Pat Dollard | Young Americans

As soon as the U.S. military invaded Afghanistan to hunt al Qaeda down in its caves, it starting running into the improvised explosive device. Just a few months after September 11, IEDs had become major killers — in the caves that U.S. soldiers were now scouring in the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

Just as quickly, the military started to devise ways of inserting eyes and ears into the cave without also putting life and limb in with them. One solution was a remote-controlled robot. It proved too heavy, too expensive, and not entirely practical for use in caves. But it was a step in the right direction and it taught the military an important lesson. The U.S. needed a force specifically designed to counter — quickly and cheaply — the lethal innovations of an exceedingly creative enemy. That is how the Rapid Equipping Force was born.

Its commander, Colonel Gregory Tubbs, is an imposing figure who doesn’t take kindly to people who waste time. When discussing a new problem that the troops are facing, he gets anxious to “initiate movement,” as he puts it, and fast. “Wasted time,” he says, “means wounded soldiers and lost lives.”

The Rapid Equipping Force is headquartered at the improbably idyllic Fort Belvoir, a long stone’s throw from George Washington’s estate at Mount Vernon on the Potomac River. But its eyes and ears in Iraq are what Colonel Tubbs calls “the Ph.Ds in theater” — engineers in Iraq such as those who work for Exponent, Inc., a company with a core competency in “catastrophic failure analysis.”

I visited the Exponent workshop at Camp Victory just outside the Baghdad International Airport. Staffed by bright young engineers in their 30s, the Ph.Ds are in constant touch with frontline troops. They not only develop cheap and user-friendly solutions to the novel problems the troops constantly face, but also escort their solutions through the problems that invariably arise in implementation. It’s called “spiral development.”

Colonel Tubbs is eager to reach outside the military for many ideas, because, as he explains, “It’s hard to solve a problem with the mindset that you created it with.” That sounds like something Rumsfeld might say, and indeed the “REF” is an example of Rumsfeldian transformation at its best.

The initial effort to develop a robot for the caves of Afghanistan ran up against many of the same obstacles that Rumsfeld constantly railed against — top-heavy bureaucracy, needlessly demanding specifications, and needless expense — and all of that, to produce a product that in the end was impractical from the common soldier’s point of view.

But the REF has come a long ways in the few years since it started life as a special project. Many of the REF’s initiatives start life as a ten-point form that can be used to interview soldiers about a particular problem. The form asks the soldier to “summarize the problem that the lack of the widget causes”; “describe what it is that you want the widget to do, be, look like”; and to suggest existing “off the shelf” products that might be used as part of the solution.

One “widget” of which the REF is particularly proud is the MARCbot — a robot used to inspect possible IEDs on the roadways of Iraq. As one of the Ph.Ds at Exponent’s workshop in Iraq explained to me, he and his colleagues were horrified at the number of soldiers maimed and killed simply because there was often no way to inspect a possible IED other than to give it a good kick and see what happened next. Surely there had to be a way of getting a machine to do that kind of simple inspection.

The MARCbot is fiendishly simple. It uses the chassis of a common toy truck and turns that into a military lifesaver. Current models run little over $6,000 per unit (the original robot for Afghanistan was more than ten times as expensive). And what is most impressive is how quickly the team had units out in the field after they started development. Careful monitoring of the MARCbot’s performance led to a rapid improvement of the basic design. Now hundreds are in daily use.

Full NRO article by Mario Loyola HERE