The Army is using technological innovation to drive revolutionary change across the service, a panel of experts said.

“How do I solve a problem that I did not know I had? … How do I repurpose existing technology … to solve a problem … other than what it was designed for?” said Chris Manning, deputy assistant secretary of the Army for research and technology.

Some of that ingenuity and problem-solving is evident in the Army’s transformation in contact initiative, Manning said. The initiative, which puts new capabilities in soldiers’ hands for testing, takes current technology “that is available at some level of maturity” and  has soldiers ask, “What can I use this for? How can this change the way we fight as an Army?” Manning said.

The service also is changing the way it solicits from industry as it innovates using “a new mechanism called the characteristics of needs statement,” which more broadly defines problem areas or capability gaps, said Brig. Gen. Anthony Gibbs, director of integration at U.S. Army Futures Command. 

At times, the broader approach to problem statements may pose a challenge, Gibbs said at a Hot Topic on contracting and procurement hosted by the Association of the U.S. Army. “When we issue broad problem statements, ... we tend to get solutions that don't neatly fit into the existing requirements or categories of things that we expect to buy,” he said.

Instead of looking to industry to merely solve problems the Army comes across, the service is adapting its mindset and innovation processes, Manning said. “We're saying, ‘Hey, maybe what we need to do is first look outside and say, ‘What do you have, and how can we apply it?’ And how do we iterate rapidly with units and soldiers to go, ‘Is this thing useful?’ ”

Futures Command is hoping to take the lessons learned from transforming in contact brigades and scale it up to create “enduring” transformation, Gibbs said.

“We've been working a brigade and a division at a time … and moving very fast,” he said. “What we have to do is create paths so that we can take the promising technologies into production and scale up and actually create enduring change for our Army, versus kind of modernizing one brigade or one division at a time in different ways across the Army, because ultimately, we want the transformation to be enduring ,and we want to have interoperability across our Army formations.”