BLACKWATER USA | DAILY BRIEF

Posted by BW Actual on Oct 21st 2022

BLACKWATER USA | DAILY BRIEF

U.S.

  • The WSJ profiled a clever Pentagon competition to reward enterprising ideas from younger soldiers – such as a training platform for disrupting enemy drones. Read more about the “Shark Tank”-like contest below.

Ukraine

  • U.S. intel officials think Ukraine will have about six more weeks of opportunity to push Russian forces back before the ground starts getting too muddy to fight.
  • One of the key prizes Ukraine may seek to capture before the ground softens is the city of Kherson, where pro-Russian authorities have been evacuating civilians – perhaps as a prelude to the withdrawal of Russian forces (Ukraine says the relocations are a “propaganda show” designed to scare civilians into thinking Ukraine is about to shell their homes).
  • Separately, Pres. Zelensky said Russian forces have planted mines at a key hydro dam in Kherson, Nova Kakhovka, and warned of a “catastrophe on a grand scale” if Russia carries out the attack. Zelensky wants his Western allies to pressure Russia to back down and remove the mines.

Iran

  • As expected, the EU and UK imposed new sanctions on Iran for sending Russia drones to use in Ukraine (Iran and Russia implausibly deny it).

Sahel

  • Security forces in N’Djamena, Chad violently suppressed banned protests demanding a faster transition back to a civilian government, leaving at least 50 people dead. Chad has been under military rule since April 2021, when Pres. Déby was killed while visiting troops during a battle against rebels.

Other News

  • The UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime estimated that Colombia will produce 43% more cocaine in 2022 than it did in 2021, based on land area being cultivated. Leftist president Petro has declared the war on drugs a failure and proposed decriminalizing certain elements of the cocaine trade like small-scale coca farming.
  • France, Portugal, and Spain announced plans for a new energy pipeline between Barcelona and Marseille (nickname: “BarMar”) that will focus on renewable fuels like green hydrogen, but also carry a limited amount of natural gas. The EU has done well stockpiling fuels ahead of winter – it has filled over 90% of its storage capacity – but additional capacity boosts will add a safe buffer.

What Happened When the U.S. Military Played ‘Shark Tank’ (WSJ)

Central Command went searching for good ideas. It had to flatten the chain of command to find them.

Mickey Reeve stood up one morning last week and did something the young Army sergeant never thought he would do: He told the four-star general in charge of U.S. Central Command how to fix an issue facing the American military.

Gen. Michael Erik Kurilla sat in the center of a secure conference room and took a sip from his Centcom mug as he listened to Sgt. Reeve discuss the deadly threat of enemy drones. He was flanked by senior military officials and tech executives, but Gen. Kurilla’s attention was focused on this nervous soldier with a fraction of his authority who had flown over from the Middle East for this moment. He wanted to hear more.

“This is a significant problem,” he said. “You’ve come up with an idea to help us solve that problem.”

That was the reason Sgt. Reeve was there. He was one of five service members chosen from hundreds of applicants stationed around the world to participate in the first pitch competition of its kind—Centcom’s version of “Shark Tank.” The contest was held in the headquarters of the military’s premier operations command, a place where phones are banned and clocks display the time in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the animating spirit of the event was one that applies to every business.

There are good ideas to be found in unlikely places for anyone willing to look.

They might be on a base in Saudi Arabia or hiding in plain sight one floor away. They can tackle existential risks. They also mitigate the risks that nobody else knew existed.

The only way for the military to find them was to flatten the chain of command. That doesn’t come easily for troops—deference is necessary for success, and defiance is how failure happens—and it can be hard for any company. But temporarily breaking rank and empowering Sgt. Reeve to address Gen. Kurilla was a recognition that innovation doesn’t just come from the top down. It also rises up from the bottom.

“The people closest to the problems are the ones seeing and feeling the pain points firsthand,” said Brigadier General John Cogbill, the deputy operations director for Centcom. “But they don’t have the resources or authorities to implement those solutions. Our four-star boss does.”

Sgt. Reeve’s pitch was a perfect example of how good ideas can get lost in hierarchy.

Sgt. Reeve, a 24-year-old infantryman in the Massachusetts Army National Guard, was deployed last year to the Prince Sultan Air Base and assigned to the Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems team. He knew from his experience on the ground that operators needed a better system to practice disrupting, tracking and defeating hostile aerial drones. What they wanted was a universal C-UAS training simulator. What they had was a laptop with some PowerPoint slides.

He felt that even a basic training tool would help prepare the service members whose skills have never been so valuable for what defense officials have called a top priority in the Middle East. So he built one himself.

His desk was a locker door. His equipment was an eight-year-old laptop. His internet connection was so unreliable that he often sought divine intervention.

“I would pray to the Wi-Fi gods,” he said.

It wasn’t pretty, but it worked. Sgt. Reeve spent more than 100 hours of his free time coding this rudimentary training program, which allows C-UAS operators to construct scenarios they might encounter and improve their decision-making. When he learned about the Centcom event called Innovation Oasis, he accelerated the software’s development, cycled through 10 drafts of his pitch and rehearsed the presentation in front of his superiors.

The script was so drilled into his mind by the time he flew to Tampa that he memorized it the morning of the competition when he woke up jet-lagged at 3 a.m. and couldn’t fall back asleep.

The executives from Google, Microsoft, NASA and Blue Origin could see the promise in his crude prototype, and the military brass whispered that it was amazing they didn’t already have something like this. Gen. Kurilla told the experts around him that he had visited every C-UAS site in the region and there was definitely a market for Sgt. Reeve’s universal trainer.

His little project could make a big difference with Centcom’s backing, they believed, and nobody outside Sgt. Reeve’s base would have known about it before this contest.

Gen. Kurilla brought his own idea from his previous role leading the 18th Airborne Corps. When he took control of Centcom this year, he didn’t take long to announce Innovation Oasis—the logo was a bunch of palm trees inside a lightbulb—with a call for submissions from across the military and Department of Defense. The prize was the chance to see a theory come to life.

The competition was stiff. A doctor in the Army proposed a restructuring of medical support teams for combat. A captain in the Army Reserve pitched a blockchain for real-time inventory. A staff sergeant in the Air Force made a pallet loader designed to save hours of productivity, reduce injuries and change the way cargo aircrafts are packed.

But my favorite came from the mind of Kendra Kirkland, who had the shortest trip of any finalist: She took the elevator.

A captain in the Air Force working a few hundred feet away at Centcom, she provided an important lesson in not overlooking the obvious. For all the technical challenges and moral complexities of war, even the military needs help fighting the banalities of work.

Capt. Kirkland focused on personnel accountability—or, as it’s known outside the walls of Centcom, taking attendance. What she told the judges astonished them. This organization that values precision was wasting time chasing busy people around the office because they forgot to check in.

It was an obvious inefficiency to anyone paying attention. But nobody was—except, as it turns out, Capt. Kirkland.

She figured there had to be a simpler way. She was right.

“How did you get into the building today?” she asked. “You badged in.”

Her idea was to streamline the accountability process by automatically marking employees present as soon as they swiped their badges. That was it! The sharks were smitten. This sort of tedium was so far beneath everyone in the room that it had never occurred to them. Many of them didn’t even realize someone was spending time signing them in until Capt. Kirkland was in front of them.

They wanted solutions to known problems. This was a solution to a problem they didn’t know they had.

They had searched the globe for good ideas only to discover one staring them in the face. There were times during Innovation Oasis when the whole thing seemed a bit too cute for a war-fighting operation and I wished Gen. Kurilla would order everyone to stop using buzzwords. Yet in that moment I understood why a command responsible for dangerous corners of the planet had plans to keep hosting a game show several times a year.

“It’s finding those good ideas,” said Colonel Melissa Solsbury, commander of the 513th Military Intelligence Brigade, “and encouraging people to have them.”

The challenge for every government bureaucracy and sprawling corporation is what to do next. If a good idea is hard to find, it’s much harder to apply. Action is the last barrier of innovation.

That’s now the duty of Centcom after the judges deliberated for an hour, the dramatic theme music of “Shark Tank” played and Gen. Kurilla awarded a meritorious service medal and four-day pass to…. Sgt. Mickey Reeve.

I asked if he had any ideas for his break. He looked at me like I had a few heads.

“My guys are working extra shifts because I’m here,” Sgt. Reeve said. “I’ll probably spend the four days just taking their shifts. They deserve some time off.”

The satisfaction of small change was enough of a reward for Capt. Kirkland, too. She didn’t have to win a contest to win over her bosses. She was confident they would implement her solution now that they knew about the problem. “Otherwise,” she said before going back to work, “I’ll be reminded of it every day.”