Future of rapid equipping force remains in doubt.

• Author: Parsons, Dan

To avoid stumbling into a Taliban ambush or booby trap in the early days of the war in Afghanistan, U.S. troops wanted robots to search caves where fighters were hiding.

The Rapid Equipping Force found a commercial robot called the PackBot, outfitted it with a camera and sent it downrange in a matter of weeks.

When an enlisted soldier thought a camera on a fishing pole would be an ingenious way to explore wells, pits and other nooks and crannies for possible weapons caches, REF sent him one.

On that soldier's next patrol, his unit reeled in a large cache of weapons without a single U.S. casualty, as an oft-repeated anecdote recalls.

With the Iraq War over and large-scale U.S. involvement in Afghanistan waning, the small organization based at Fort Belvoir, Va., could become a relic of two concluded wars, a victim of budget hawks, or both. Some Army officials have questioned the need for peacetime investment in an organization purpose-built for war.

Col. Steven Sliwa, who took the REF directorship in August, believes the unit will be just as important in the future as it was at its inception in 2001, in which time it has rushed into combat everything from protective face shields for machine gunners to hand-launched unmanned aerial vehicles.

"We have got to remain rapid," Shwa tells National Defense. "The ability to do things quickly in times of war--that just makes sense. If you're focusing your efforts on the deployed soldier that is in combat and engaged with an adversary, you can get them a potential solution and you're not spending tons of national treasure to do it. In order to do that at the highest level, you have to have organizations that can do it at the lower levels. I think we're going to play very well in that process."

A 27-year Army veteran, Sliwa commanded an artillery battalion in Iraq that was converted to an infantry unit out of necessity. He's worked on 8th Army staff in Korea and in the Pentagon, where he saw every operational needs statement coming from both Iraq and Afghanistan from 2006 to 2009. Helming REF is a natural extension of his Army experience, he says.

"Frankly, I was somewhat envious of REF's ability to reach out to industry and pull, off the shelf, an urgently needed technology and get that into the hands of a unit in contact," he says during a tour of the organization's facilities in October.

It is not lost on Sliwa that, after more than a decade of sending dozens of life saving technologies downrange...