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home > September 10, 2007 issue > article
Web forum gives voice to innovative warfighters
By Brian Robinson
Special to Defense Systems
Gestalt, a consulting firm with a focus in the defense sector, has devised a Web-based forum that the Defense Department can use to pry useful technology ideas from warfighters on the front line and send those ideas to people who can act on them.
Anyone who logs in to troopideas.com can share their ideas for innovations and Gestalt will be a conduit to move them quickly to the right place.
If the ideas fall under Gestalt’s area of expertise, the company will evaluate them and perhaps champion their development, and when it can’t, the company will make sure the ideas are forwarded to appropriate military and government organizations.
It’s a process Gestalt has used in other places, said William Loftus, the company’s president and chief executive officer.
“We’ve learned a lot from talking with people who have just rotated out of the field, more than we do through regular military and Pentagon channels,” he said. “So we’ve been doing this kind of thing for a long time.”
One event that spurred development of TroopsIdeas.com came when a Gestalt employee met John Lewis, a Marine who was badly wounded by an improvised explosive device (IED) in Fallujah, Iraq. He explained how there was no simple way for patrols to share information about the location of IEDs and other dangers.
A Gestalt team developed a prototype of an online database system, named PatrolNet, in a couple of weeks that enables patrol troops to share that kind of information with one another.
Tracking IEDs was a good tool to get the whole program started, said Lewis, now a former Marine who’s a defense industry consultant. He was more focused on finding a better way than spreadsheets to organize the profiles of civilians that troops encountered on patrols.
“I wanted to do that kind of census operation because you can’t know what’s going on in this kind of [urban] warfare unless you know all the parts, and in this case that means information on civilians and what their family, business and even criminal connections are,” he said.
Each service has a requirement process to handle these kinds of troop-borne ideas. In the Marine Corp’s case, it’s called the Urgent Universal Needs System. But like any bureaucracy, Lewis said, the system has flaws. The basic one in this case is speed, or the lack of it. Also, any idea is liable to be intercepted en route and dismissed before it can be fully considered.
Lewis thinks TroopIdeas.com has a chance to be a valuable supplement to the chain of command once troops on the ground get to know about it, and if they can get adequate Internet access. It also helps that TroopIdeas.com is well-suited to the instant-access experience of most 18- to 20-year-olds, he said.
“I don’t think any good Marine is looking to circumvent the chain of command,” Lewis said. “But they will look for other ways if that
doesn’t work, and the problem is that the [formal] system is replete with things that take three years to succeed rather than three days.”
TroopIdeas.com went live Aug. 7, and warfighters have already started submitting ideas, Loftus said, including some that have come out of left field. One, for example, was for a way to help warfighters in the field to vote in U.S. elections, which can be hard for anyone who doesn’t have an absentee ballot.
A couple of members of Congress have also asked the company
to keep them in the loop about what the project produces, Loftus said.
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