be a big company, it could be an academic, it could be somebody on the startup side. But it’s not necessarily geared toward startups. It’s geared toward finding the best solution. Almost always, it’s a com- bination of all of them working together.
Army AL&T: It seems that what you do isn’t so much about technology, but about problem-solving.
Newell: So much of it is really about the sociology of building teams around problems.
Space: From the culture side, the Defense Department is not used to hav- ing to reach across like that, or reach out from the acquisition side. Tey’re used to having the vendors and people come in and pitch them all the time. So this has really been a new sort of cultural way of
looking at the behavior of an
organization and how they look at their problems.
Army AL&T: What kind of feedback have you gotten from DOD? Is there resistance?
Newell: If you measure the reaction in terms of the workload, we have more work than we can possibly handle. I still think, though, that we are met with a lit- tle bit of—I would call it skepticism. You really have to educate people, and quite honestly it takes a lot of socialization inside some circles of the government to get them to understand how they’ll be able to use this in the environment that the systems are currently built in.
Space: I’ve found so far that our initial engagements come from people who would be considered mavericks inside their own organizations. We’ll start the conversation with them and over time help them educate others within their organization on how H4D can be used to help them.
People think, well, if you have a general sold or some secretary, then that will make a big difference. But it’s really the middle layers that have to adopt and execute on this. Tat’s who we spend the bulk of our time with.
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.
We are getting good responses, I think, not just the hand-waving and gentle pats on the back, but real solid engagements followed by real solid problems to work on. Despite the results, I don’t think it’s our job necessarily to go out and try to convince everybody to do this.
Army AL&T: Tere has been some criti- cism of your approach, and for that matter DIUx’s
approach, and criticism from
supporters of some of the big defense con- tractors, who say that what you’re doing is all nice and well, but it’s small potatoes and not going to make that much of a difference. How do you respond to that?
Newell: I call it shortsighted, but Jackie has a more worthwhile explanation.
Space: 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 require- ments. I don’t see how it’s not going to help by understanding the requirement better from a technology perspective and from a user perspective.
Te large defense programs—there is a place for that, when it comes to build- ing ships, tanks and fighter jets. But when you’re looking at all of the R&D [research and development] that’s feeding into those programs and all the proto- types that are being built that don’t have a direct alignment to a customer and aren’t in line with … the leading edge, I think that’s a problem.
Newell: I’ll look at it from a warfighter’s perspective. Te way the world is today, it doesn’t matter how good your kit is the day you show up for a war. What does matter is how quickly you change once the bullets start flying. People are finding ways to circumvent our best technology more rapidly than we can actually get it out on the battlefield. So offset in the future is really about speed, not about any one technology.
I’ve had a little bit of pushback from some of the bigger guys, and some others who said, “You know what? You’re right. We have to figure out how to behave better in this arena, and we need to figure out how we’re going to become part of that eco- system.” Today we work with some very large corporate clients who are hell-bent on figuring out how to do this. Te us- versus-them thing between defense firms and startups is nice fodder for news arti- cles, but it’s not based on reality. Wasted energy, I think.
ASC.ARMY.MIL
125
CRITICAL THINKING
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156 |
Page 157 |
Page 158 |
Page 159 |
Page 160 |
Page 161 |
Page 162 |
Page 163 |
Page 164 |
Page 165 |
Page 166 |
Page 167 |
Page 168 |
Page 169 |
Page 170 |
Page 171 |
Page 172 |
Page 173 |
Page 174 |
Page 175 |
Page 176
