Why is it that you can send money around the world in seconds with your phone, but a forward observer can’t use a secure application to connect with an artillery battery and call for fire? That’s because the past 30 years of technological innovation have largely left the military behind. The services don’t have a large-scale ability to create the technology required to compete on the modern battlefield.
This is a problem. And the Marine Corps is no further ahead than the other services. It does not have an active duty or civilian workforce with the skills necessary to develop or maintain the technology it will need for its operating concepts in the next conflict. Recruiting and training the right people will take decades.
We have found a way to speed this up: Use the reserve components to inject private sector expertise into the active force while it builds technical capacity. We (Drew and Collin) have worked to establish an organization within the Marine Corps Reserve to support the active force’s software development efforts. Our experience has shown that — if employed correctly — reservists can bring a wealth of experience into the active force while working to advance the mission. But to use reservists effectively, the services will need to update their employment models for the 21st century by enabling asynchronous remote work and considering a reservist’s private sector expertise when assigning them to software development units.
Case Study: Casualty Evacuation Planning Software
A recent project demonstrates what software can do for the operating forces. We’ve been building an application — Augmented Reconnaissance and Estimate of the Situation — to help plan casualty evacuations. The project began with a student at Naval Postgraduate School who was trying to build an application to help plan responses to changed tactical situations. Patrols that take a casualty usually default to pre-planned evacuation points. But these zones are rarely the most advantageous, because the tactical situation has completely changed since they were identified. Quickly finding a nearby evacuation point within the “golden hour” after taking a casualty can be the difference between life and death. The application scans data to identify nearby landing zones.
Alongside the Marine Corps Software Factory, we have worked on iterative versions of the application. We first formed a cross-functional software team and, after design sessions with the app’s creator and Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics Squadron One, we gave it to the operating forces for initial acceptance testing. Feedback indicated that we needed to improve the tool before it would be helpful on the battlefield.
The biggest issue was that it was too slow. To identify landing zones, the application scans topographic data to find areas that don’t exceed specified aircraft landing parameters. This is a complicated math problem. So, we added a marine with a doctorate in mathematics to the team and had him apply a machine learning model to improve performance.
