Need for Speed: SOFWERX Zeros In on Rapid Acquisition.

• Author: Mayfield, Mandy

An innovation hub linked with Special Operations Command is pivoting its efforts from discovering new technology to more rapidly putting capabilities into the hands of commandos.

The SOFWERX hub was stood up in 2017 under a partnership agreement with SOCOM to help solve challenging warfighter problems in collaboration with industry, academia and government stakeholders. Since its creation, the organization has set out to solve a number of issues and begun weekly virtual forums inviting creators to pitch their unique solutions.

SOFWERX Director Leslie Babich, who joined the Tampa, Florida-based center in late 2020, is realigning its efforts to focus on rapid procurement, not just tech discovery, said Brian Andrews, the organization's chief technology officer.

"We're going to really focus our efforts on the acquisition piece and how do we shorten that timeline from SOFWERX [developing] a proof of concept to getting it into the warfighters' hands," he said in an interview.

That includes everything from how the command can get the money to purchase a system as well as the sustainment, training, support, logistics and delivery aspects, he added.

Although SOFWERX is changing its priorities, it will still have efforts geared toward discovery, Andrews noted.

To walk lockstep with Special Operations Command, SOFWERX is closely aligned with the organization's program executive offices, Andrews noted.

"Those 11 PEOs...are closely tied with SOFWERX and they work with us through what we call a collaborative project order," he explained.

The order allows the offices to give SOFWERX a broad, but complex, problem set that often does not have a single solution that can solve it. SOFWERX then takes those issues, puts together a team and facilitates discovery and ideation to fully define the problem and identify solutions, he said.

"That is kind of the magic of SOFWERX because we can put in a room an end user that has the problem; the acquisition folks that are going to plan out the money and the acquisition strategy; the academics;...industry partners that might be able to provide a solution; and even the national labs or subject matter experts," Andrews said. "We sit there and kind of hash over what the art of the possible is."

The group also gets inquiries from components of SOCOM when they are facing a problem in a very specific area, Andrews said.

"We had a thing called warfighter nomination where they could go online and answer about five questions...