The Pentagon has long indulged in highly polished technological systems that are the product of many years of bureaucratic wheel spinning, grinding meetings and wish-list overkill. But those soul-deadening procedures have come under intense criticism for turning creative people away from innovation for national security.
"Innovations threaten the establishment, and the reaction is often to get rid of the person promoting the innovation," said Jay Cohen, undersecretary for R&D in the Department of Homeland Security.
Even when a military official advocates a new technological system, added Cohen, he or she runs the risk of being punished by resentful officers protective of their turf.
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
The military's appetite for expensive, gold-plated systems still exists, but soldiers increasingly want their civilian technology partners to deliver solutions quickly to the field, even if the devices are far from perfected. That is partly because changing conditions in the Iraq War have raised demand for new gadgets and gizmos, even in tiny batches.
"This is a major shift in outlook, and I believe it is a permanent shift," said Mark Sherman, who oversees efforts by BBN Technologies of Cambridge, Massachusetts, a supplier of new technologies to the military since 1948.
His advice to civilian innovators seeking military sales is this: "Do it quick, and make it cheap because conditions change."
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE/BBN TECHNOLOGIES
Consider the experience of BBN's shooter detection program, conceived in a rush four years ago. Asked by the US Army to quickly help soldiers in Iraq who found themselves under sniper fire, BBN delivered 50 early versions of a system it called Boomerang in a mere 66 days. Using an array of microphones in a small box, the system tracks the location, elevation and distance of a shot fired at either a stationary soldier or a moving vehicle.
In 2005, the army asked for improvements, and BBN fully commercialized the product. This year, BBN released a new version. At 9kg, it's one-third the weight of the original Boomerang and much more accurate at tracking shooters. The army has a thousand of them in the field and is ordering more.
More recently, BBN built a two-way translator, a hand-held device that allows a US soldier to understand an Arabic speaker, sort of. It is not perfect, Sherman acknowledges, but at 50 percent accuracy, the digital translator may indeed improve security and save lives because human translators in Iraq often spy for the other side or are targets for assassination by insurgents.
Late last year, Sherman had a chance meeting with some army officers at Harvard. Because BBN had been researching language translation for decades, a team was able to produce a single hand-held translator in just 42 days. It is now being tested in Iraq.
The idea of bringing inventions quickly to the battlefield has roots stretching to World War II and the Korean War. Faced with military setbacks in Korea in the early 1950s, Vannevar Bush, a science adviser to former US presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, argued that the best way to create breakthrough technologies for the military was to quickly put new inventions into the hands of soldiers, even if the products could not yet be mass produced.
But Bush's "few quick" notion fell out of favor after the Korean War, and the military's process of acquiring new technologies became highly bureaucratic, politicized and out of touch with the civilian technology scene.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are driving the military's new sense of urgency about technologies. But the need for suppliers to move faster is likely to persist well into the future.
For the battlefield, such speed requires an early adopter, or champion, and the willingness of engineers and product designers to work alongside soldiers.
"Our message to soldiers is: `We don't know how to improve this product, and we think you do. So tell us,'" said Daniel Kaufman, a program officer at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, part of the Defense Department. In recent years, the agency has helped companies insert dozens of beta technologies into the battlefield, with promising results.
Kaufman helped BBN and Total Immersion Software, a simulation-software firm in Alameda, California, quickly deliver to soldiers in Iraq a computer simulation that helps prepare them against ambushes.
While learning about the real conditions facing soldiers is usually more challenging than, say, figuring out the needs of a word-processing customer, the feedback from military users of new technologies is ultimately more rewarding.
"Soldiers are so appreciative," Kaufman said.
His work, he added, often leaves him with the notion that "Maybe I helped some guy come home."
To bring novelties successfully to the battlefield, engineers recognize that they need champions within the military to ensure timely field tests. Impatient military officials sometimes reach out to civilians, encouraging them to work quickly in the lab and promising that their troops will try the new gadgets and offer feedback about possible improvements.
When an army officer complained that sniper rifles were too heavy and that shots were often thrown off course by slight changes in wind speed, Deepak Varshneya, a manager also with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, visited a sniper training school in California and talked with soldiers back from Iraq.
Varshneya then helped the maker of a standard sniper rifle, the Iron Brigade Armory, reduce the weight of its XM-3 rifle. Now, he's working on the accuracy.
As of August, 52 of the beta-version rifles were in use by snipers in Iraq.
"We cut every possible obstacle," Varshneya said.
"The lesson here is that you can get rapid use if you try," he said.
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