Bringing the Army to Innovation
Jeff Decker and Mrinal Menon
December 24, 2020
Will the U.S. Army be able to use cutting edge commercial technologies to dominate battlefields in the not-too-distant future? A company called Lumineye certainly hopes so. Lumineye (with which we have no affiliation) won the Army’s xTechSearch competition with a device that essentially enables soldiers to “see†through walls. Though Lumineye won the Army’s premier innovation pitch competition and offers game-changing technology, the Army has yet to transition the company’s solution into a widespread capability. In fact, after four iterations of xTechSearch less than half of the 43 finalists have gained pilot contracts, and far fewer participants have transitioned their technologies to the Army.
Although xTechSearch is only one component of the Army’s recent efforts to harvest commercial technologies for modernization, its struggles may indicate an Army-wide problem. Such problems could hamper the Army’s attempts to prepare for the future of war. A coherent assessment of the Army’s ability to adopt commercial technologies is therefore needed to determine whether the Army can meet its ambitious modernization goals.
https://warontherocks.com/2020/12/bringing-the-army-to-innovation/
