ADAPTING EXPERIMENTATION AND TESTING


“When we have innovative partners that come out into the field with us … they find that things are very different from how they envisioned it in their labs.”


With support from the EI Cell, the Diagnostic Systems Division plans to participate in next year’s Arctic Edge to conduct base- line testing on another group of technologies, to be followed by additional cold-weather testing during which warfighters will get a chance to use the diagnostic tools in training scenarios, follow- ing the protocols developed by the USAMRIID team based on their Arctic Edge experience.


CONCLUSION In just a short time, USAMRDC’s Experimentation Integration Cell has made it easier for the organization’s DRUs to field-test a wide range of impactful, life-saving medical capabilities, includ- ing pathogen diagnostics, casualty collection and protection, temperature sensors and hypothermia prevention, freeze-dried plasma and oxygen generators. As the command’s central coor- dinator for participation in experimentation events, the EI Cell eliminates pain points that would otherwise prevent participants from getting the most out of their time in the field.


Furthermore, because much of the experimentation conducted at USAMRDC is iterative, research teams may want to return to annual and semiannual exercises in subsequent years, partic- ularly when a capability has matured to the point where it is ready to be handed off to warfighters to see how they train with it and incorporate it into their routine operations. Te ability of the EI Cell to build lasting relationships with event sponsors gives DRUs confidence that their experimentation teams will have the information they need to plan and execute those exper- iments successfully.


Te leaders of the EI Cell believe their approach to integra- tion could represent a model for other military services and government research organizations to improve their agility in developing, testing and fielding new capabilities.


“What started as a way to coordinate the DRUs has evolved into a joint and interagency capability that acts like glue or mortar


https://asc.ar my.mil 27


holding the process together,” said Nuckols. “You need to have cool minds at the table who understand that failure is accept- able. It’s the nature of experimentation that things will change; you have to be able to capture value in the change. How we over- come that failure and how we learn from it is what the EI Cell does very well. We’re not going in with a firm vision of what will happen; we’re going in with an agile vision of what can happen and how to take advantage of that to get better results.”


For more information, go to https://mrdc.health.mil.


PAUL LAGASSE is a public affairs writer with USAMRDC. He has an M.A. in history and an M.L.S. in archival studies from the University of Maryland and a B.A. in history from Regis University. Before working in public affairs for the Army and Navy, he was a newspaper reporter and a freelance writer and editor.


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