With Joint Innovation Outpost, Army ‘operationalized an acquisition cell’

FORT BRAGG, N.C. — The XVIII Airborne Corps’ new Joint Innovation Outpost in a recent exercise laid the groundwork to improve how systems are tested and potentially fielded, which officials hope could lead to wider, faster delivery of capability across the larger Army.

The JIOP, officially opened in January and designed to operationalize acquisition at the three-star tactical edge for the corps, is part of the Army’s larger Pathway for Innovation and Technology (PIT). The PIT falls under the Army’s wider acquisition reform efforts and is described as the plus-one to the six Portfolio Acquisition Executives, aiming to deliver capabilities faster by nestling organizations directly with soldiers for more direct feedback on needs and capabilities.

“It doesn’t matter what it is. It could be helping them with a contract. It could be helping them procure something. It could be helping them staff a requirement. It could be letting the Army know that they did something really great. It could be letting the Army know that we don’t want to go this way. It really is the first time the Army has operationalized an acquisition cell,” Col. Thomas Monaghan, director of the JIOP, said of the outpost in an interview on March 31.

This is the first time an operational command, in this case the XVIII Airborne Corps, has acquisition professionals and decision authority up to $50 million of mostly research and development funds.

Monaghan spoke to Breaking Defense on the sidelines of the corps’ flagship Scarlet Dragon exercise, designed to refine operational capabilities and processes in the way of sharing data and closing kill chains from intelligence to targeting for data-centric warfare. With the JIOP in place, officials began to rethink how to make Scarlet Dragon less episodic and leading to more robust capabilities that could be matured not just for the unit, but the wider Army.

“Traditionally, the way that we’ve done Scarlet Dragon, it’s a three-week exercise. We have an engineering week … so like an integration week and then a validation week, an execution week. It’s an episodic exercise series,” Rob Braun, corps chief technology officer, said in an interview at the JIOP. “But it’s not the best recipe for success to actually solve long term problems. Because we just keep going in fits and starts.”

While JIOP had a limited role in this most recent exercise, Braun said the goal for future Scarlet Dragon iterations is to have vendors respond to problem sets in between each execution day serving as a risk reduction to validate or invalidate their systems. This, officials believe, will lead to a higher payoff exercise with more mature technologies by making it more enduring in between each iteration.

Under that model, the hope is to eliminate huge proposals that can top 900 pages that are a staple of the legacy acquisition process to more quickly identify capabilities that can play, or even are mature enough to purchase right then and there.

“We just came up with a quick, slick 9-line. What’s your capability? Is it ready? What do you think it does? Where do you think it meets in some of our innovation priorities,” Monaghan said. “We can give feedback on some of the 9-liners we’ve got. … We can weigh and measure that and say, ‘Please, do this, do this, this is what we’re looking for and now that’s ready to go into a Scarlet Dragon.’ Or the other side, ‘Hey, that’s ready to go now, it doesn’t need to go into Scarlet Dragon.’ That’s a quick buy and test.”

For example, the Army’s G6, responsible for network capabilities, has been testing a cross-domain solution that is not part of the service’s fielded network kit presently at the last few Scarlet Dragons. Now, with the JIOP and its tie in to the larger acquisition enterprise, they can build the program manager relationships to quickly transition the capability to go to other units.

“That’s something that we’ve been working with the program office. Their track ends like, ‘Hey, this is probably a better solution and we’re just been maturing it within the confines of what we’re supposed to,’ so the program office would be able to take that and make it a program of record and get it out to the Army. We benefit from it. The Army benefits from it,” Braun said.

While the JIOP serves XVIII, it is tied into the larger Army acquisition enterprise. Through its work responding to solider requirements in its unit and events such as Scarlet Dragon, it’s meant to identify technologies that have wider applicability for big Army and work to transition them to the traditional acquisition process for fielding to all.

“We immediately start looking at what program office we can roll those into if successful, if one exists. If it doesn’t exist, I inform [Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology] like, hey, we need a cup program office, because here’s a new cup, that type of thing,” he said. “That type of connective tissue has never existed before in the Army, where you have the soldier that can generate an idea or validate an idea to make a usable product and then it rolls over into the big military industrial complex of ASAALT and building it with industry. It flows back and forth.”