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As one of the first if not the first Technical Special Reconnaissance (TSR) Officer's in Naval Special Warfare, I thought this was a good article for the average person to understand what's happening in SOF and in the SEAL Team's regarding use of drones and the overall theme that "ISR is critical".
Cheers,
J.Surmont
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May 2011
By Grace V. Jean
To accommodate the growth of unmanned systems in the covert operations community, Naval Special Warfare Command this month will commission a new active-duty group that will concentrate the component’s remotely piloted aircraft, underwater systems and robotic programs and personnel under a single entity.
The establishment of Naval Special Warfare Group 10 reflects the increasing importance of drones in the elite forces.
“I can think of nowhere where SEALs are operating today where they’re devoid of UAS support,” said Cmdr. Robert Witzleb, the director of technical special reconnaissance at Naval Special Warfare Command.
Because frogmen are less likely to be swimming with fins than boating and ambling ashore, SEAL teams are relying heavily on unmanned aircraft more than underwater robots to accomplish their missions.
The Navy is developing a new robotic platform called small tactical unmanned aircraft system, or STUAS. The program intends to begin fielding the aircraft as early as next year.
The systems will complement the Insitu Inc.-made ScanEagle, a commercial technology that NSW procured as an interim solution for its intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance needs. Naval Special Warfare personnel who are not trained as SEALs fly that system.
STUAS, which is being developed by Insitu, will accommodate a 75-pound payload — a drastic improvement over its predecessor’s 5-pound limit. It is also a rail-launched system with greater endurance and higher altitude capability.
“Acquiring STUAS allows us to fill a gap,” said Witzleb. “The only option we have right now is to request a Predator or Reaper.”
By design, the system will be operated by dedicated Naval Special Warfare personnel who are not SEALs, said Witzleb, who is also the commanding officer of the Naval Oceanography Special Warfare Center. He oversees about 100 personnel who provide meteorology and oceanography support to NSW. They also have a secondary function as unmanned systems operators.
“There’s just no time to take a SEAL who has all these other responsibilities — being able to jump out of airplanes, being able to combat dive, all these other skills and then heap on UAS operations,” explained Witzleb. “NSW has gotten smart over the past 10 years by bringing on folks who are not SEALs, not trained combat divers and parachutists, to do the work on behalf of SEALs.”
However, it is true that every SEAL is conceivably a pilot when it comes to the small, hand-launched systems such as the Raven or Puma, which are allocated much like other gear, whether it’s rifles or radios, he added.
”The ability of a SEAL to stand up from a fighting position and hand-launch a UAS that can then be used to do force protection over movements or locate an enemy’s firing position near instantaneously, is never going to go away,” Witzleb said.
For the larger systems, the UAS operators form detachments that marry up with SEALs on deployments. They can break down into smaller groups or aggregate into a larger element as necessary in the field.
“We have designed ourselves in such a way that the smallest conceivable subdivision of NSW operations would be able to have some UAS capability associated with it,” said Witzleb.
When STUAS comes online, it will not replace ScanEagle. “There was never an intention to procure STUAS and then allow ScanEagle to collect dust. With current budget pressures, ScanEagle is envisioned to continue to be part of our family of systems,” said Witzleb.
Underwater robotic systems are also a part of the family, but because of budgetary constraints and war priorities, the semi-autonomous hydrographic reconnaissance vehicle and others have not been maturing as quickly as the airborne platforms.
“I think everyone recognizes that on short notice, NSW could once again find themselves operating in the littorals and not landlocked, and those UUV programs could be every bit as important in that operating environment as they have been in the past,” said Witzleb.
“If we were not resource-constrained, we would probably still be making large investments and continuing development of UUV systems. However tradeoffs have to be made. Right now, with most SEALS having two feet on the ground, bigger investments are being made in airborne systems.”
Image by uscgd8 via Flickr
I read an article today from the Homeland Security NewsWire about the recent release of AT&T's new satellite smarphone called the TerreStar Genus. As a former military operator of sophisticated satellite communications systems, I've always been impressed with the tech. I was impressed with the article about this gadget as well.
To summarize the article
"AT&T’s TerreStar Genus satellite smartphone allows users to communicate from areas where no wireless network coverage exists -- or areas where such coverage was destroyed by a disaster; the phone is not cheap, and using it is costly; there are other limitations, too -- but for those who need to stay in touch with headquarters even when outside of traditional coverage areas, or when such coverage has been disrupted, the phone offers a reasonable solution."
Beyond the typical information about features, benefits and costs there was an interesting comment made by the author about users of this device and "priviledge".
For some reason the statement "the phone offers a reasonable solution." for those "priveledged" (to use it) bothers me. I think primarily because I kept asking myself, "reasonable and priveledged for whom? and by whose standards?"
Anyway.
I decided to look into some statistics about the number of casualties just this year from natural disasters. I learned that there have been 103 documented natural disasters so far in 2010. I also found here that the number of casualties from natural disasters in 2010 is already well above 200,000, which is outside the norm, and that this abnormally high death toll is primarily due to one single disaster, the Haiti Earthquake.
What I discovered is that while the tech is cool I started to think about the concept of two people separated by a few miles from one another trying to talk to each other and using something like this to enable those kinds of communications. Then it hit me. What bugs me is that this is a really sophisticated system that was originally developed for the United States Military to have their troops in the field be able to communicate in real time with their Headquarters which in some cases could be halfway around the world.
According to the article...
"AP reports that there are some important benefits to the Genus. It could become an important tool for businesses that operate off the beaten path, like mineral mining companies, commercial fishermen, wilderness authorities, and emergency response workers."
My observation is that there are people who use and will use these devices to talk or message someone a few miles away with each other and end up paying the same premium one would expect to pay for something that enables you to talk or message someone halfway around the world. I mean think about it. Would you pay 65 cents per minute to talk to someone, $5 per megabyte to send data back and forth or pay .40 cents per text message if you could avoid it? Especially if you've got multiple people scattered out over a 20 mile radius? (as an example)
I'm not a doctor, but it seems kind of like using a sledgehammer when you need a scalpel, it just seems to me to be really expensive and inefficient.
This is the reason we're bringing our technology to market.
As I've said before, we've observed over the years that something was missing for individuals who simply need lightweight, affordable, rapidly deployable and highly mobile technology to enable them to provide themselves with effective and efficient localized voice, data & imagery coverage capabilities.
If you want to think about it in geeky computer science terms, we believe that the world is transitioning from a "Client Server or mainframe" architecture to a peer-to-peer architecture or even a Peering-Client-Peering-Server architecture. Think about the way the United States Military developed their satellite communications or satellite Imagery systems. To reflect their organizational requirements - which are global reach and centralized command and control, which is shifting and decentralizing and flattening, by the way. This leads one to choose a Client Server or main-frame architecture.
Obviously this is fantastic technology and is very useful for many many people. But it's not a cure-all for communications and imagery coverage for everyone. Again, the problem is having to connect back to a server. If you use Gmail you realize the limitations when Gmail slows down or is unavailable. It stinks!
The opportunity we see is to design, build, develop and deliver game-changing 21st century expeditionary enterprise platforms to front-line users. In addition to the simple example outlined for localized communications coverage, front-line users need the ability to generate localized iterative data and they need approachable systems, methods and techniques to accomplish this. Examples of localized iterative data are high resolution aerial images or full motion video. Of course, the data would be processed locally and then shared locally first and globally second which provides the (most important) local users "first dibs" on the data. An additional benefit will be increasingly precise data, information, decisions and execution - resulting in more desirable outcomes. By the way, the military calls this idea "Persistent Coverage". They also have an interesting project ongoing in Afghanistan right now called "Gorgon Stare".
Today, if you aren't in the military (or a humongous publicly traded corporation with gobs of investors capital and net margins to spend) how do you affordably and effeciently achieve "persistent coverage" at the local level?
Besides the military, additional users of persistent coverage generating iterative data are mineral mining companies, commercial fishermen, wilderness authorities, and emergency response workers.
Think about it, if wall street can come up with methods, techniques and systems to get the robot traders up to the minute data to generate enormous gobs of cash and transactions, why can't an expeditionary enterprise user on the front-line trying to save human life or defeat murderous thugs have a 21st century capability that puts their immediate and local needs first?
Global strategies, global reach, global this, global that sounds great on paper, looks wonderful in a prospectus or in the financial summary of a quarterly report or from a pundit on television.
The cold hard truth is that people (you and I) think, act and respond locally.
Like when you are trying to dig your relatives out of the rubble of a collapsed building or keep your shipmates or fellow soldier's safe in a hostile place far from the comforts and safety of home - the only thing that matters to you is to be blunt - what's going on around you. Nothing else really matters.
If you don't believe me - find a member of the military or a public safety professional or a Disaster Responder, or an NGO/Humanitarian Aid professional and ask them.
Before you ask them though, thank them for serving and for not being too "priveledged" to serve.
Cheers,
John
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Essay about Shipping from a founder from WordPress.
Definitely worth a read.
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Many entrepreneurs idolize Steve Jobs. He’s such a perfectionist, they say. Nothing leaves the doors of 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino without a polish and finish that makes geeks everywhere drool. No compromise!
I like Apple for the opposite reason: they’re not afraid of getting a rudimentary 1.0 out into the world.
“No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.” — cmdrtaco, Slashdot.org, 2001, reviewing the first iPod
I remember my first 1G iPhone. Like a meal you have to wait for, or a line outside a club, the fact that I stood in line for hours made the first time I swiped to unlock the phone that much sweeter. It felt like I was on Star Trek and this was my magical tricorder… a tricorder that constantly dropped calls on AT&T’s network, had a headphone adapter that didn’t fit any of the hundreds of dollars of headphones I owned, ran no applications, had no copy and paste, and was as slow as molasses.
Now, the crazy thing about that release is when the original iPhone went public, flaws and all, you know that in a secret room somewhere on Apple’s campus they had a working prototype of the 3GS with a faster processor, better battery life, normal headphone jack… a perfect everything. Steve Jobs was probably already carrying around one in his pocket. How painful it must have been to have everyone criticizing them for all the flaws they had already fixed but couldn’t release yet because they were waiting for component prices to come down or for some bugs to be worked out of the app store.
“$400 for an Mp3 Player! I’d call it the Cube 2.0 as it wont sell, and be killed off in a short time… and it’s not really functional. Uuhh Steve, can I have a PDA now?” — elitemacor, macrumors.com, 2001, responding to the original iPod announcement
Or, I wonder, are they really quite zen about the whole thing? There is a dark time in WordPress development history, a lost year. Version 2.0 was released on December 31st, 2005, and version 2.1 came out on January 22nd, 2007. Now just from the dates, you might imagine that perhaps we had some sort of rift in the open source community, that all the volunteers left or that perhaps WordPress just slowed down. In fact it was just the opposite, 2006 was a breakthrough year for WP in many ways: WP was downloaded 1.5 million times that year, and we were starting to get some high-profile blogs switching over. The growing prominence had attracted scores of new developers to the project and we were committing new functionality and fixes faster than we ever had before.
What killed us was “one more thing.” We could have easily done three major releases that year if we had drawn a line in the sand, said “finished,” and shipped the darn thing. The problem is that the longer it’s been since your last release the more pressure and anticipation there is, so you’re more likely to try to slip in just one more thing or a fix that will make a feature really shine. For some projects, this literally goes on forever.
“hey – heres an idea Apple – rather than enter the world of gimmicks and toys, why dont you spend a little more time sorting out your pathetically expensive and crap server line up? or are you really aiming to become a glorified consumer gimmicks firm?” — Pants, macrumors.com, 2001
I imagine prior to the launch of the iPod, or the iPhone, there were teams saying the same thing: the copy + paste guys are *so close* to being ready and we know Walt Mossberg is going to ding us for this so let’s just not ship to the manufacturers in China for just a few more weeks… The Apple teams were probably embarrassed. But if you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first version you waited too long.
A beautiful thing about Apple is how quickly they obsolete their own products. I imagine this also makes the discipline of getting things out there easier. Like I mentioned before, the longer it’s been since the last release the more pressure there is, but if you know that if your bit of code doesn’t make this version but there’s the +0.1 coming out in 6 weeks, then it’s not that bad. It’s like flights from San Francisco to LA, if you miss one you know there’s another one an hour later so it’s not a big deal. Amazon has done a fantastic job of this with the Kindle as well, with a new model every year.
Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you’ve created until it’s out there. That means every moment you’re working on something without it being in the public it’s actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world. It’s even worse because development doesn’t happen in a vacuum — if you have a halfway decent idea, you can be sure that there are two or three teams somewhere in the world that independently came up with it and are working on the same thing, or something you haven’t even imagined that disrupts the market you’re working in. (Think of all the podcasting companies — including Ev Williams’ Odeo — before iTunes built podcasting functionality in.)
By shipping early and often you have the unique competitive advantage of hearing from real people what they think of your work, which in best case helps you anticipate market direction, and in worst case gives you a few people rooting for you that you can email when your team pivots to a new idea. Nothing can recreate the crucible of real usage.
You think your business is different, that you’re only going to have one shot at press and everything needs to be perfect for when Techcrunch brings the world to your door. But if you only have one shot at getting an audience, you’re doing it wrong.
After the debacle of the 2.0 -> 2.1 lost year of 2006 the WordPress community adopted a fairly aggressive schedule of putting a major release out 3 times a year, and we stuck to it fairly well although in 2009-2010 we’ve slacked a bit, falling into the “one more thing” mentality again. But more fundamentally it’s still shrink-wrap software, which means that updates burden its users in some way so we have to spread them out.
That’s why I love working on web services and pretty much everything Automattic focuses on is a service. On WordPress.com we deploy code to production twenty or thirty times a day and anyone in the company can do it. We measure the deploy time to hundreds of servers and if it gets too slow (more than 30-60 seconds) we figure out a new way to optimize it. In that short rapid iteration environment the most important thing isn’t necessarily how perfect code is when you send it out, but how quickly you can revert if you need to so the cost of a mistake is really low, under a minute of brokenness. Someone can go from idea to working code to production and more importantly real users in just a few minutes and I can’t imagine any better form of testing.
“Real artists ship.” — Steve Jobs, 1983
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Mobile IT infrastructure is hot and is growing. According to a recent In-Stat research paper titled Mobile Hotspots:Heating Up and Driving Mobile Data Growth, the Market for Standalone Mobile Hotspots is already at $500M and growing fast.
According to In-Stat,
"The concept of a mobile hotspot, a device that connects to a mobile broadband connection and provides a bridge to a Wi-Fi LAN, is relatively new, with the first standalone mobile hotspot devices only appearing in the last two years. Yet, the number and types of mobile hotspots is growing almost daily and In-Stat (www.in-stat.com) forecasts that revenue from standalone mobile hotspot devices will approach $500 million by the end of 2010. Mobile hotspot service revenue is projected to reach into the tens of billions of dollars annually."
Additionally, the researchers also point out that this market is already fragmenting and will only fragment more over time.
“Mobile hotspot device shipments are expected to grow for several years, but we expect some jockeying for the top position occurring between device categories,” says Allen Nogee, Principal Analyst. “Smartphones with embedded mobile hotspots have already cut into shipments for battery-powered mobile hotspot devices. Automotive hotspot devices might do the same. Standalone mobile hotspots will take on a new life again as they are positioned as home gateway devices for mobile operators selling broadband services to the home.”
The point is that as demand increases in the consumer/commercial markets for this "information iInfrastructure", we believe that a small niche will be established wherebye federal markets and DoD users will continue to pull this and other Commercial Off The Shelf technologies in to meet the increasingly important need for instantaneous access to iterative data which will then drive a second "iterative data" wave, which we believe will show up for many as an emerging market we have identified that we call the "expeditionary enterprise".
Additional In-Stat research reveals:
Cover of The Four Steps to the Epiphany
"Whether or not the people who control the expenditure of funds in the DoD or investment capital in the commercial sector are smart enough to pick up on this is something we can only speculate about, but the need is so obvious and the application so straightforward, it is almost pathetic it has not already been done.”
- Former Pentagon Director of Air Warfare Chuck Myers, a retired combat/test pilot who now runs a Virginia-based mini-think tank called AeroCounsel Inc. (excerpt from DefenseMediaNetwork article "Return of the Military Airship")
"In a startup no facts exist inside the building, only opinions."
Early on in previous posts, I briefly discussed Blank’s book "The Four Steps To The Epiphany" which is essential reading for anyone starting something new. Stephen Blank has devoted many years to trying to answer the questions of "Who is the customer? and will they buy this? and will it make any money?" , with a theory he calls Customer Development. This theory has become so influential that some have called it one of the three pillars of the lean startup - every bit as important as the changes in technology or the advent of agile development. His book is fantastic, but it’s a tough read because it’s basically a bunch of his teaching notes compiled into a book.
In some of my early posts I discussed one of the key components of his Customer Development theory called “product/market fit”. I think it’s a good time to talk a little bit more about the Customer Development Model and how it relates to Sofcoast and (more than likely) how it relates to other startups.
After two plus years of blood, sweat and tears and multiple pivots, we're moving from customer discovery into customer validation. I also call the customer discovery process the [can-we-what-do-we-build-is-it-viable] hump. Everyone who has been following the journey with Sofcoast may at some point or another have said "what are they doing?" or they may have said "what are they doing now?" or "what are they building now?" What you've been witnessing is the customer discovery process in action.
According to Stephen Blank, the goal of Customer Discovery is to find out who the customers for our product are and whether the problem we are solving is important to them. This step involves lots of discovery. Discovering whether the problem, product and customer theory is correct. Stephen Blank stresses the importance of “getting out of the building” in order to learn what the high-value customer problems are and what it is about our product that solves these problems and then identify who the actual customers are who will buy and use the products on a daily basis.
The goal of this process is not to collect feature lists, it’s to test the hypothesis of the founders and product development team. In a startup the founders and product development team define the first product based on the founder’s vision. The Customer Discovery process is seeing whether customers and markets exist for this first product. This is also the process of achieving product/market fit.
For us this has been an iterative process to build out the founder’s vision (my vision) which admitadly, has been a fight and struggle to build for a variety of reasons - most importantly a matter of having the right customer development team onboard. Once we got the right team onboard things have and are moving much faster. By the way, as a 15 year veteran Special Operations & SEAL operator, my vision wasn't to build a kite - or a flying mattress - or anything that required a tractor trailor or lots of complexity - it was something small, valuable, powerful, disruptive, game changing, cool, surprising and interesting - and I’m ecstatic to say that you can now see it - because it finally exists.
Watch this video. I'm standing by myself holding onto this thing in 24 MPH winds with no problems. 'Nuff said.
If you want to summarize for people you might speak to, Sofcoast's primary product is an autonomous rucksack portable tactical aerostat system (RPTAS) or an intelligent balloon or smart balloon. Essentially we've developed something that is quite elegant in it's simplicity and functionality. One thing that you may not be able to see is that the system is autonomous which has always been a core element of my vision - turn something old and inefficient like a balloon into something new, modern and relevant by designing it elegantly and making it intelligent.
It took time to find the right group of people that would constitute Sofcoast’s Customer Development Team. Navigating the challenges with having the right team to build out the founder’s envisioned product for us was one of the biggest challenges we faced – and we weathered the storm. Additionally, this is essentially where as the founder and CEO of the business, I had the ability and responsibility of making the decisions to continue to pivot the product as the customer hypothesis continued to crystallize. By the way, I was also determined to get what I had envisioned built in order for us to be able to defend our patent portfolio.
One important note: It might be of interest to note that Sofcoast's customer development team is unique because in addition to myself as the founding CEO and visionary, 75% of our Customer Development Team are former subject matter experts in Unmanned Systems and in-the-field information technologies, who represent several of our targeted early key customers and end user groups. Translation: We understand what these individuals need very well - we also understand the high value problems they are faced with intimately. (Imagine being able to remove a couple of layers of people when managing a project and moving information or instructions through a group of people...and replace them with industry leaders...things move faster and with more fidelity the fewer the nodes...) This has also given us an important advantage in narrowing our product focus on key problems and capability gaps translating into a compelling value proposition for our customers.
Additionally, this phase is where lots of iterations and stress on our team, partners, investors, advisors, suppliers, directors and everyone's families can occur in order to achieve the envisioned product/market fit. It truly takes a special group of people to weather this process and stick with it in order to get to the next phase which Blank calls Customer Validation.
According to Blank, in the Customer Validation step, the startup is focused on finding visionary customers and to get them to make a purchase. Unlike “mainstream” customers who want to buy a finished, completed, and tested product, earlyvangelists are willing to make a leap of faith and buy from a startup. The reasons will vary greatly but these customers will buy yet-to-be-delivered, unfinished product.
I'm happy to share that we are generating momentum in developing early sales with visionary customers and look forward to checking back in with everyone as we transition from the validation step towards the creation step, which may actually end up being a much quicker sequence than the customer discovery process.
Then again, it may not.
Of course, the pace at which we continue to learn and improve as a Customer Development Team will directly correlate to all areas of performance relating to our execution on sales, product quality, market entry and ultimately our profitability and growth profile as we mature.
It definitely ain't boring and beats a day job!
Cheers,
John
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I've already pointed out in a previous thread the dilemma of buying and operating an 800K platform to fly a $400 camera over a place. That's definitely not a highly scalable model, I'd say.
We all get that social is scaling, I caught the movie "The Social Network" this weekend and thought it rocked. Mobile is scaling - there's an "app" for just about everything now.
Real-time, localized and relevant information can scale - but right now it's not truly scalable. Ask Apple. Ask AT&T. Ask anyone who's looked at their house in Google Earth and said "that's not my house anymore!". Ask military members on the front lines. Ask First Responders. Ask NGO's. Ask anyone who drives through the mojave desert.
I mean, think about this - When Apple unveiled the iPad awhile back, the network went down and Steve Jobs had to "voluntell" everyone to get off the damn wifi so he could continue with his demo.
Even Steve Jobs legendary product demo's and unveilings aren't impervious to the problems of infrastructure collapse or constraints. (I guarantee you that no expense will ever be spared again to ensure that never happens again...but again who's got wads of money like Apple?) Needless to say, mobile and ad-hoc infrastructure is limited and expensive - which (once again) limits information relevance, availablity and scalability.
We think the ASAP coverage system can change this and actually enable scalability because if we're successful then we've dropped the cost of rapid, mobile and ad-hoc infrastructure to close to as close to zero as we can feasibly get it.
General Interconnected Coverage Concept (above)
Do you think it's feasible to have a mesh network with towers and airborne (even inflatable) systems if the systems drive the costs up by orders of magnitude? Not unless your The US DoD during the Bush years.
And we're all pinching pennies these days but still demand our apps and mobile and information.
So what does one do?
Call us.
Single Panel ASAP (ASAP XP - "extremely portable")
Image from 300 ft. above ground level via a Smartphone from the ASAP XP (Single Panel) in Utah at 8,000 ft. Density Altitude. (above)
Article worth reading about Smartphones and very small computing devices such as iPad, Kindle, etc., etc..
Note:
Keep in mind that we're now three years Post-iPhone launch and 1.5 years post android launch and the military decision makers are actually just now (over past 6 -12 months) starting to take notice about the benefits/impacts of smartphone and mobile and frankly had Apple and Google not spent the obscene amount of money well in advance of revenue's the military market would probably still be casting a wary eye at mobile and very small computing devices as relevant tools for their soldiers on the front lines.
It all "makes perfect sense" now but don't forget how much money and time and prestige (Apple/Google/Pick an important name in tech) it took to move this market.
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Army looks to Kindles, iPads and smart phones for the battlefield
The tech gadgets rely on a never-ending supply of energy, so the service also is experimenting with alternative power sources such as fuel cells and solar panels, said Mike McCarthy, director of the mission command complex of the Future Force Integration Directorate at Fort Bliss in Texas. The consumer products will not replace standard systems such as the broadband radios the Army is testing at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. McCarthy bought a Kindle, six Apple iPads and an Entourage Edge, which incorporates an e-book reader and a tablet into a dual-screen computer, to see how the retail products could be used on the battlefield. He said the devices could serve as electronic manuals for Army standard battlefield systems, including broadband radios and unmanned sensors systems. Currently, soldiers use printed manuals. Every time a system is reprogrammed or revised, the Army has to print new instructions to distribute to soldiers. But the service could easily update the e-manuals and push the changes out instantly over a network, McCarthy said. Combat networks in the future could include battlefield cellular systems, and the Army is using Nextel's cellular service, a division of Sprint, to blanket the 350 square miles where testing is taking place at White Sands. Since it might not have access to commercial cellular networks in combat, the Army plans to test later this year the Monax wireless network Lockheed Martin Corp. manufactures, which supports smart-phone operations over military networks. The integration directorate also will test short-range cellular systems xG Technology Inc. developed. To keep batteries charged, the directorate is experimenting with solar cells that attach to a backpack and provide three hours of power for every one hour of sunlight exposure. It also is testing fuel cells that provide continuous power and weigh just ounces compared with standard Army batteries that weigh a few pounds. The directorate fielded 149 i1 Push-to-Talk phones from Motorola, which run on Google's Android operating system, as well as 53 Touch Pro2s from vendor HTC, which run on Windows Mobile software. With these phones soldiers can quickly choose to use chat as their key communications mode, Tanner noted. Final test results, which will be available in December, will be forwarded up the Army's chain of command for further evaluation. Carol Wortman, acting director of the Army Architecture Integration Center said during a Government Executive training webinar on Tuesday that smart phones have strong backing from top commanders, including Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the vice chief of staff, who is an avid iPhone user.
The Army is testing this month some popular consumer technology products, including smart phones, Kindle e-book readers and iPad tablet computers, to see how they work on the battlefield.
After spending some time with Stewart Long at Gonzoearth and learning more about what he's trying to do and learning a little bit about the grassroots mapping project, I decided to share a video about the backpackable system we're developing that we call the ASAP-SP (single panel). I think this might fit some interesting usecases, especially for making approachable methods for aerial imaging. In other words if there is a need for a kit that's still affordable but is just a little bit more robust, I think we might have something that can be immediately useable and wanted to share it.
Here are a few video's as an intro about some of our core innovations with asap and here's a photostream with some some more asap pics from CWID that might be of interest.
Cheers!
John Surmont
Founding CEO
Sofcoast
ASAP-SP in a backpack.
ASAP-XP in a dufflebag clip 1.
ASAP-XP in a dufflebag clip 2.
By the way, I can't help but chuckle every single time I read this quote from the book...."Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is exhausting for children to have to provide explanations over and over again."
One of the most interesting points about this story is in the second chapter when the narrator meets The Little Prince in the Sahara desert after his emergency landing leaves him stranded with a pretty uncertain future.
The Prince asks the narrator to draw him a sheep and after repeated unsuccessful attempts to draw the sheep to the specific satisfaction of the Prince, the narrator draws a box and explains that "This is only his box. The sheep you asked for is inside." (The Prince got very excited and was tickled about this. He imagined what the sheep might look or be like - and obviously the Prince liked his vision of the sheep in the box more than the narrator's drawings..)
I hear lots of talk about web 2.0, web 3.0, web 4.0, web x.x, cloud this, mobile that, etc., etc., etc....
Sure patterns of human behavior and the tools we use are changing - but the fundamentals are the same.
By definition, scarcity is everywhere abundance isn't.
The idea behind Sofcoast is simply to focus on applying tech to target the abundant scarcity problem set as it pertains to information and communications. Unfortunately with all of the stuff happening in the world today, it's getting easier for the average person to get a whiff of what might happen when "scarcity" hits and escalates. (some examples...)
Now think about the technology we take for granted, like being able to pick up your mobile phone and dial a number and someone answers on the other end...or better yet, you pick up your iPhone which has a full battery and great cellular or wifi reception and download that app to entertain yourself - it just works.
That's abundance.
Now...think about the time where you couldn't make that phone call or couldn't download that app. (your battery died, you couldn't get access to a network, your service was shut down because you didn't pay your bill...wait that was me....) all of these are examples of scarcity.
Now...imagine that you needed to use your mobile device for something more than ordering takeout or playing a game - imagine that you were a first responder responding in a crisis such as a hurricane, a flood, an earthquake, a search and rescue event.
Scarcity happens quickly and when it does people can and do suddenly find themselves in "abundant scarcity" mode. Meaning those individuals (and organizations) must be able to effectively cope in order to survive. We consider groups of people who are responsible for responding during these types of situations to be "expeditionary enterprise users".
The military is great at organizing, synchronizing and operating in expeditionary mode or "abundant scarcity" mode. They've spent eons and gazillions of dollars figuring out how to cope with scarcity.
Consumer tech is advancing at warp speed tantalizing us all with tech that allows us to exploit abundant network and bandwidth availability, processor power and energy.
What about those folks in between magical consumer gizmo's that "just work" and are powered by "freemium" business models and the military tech that, if it isn't classified, is ridiculously pricey or hard to (acquire|operate|integrate|manage|support|maintain).
That's our box.
The Gulf oil spill just highlights a national problem: the need
for a national innovation panel to tackle our increasingly sticky problems.
--------
As Deepwater
Horizon enters into its seventh week, one can’t help having a bit of the
‘I’m stuck in a bad episode of the Twilight Zone’ feeling.
First, the problem seems unending. No
high tech magic wands. No victory laps. Rather, we’ve witnessed a series of
techno-flops. Top kill, robots, container domes, riser insertion tubes, and now
back to more robots. A definitive remedy, we’re told, can’t be in place until
August. Hmm let’s see 5,000 (or is it 100,000) barrels per day times another 45
(or is it 60 or 90) days. Only one thing seems for sure. We’re talking a mighty
big number.
Deepwater
highlights how far we have to go in terms of practicing innovation on the fly
in relation to important and emerging agendas.
And that’s the second striking feature
of Deepwater: the mushiness of the data and the conflicting positions that
result from it. Leak
volume is only one example. Opinions also vary on environmental impact,
costs, and on policy remedies that are now needed. We are now in the realm of
challenges that defy simple technological solutions or orderly chains of
command. It’s business Rashomon now, since how we define the problem (profits,
environmental and economic impact, academic truth, regulatory oversight)
determines what we think should be done.
This takes us to the third aspect of
Deepwater, the ‘could have been’s’ that emerge as we walk the cat back. If only
BP had better
safety procedures, or had questioned the well’s stability earlier or had
used a more conservative remedy in the first place. If only the federal
government had stepped
in sooner. If only our policies with regard to regulation
of oil companies and offshore drilling had been more strict. If only we had
brought other expert opinion in at the outset to work the problem.
Welcome to the world of wicked
problems.
I touched
on this topic recently in relation to the UK elections, but it is worth
expanding on in relation to Deepwater. Almost 40 years ago, the social
scientist Horst Rittel proposed the term “wicked problems” as a way of trying
to understand why some challenges were intractable and highly difficult to deal
with. Wicked problems shared certain characteristics, in his view. First, they
were hard to define. (Is Deepwater an issue of technology, safety, policy, or
environmental policy? Yes.) Second, they involved many different and hard to
reconcile perspectives? (For sure, in this case.) Third, solutions weren’t true
or false, but better or worse, and hard to test in advance. (Yep.) And fourth,
the resut is a brace of conflicting opinions. (Definitely.)
So there may be an important, teachable
element to the Deepwater story. While we would have all preferred a
straightforward technological success story (top kill worked and it’s Miller
time), the failure goes much further. It’s about how we look at our
preparedness to address complex challenges and how we might deal with them
better in the future. Because we are in an era of wicked problems, folks, and
something like this, sadly, is bound to happen again. And again.
How do you deal with wicked problems?
The key for Rittel was bringing a highly creative process to bear and
collecting all stakeholders and viewpoints under one roof to engage in the
work. He felt it important not to give in to the temptation to simplify, but
rather to examine the challenge in all its complexity. Some of this is
reflected in our president’s recent statement, We will take ideas from
anywhere. That’s crucially important, but success is not just about ideas – it’s
what you do with them to make them happen and when, as well as how you use the
convening power of government to create blended solutions and fast
synchronization among divergent parties.
Where can we find some best or at least
promising practices? Certainly the military is in the wicked problems business.
And in that culture, you find situation rooms, sophisticated approaches to
command and control, experience in crisis management, mental rehearsal and
training to think the unthinkable, and investment in leadership development.
But comparable capabilities still seem lacking for the kind of societal
disaster that is Deepwater. And they are desperately needed to generate the
kind of divergent thinking appropriate to wicked problems. In the Deepwater
story, it took a long while for academic expertise to be allowed into the tent
and for the full weight of government expertise to make itself known once we
had resolved a few little problems in the Minerals
Management Service.
So we need to know a lot more about how
to do the work of innovation in order to address the kind of wicked problems
that threaten the common good. In short, we need to design a new kind of
innovative and fast capability in government that is also capable of blending
in the perspectives of the private and NGO sectors as well as academic experts
and civil society.
I have been saying for years that our
government needs to get better at innovation. Deepwater highlights how far we
have to go in terms of practicing innovation on the fly in relation to
important and emerging agendas. We are still stuck in a government narrative
that looks at innovation as being about cool, high-tech ideas, people in white
lab coats or economic inputs within broad development policies. Well yes, but
innovation is also about coming up with innovative solutions to wicked problems
at the tempo of life. It’s about how senior people come together to figure out
new solutions in a crisis to get us to where we want to go.
We need, I believe, a new kind of
innovation rapid response capability that employs the state of the art in
facilitation, communication and collaboration technology to generate speed and
alignment. We need a new approach to cultivating facilitation skills that will
enhance the work of stakeholder groups and allow the generation of rapid
alignment among differing points of view. We need better tools for
visualization and problem solving to create shared understanding. In short, we
need a new kind of innovation SWAT capability with a seat at the table of
power. I’ve even gone so far as to suggest during the last presidential
campaign that every federal department have a senior facilitation team as part
of a national facilitation corps that is prepared to deal with unexpected
emergencies.
If we don’t do something like this, I
fear that the history of our future will be written in terms of a series of
wicked problems that turned out to be a lot more wicked than they could have
been.
Dubbed
"Mr. Creativity" by The Economist, John Kao is a contributing editor
at The Daily Beast and an adviser to both public and private sector leaders. He
is chairman of the Institute for Large Scale Innovation, whose i20 group is an
association of national innovation "czars." He wrote Jamming:
The Art and Discipline of Business Creativity, a BusinessWeek bestseller,
and Innovation
Nation. He is also a Tony-nominated producer of film and stage.
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