Army’s IVAS Example Can Help Pentagon Catch Up On AI

While Congress cut funding for IVAS, one of the most innovative programs in Army history, they would be wise to look at how and where this revolutionary program succeeded in spite of inefficiencies and bureaucracy.

This revolutionary system is called the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) and it can propel DoD a decade into the future today. After highlighting the advantage of legacy system innovation for DoD modernization, it is now vital that DoD see and build the sort of structural solutions that IVAS presents.

As a new team takes control of Pentagon decision-making with the advent of the Biden Administration, they have a unique opportunity to prevent the Defense Department from again missing a technological revolution already underway in the private sector. The problem is that the Pentagon still finds itself staring in the rearview mirror in the face of oncoming traffic. The Pentagon remains stuck in the “success” of the 1990s and Desert Storm, which is hindering its ability to take advantage of revolutions in smartphone, cloud computing and social media technologies, and their potential benefits for national security.

Belief that DoD Could Bend Technology to Its Own Needs

A major, yet shortsighted, takeaway from Desert Storm was that bureaucracy of the Department of Defense could bend technology to fit its aging notions of warfighting. Uniformed leaders regularly laud their ongoing efforts to produce new warfighting concepts that drive technologies, which only shows how fundamentally out of touch they are. Technology should drive capability, not the other way around. In the commercial sector, innovation occurs when tech is developed to change operations—not in the hope that current methods of operating will spark innovation. The Pentagon must learn from commercial experience and remember how GPS evolved from a system designed to improve nuclear and conventional weapons targeting to the massive global industry it is today.

Born out of the wreckage of the Army’s decade-plus long Warfighter Information Network – Tactical (WIN-T) and Future Combat Systems programs, the Army’s IVAS body-worn computer (or exceptionally advanced goggles) had an inauspicious start. WIN-T failed because the Army tried to design it around how the Army fought; not how it could or would fight. In 2016, after 15 years of failure, the Army abandoned the tactical network program. Freed from the bureaucratic mess of funding lines and acquisition requirements and buoyed by lessons learned from Special Forces in Iraq, IVAS arrived.

Army soldiers recently used these high-tech goggles to fire their weapons. Afterwards, they said they had to forget everything the Army taught them and adapt their weapons use to the technology in their hands. Under the old methodology, the Army would have required the technology to conform to the field manual on how to fire a weapon. The new Pentagon team needs to rapidly get technology like this into the field, then let the end-user warfighter—not Pentagon processes—adapt concepts to accommodate such new technologies.

Belief that a Top-Down Culture Still Works Best

The second major, equally unhelpful lesson from the 1990s was that new technology could reinforce top-down command, control and warfighting. DoD has spent the last three decades creating massive command centers and further centralizing defense agencies—like the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA)—into behemoths. However, in the commercial sector, rising technology drove a bottom-up revolution where content creation, employment, asset utilization, and empowerment was put in the hands of the end user. The Pentagon and Congress must similarly empower their “end-users”—the warfighters.

Clearly the Pentagon has gotten it backwards so far. America’s military is scrambling because its Industrial Age command structures are falling further behind the Information Aged-industries of the private sector and many of our adversaries.

IVAS has been a success centered around prioritizing innovation with existing tech over invention from scratch. Developers were placed side-by-side with those who will use the technology in the field. In this case, IVAS is built by Microsoft, so it benefits from the company’s commercial gaming technology, cloud computing and engineering prowess. IVAS is the result of coders and soldiers working together without any bureaucratic requirement to deploy today’s commercial technology—far exceeding what the services currently have, and making military adaptations in record time.

Fast forward only three years from its start, IVAS is now being launched absent bureaucratic requirements, and without a formal designated acquisition program, or early, dedicated funding. Bypassing bureaucracy directly resulted in successfully delivering revolutionary capabilities quickly. Putting the commercial software developers’ side-by-side with soldiers—a true bottom-up partnership—led to faster and more powerful innovation. The incoming administration should take note and promote IVAS — not smother it — and other services’ projects, while at the same time building upon these successes.

How do they do this? Before advancing with new acquisition programs, senior leaders would be wise to ask the “bottom” of the totem pole the best uses of key legacy systems as technology test beds. Legacy systems are those most familiar to the rank and file and can be used for private-public partnerships at the service-level, to innovate.

Because Microsoft and IVAS now own the most important piece of real estate in the entire Department of Defense—the eyes of the American soldier—the IVAS technology should become the standard for all data storage, transport, and visualization across the Defense Department, in effect becoming the “plumbing” for a needed technological revolution. With standard infrastructure, such as the one offered by IVAS, the entire commercial eco-system of non-defense tech companies, can now innovate and work with DoD with very low barriers-to-entry.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly the cure-all solution for many defense challenges. But for the AI-revolution to occur, there must be a common infrastructure platform to build upon. To this end, shared standards, such as those generated by IVAS, are a critical step forward. Think of a near-future where servicemembers can use Slack to communicate across the globe and have apps built on-demand, customized for the next mission.

A future where they do not need weeks of training on how to use systems because they resemble the systems they use in their daily lives. The possibility of revolutionizing defense AI technology by 2025 is real, measurable, accountable, and achievable. Now Congress and the incoming administration must heed the lessons learned from the IVAS experience, and use it as the starting point to launch this revolution on President-elect Biden’s first day.

Mackenzie Eaglen is a defense expert at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and member of the Breaking Defense Board of Contributors.

John Ferrari is a visiting fellow at AEI and the chief administrative officer at QOMPLX, a data analytics and cybersecurity firm. Until last year, Ferrari was the Army’s director of program analysis and evaluation.