Rapid-fielding team tasked to transform army acquisition.

• Author: Kennedy, Tim
• Position: Case study

Many Army acquisition agencies can trace their roots to unusual beginnings, but the Rapid Equipping Force is probably the only organization to evolve from a personal challenge.

In June 2003, the staff of Gen. John M. Keane, the Army's vice chief at the time, had determined that the only way for a soldier to search enemy Afghan caves and hideouts was an old-fashioned rope and grappling hook. Confident that technology could help address these needs, Keane called in Col. Bruce Jette, an advisor on technology and acquisition issues.

Jette recently had rescued the problem-plagued Land Warrior program from certain oblivion. Land Warrior's reprieve was the result of Jette's use of commercial-off-the-shelf components, a measure that reduced the cost of each system--a package of targeting, communications and navigation technologies for dismounted infantry--by two thirds.

"Gen. Keane wanted to discuss a number of issues when the matter of ropes and grapples came up," Jette tells National Defense. "The conversation quickly became a challenge to find a way to provide soldiers with an operationally relevant solution in time to make a difference.

"This would require leveraging many of the authorized but rarely used exceptions and shortcuts in acquisition and requirements generation--a change about the same size as Vietnam-era grapples are to robots."

Two days later, Jette found a solution: iRobot, a briefcase-sized device developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for potential use in ordnance disposal, and search and rescue operations. Jette says he selected iRobot because it was relatively cheap (about $45,000 a copy), easy to operate (users guided it with a wireless joystick) and, best of all, "because we already owned it."

Keane dispatched Jette and a small team-operating under the auspices of a program known as RIRS (Rapid Integration of Robot Systems)--to Afghanistan, to demonstrate to conventional and Special Operations Forces how to use a video-equipped iRobot. Reconfigured to be man-portable, the tank-like device was dubbed the "Packbot."

Initially, Army teams allowed RIRS representatives to accompany them on search missions, but only if they carried their own gear and operated the Packbots themselves.

"Soon after, the SOF were not only operating the Packbots with ease," says Jette, "they also informed us we no longer had to carry 'their' Packbots. Not long afterward, they politely asked us to stay out of their way--which...