrewed aerial systems from various vendors. PIT's heard from soldiers that power generation and integration are major problems, Daiyaan said, and an ideal solution would be having "one charger to charge them all."
That relatively small fix, officials argue, can have outsized operational impact by reducing the logistical burden on units that increasingly rely on a mix of commercial drones.
The first phase of the program invites 25 companies to test their drones with US military operators.US Army photo by Capt. Shenicquia Fulton
The ideal PIT program development cycle would be a shorter, more competitive process than with traditional weapons. Various companies would be brought in to work on solving an Army problem. A number would be selected for funding, and then those vendors would get their prototypes into the field with soldiers for 30 to 45 days of testing.
Afterwards, the successful applications would get contracts for further development. Then, alongside PIT partners like the Army's FUZE program, officials could buy systems in rounds and gather more information on what works and what doesn't.
"Maybe we started with five, the next round was 20, and now we may buy 100 to really be getting all that data," Daiyaan said. "All of that, maybe a year from 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.
PIT does not replace the traditional acquisition system, which is still required for large, complex weapons platforms. Instead, it accelerates smaller-scale technologies and urgent capability gaps.
The major changes to how the Army develops and acquires new weapons are intended to speed up the process, focus less on specific requirements, and better incorporate feedback from soldiers. Over the past year, the service has undergone a shift that officials have said is designed to focus more on what capabilities soldiers want and believe would be most useful for future warfare.
Army and broader DoD leadership are increasingly focused on using commercial solutions where possible, such as drones, as well as on technologies that can be upgraded or modified based on mission sets.
One of the most recent examples is the first phase of the Drone Dominance Program, which invited 25 defense companies to bring their drones to Fort Benning, Georgia, for testing with soldiers. From there, the Pentagon will decide which ones to buy at scale.
These efforts reflect a broader push inside the armed forces to shorten the time between experimentation and procurement, key as rapid battlefield innovation in places like Ukraine has exposed how quickly technology can evolve.
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