Policy office in the Pentagon. Newell and Space are also visiting senior research fellows
at National Defense Univer-
sity. Tey talked about the evolution of BMNT with Army AL&T magazine.
Army AL&T: When you took over REF, and correct me if I’m wrong, you didn’t know it existed.
Newell: No, I didn’t. I got a note from the Colonels Management Office that said, “Congratulations, you’re going to take over the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force at Fort Belvoir, Virginia.” And I lit- erally had to Google it to figure out what it was. Considering that I was one of only six brigade [commanders] in Iraq, that wasn’t a good thing.
I moved to D.C. in July, and I think took over REF at the end of the month. I knew nothing about acquisition, nothing about money, nothing about how things work in the Pentagon. I had all this fresh
experience from theater, and I was pissed off that the organization had “overlooked” my brigade in Iraq.
As I started my transition, I was given a list of people to talk to by my predecessor and warned ahead of time that there were many people in the Pentagon out to shut down REF, and that I should avoid talk- ing to them until I had done the list of REF fans. I decided to take the opposite track and talk to those who weren’t fans of REF so I could get an unbiased feel for what REF was doing, just to get a sense of where the problems were.
Back then, REF was, I would best say, on a targeting board by most of the folks in the acquisition community for their behavior over the past couple of years. Teir relationship with the asymmetric warfare group was horrible, and the rela- tionship they had with senior leaders in the acquisition community was horrible. Fortunately, because I hadn’t yet formed an opinion, I had a great opportunity just to hear what people had to say. It was good for me.
We’ve been maybe viewed as being competitive to defense contractors, which I think is silly. We know that the more work that gets done like this, the better off the programs will end up being when the government goes to write the requirements.
Shortly after that, I took off and went to Afghanistan for a visit because I had not been there in several years and because that’s where the bulk of our work was being done. I think it was October 2010. At that point, REF’s headquarters in Afghanistan was in Bagram and there was a satellite office in Kandahar.
One of the stops included the prod- uct integration facility that RDECOM [U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command] had just opened there. It was essentially a small manufacturing facility on Bagram that was the size of a warehouse, where they could make just about anything they wanted. It struck me that you could hear a pin drop in the place, because there was
nothing happening. After my visit there, I went back to the REF office, where the REF lab guys [were] working night and day doing something in a room the size of a closet. I asked the guy that ran the place, “Why are you guys doing all this stuff internally when you’ve got that big old facility on the other side of the base?” I never really got a good explanation on why it was, other than, “Tis is the way we’ve always done it.”
I took a flight down to Kandahar to see the other REF office and to visit units working there. I just happened to bump into a guy I had served with in the Ranger Regiment several years before. He was now in Kandahar commanding the first brigade that had gone into the city as part of the surge in 2010. We were standing at the edge of the airfield talking, and he looks like a cadaver. He’d been in this country, I think, six weeks. And at the time, he’s losing, I don’t know, 10 to 15 people a day.
At one point I asked him, “What can I do for you?” And his response to me kind of set me back a little. He just looked at me and said, “What I need most is for people to quit asking me what they can do, and just do something.” What he meant was that he was so busy trying to fight the daily fight and keep people alive that he didn’t have time to do analysis of what his problems were. What he really wanted was for somebody to look over his shoulder and anticipate what was going on, and hand him potential solutions for his guys to try. And he wanted it done in real time.
After that, I went to see the guy who commanded the second surge brigade into Kandahar. When I asked him what I could do to help, he said, “We’re having a seriously hard time with IED [impro- vised explosive device] attacks against our
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