Bruce Jette, the guy who designed REF, did an absolutely beautiful job with it. Unfortunately, between Bruce’s depar- ture and my arrival, you got folks who were in the execution mode, who started to celebrate, picking low-hanging fruit off trees and pitching it over the wall at people, and started reading their own press at how great they were and how jacked-up the acquisition community was. But what REF wasn’t doing was helping anybody, other than those short, easy successes.
So when I left Afghanistan, I set out to find out why REF was so counter to what I thought they ought to be doing, and also figure out how to re-chart the course for it. Our analysis would show later that between the start of the surge in Afghani- stan and when I got there and made defeating IED attacks against dismounted forces the No. 1 priority at REF, there was a six-month gap, and that six-month gap cost us probably 5,000 casualties.
Having left Afghanistan with kind of a mission in my mind, I spent the next year with a host of folks trying to figure out how to enable REF to focus more on find- ing problems, and then how to rebuild the organization so it constantly pushed itself to the edges of the battlefield.
Part of my time was spent looking for a professional development program that would help REF’s workforce keep up with a rapidly changing world. I spent lots of time in the executive education courses at MIT, learning how businesses thought and how they handled problems. As I understood things better, I started sending batches of REF people to MIT executive ed courses to work on things.
We redid the way we spent money and created platforms by which our teams were moved out to the edges of the
battlefield. We then spent our money [on] better understanding and validating the problems that they found, and then used that data to build coalitions of people to solve them.
Army AL&T: You actually put labs out on the battlefield, didn’t you?
Newell: We absolutely did. I went so far as to build mobile prototyping labs— took a 40-foot [shipping container] and put in its own HVAC and power system. Added a VSAT [Very Small Aperture Ter- minal] to it and then loaded it with CNC [computer numeric-controlled] milling machines, 3-D scanners, 3-D printers and other essential prototyping tools. We manned the labs with a scientist, an engi- neer and a senior NCO who had combat experience in the theater. We then gave the labs to the divisions to move to the units in combat.
Te role of the lab team was to reach out to the guys coming into the base from missions and grab problems from them as they came in. Tey then used the lab’s prototyping capability to actually help us better understand things. It wasn’t about building parts and things, although we did sometimes. It was about making sure we understood the problem and using that to help generate interest back in Washington, D.C., to actually solve it.
To cut a very long story short, I used that platform that we built, took my $200 million budget,
As I got toward the end of my career there, I really got addicted to what we were doing.
Army AL&T: So how did you go from REF to Silicon Valley?
Newell: I had already moved my family five times in seven years. I was simply done uprooting their lives for the chance at another promotion. So I decided to retire.
During the process of the buildup for REF’s problem-solving mechanism, I ended up in Silicon Valley looking for a solution to a particular robotics prob- lem. And it just happened the day that I showed up at Stanford University to find a particular mechanical engineer- ing professor, the guy who’s my partner now, Joe Felter, had just retired from the job as the COIN [counterinsurgency] adviser to Gen. [David H.] Petraeus in Afghanistan.
He got his Ph.D. from Stanford, and when he retired, he went back to Stanford to work for [former Secretary of Defense] Bill Perry. Joe was assigned to escort me across the campus that day. Joe and I were wandering across campus, talking about the problems I had in Afghani- stan. Instead of going back to the airport, we jumped in his car and he said, “Why don’t you just come with me for a bit?”
and ended up spend-
ing $1.5 billion over the next two years, because we got so good at building these problem sets and building communities around them. By the time I left, we had people bringing us money and saying,
“We know we’re supposed to be working on X, but we can’t get it done. Will you help us get started?”
And we went on what I would call a pub crawl of startups, where we’d pull into some garage where he knew folks, and I’d sit down with the CEO of the startup. I’d talk about my problems and he’d talk about what they were doing; before long, the napkin sketches came out. It was fascinating to me that I was having an exceptionally meaningful conversation about national security problems with a guy in a garage in
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