‘WIN IN A COMPLEX WORLD’—BUT HOW?


THE SOLDIER-TECHNOLOGY INTERFACE


A Ranger assigned to 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, scans the darkness for enemies during annual task force training at Fort Knox, KY, April 22, 2014. The Army has an advantage over enemies in the way that Soldiers can adapt and innovate using technology, depending on the conditions in which they are operating. (U.S. Army photo by SPC Philip Diab, 55th Combat Camera)


in the Cold War, then you focus on differentiation. I innovate to gain differ- entiation. In other words, I know that the enemy has the T-55 tank, [and] I’m going to build [an] M1 tank. I’m going to dif- ferentiate greatly, because I know Soviet five-year plans. I know how long it takes them to go from a T-55 to a T-80 or T-72 or whatever, and so I’ll differentiate and get a huge delta in capability.


Usually when you focus on differentia- tion exclusively, what happens is it takes a lot of time—a lot of testing involved, a lot of bureaucratic processes and all that, and so it takes you 10 years to build a tank. But, since you have a known enemy


110 Army AL&T Magazine


and you know what you’re going to use it for, even though it took you 10 years to build it, it gives you a level of differentia- tion for 20 or 30 years. Te problem is, in an unknown world, that’s not what you have to focus on because you don’t know what your enemy has, you don’t know what you have to fight against and you don’t know what they’re going to do. You have to focus on rate of innovation rather than level of differentiation. So what you do in an unknown world is you start measuring the quality of innovation by the rate of innovation, the rate of change.


Te biggest challenge we have, both on my side of the equation, which is generating


January–March 2015


requirements, and your [acquisition] side, which is executing those, is that the whole system that you and I operate in was built during the Cold War, and therefore it was built to deliver a level of differentia- tion, not rate of innovation. Tat means we have to develop requirements that focus on rate of innovation, and then we have to hand those requirements off to an institution that focuses on rate of inno- vation, and that requires a change from Congress all the way down.


ARMY AL&T: How are the TRADOC and acquisition communities working together to fulfill this vision and ensure that desired solutions are within the


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