You can buy pretty much anything on Amazon, but military equipment is so far off-limits.
Luckily for all of the shopaholic soldiers out there, the US Army is taking a page out of Amazon’s book and building Prime for the primes (and startups). Earlier this month, the Army announced it’s planning to roll out an e-commerce-style marketplace for drones then this week said they’re setting up something similar for tactical radios.
Dropshipping drones: As unmanned systems proliferate, the Army’s Amazon-style drone marketplace is intended to provide units with an easier way to browse and compare all of the different models out there, filtered for cost and performance. And here’s how it will work: Companies will present their tech to Army acquisition officials, who will assess and list them on the site for units to add to their cart.
The Army says this new approach to buying is part of a push to fast-track drone procurement and deployment, in line with the DoD’s “Unleashing U.S. Military Drone Dominance” memo released last month. That directive (which, never forget, was delivered by drone) requires every unit to be equipped with attritable drones by the end of next year.
“There are awesome items, awesome systems out there right now, but sometimes folks that sell, sell,” Col. Danielle Medaglia, program manager for UAS at PEO for aviation, told reporters recently. “The units call us, as the UAS experts, and say, ‘Hey, what can this thing really do versus what may be a PowerPoint slide?’ That’s where we want to help the soldiers when they’re making these choices.”
“We will ensure [the drones do] what they actually advertise,” she said, adding that the site will confirm NDAA compliance, ranges, endurance, capability, and payloads. “There’s just a lot of vendors in the space, which is great. But at the same time, it’s sometimes confusing soldiers based on the phone calls that we get. We see our role as UAS experts to help those soldiers make those choices.”
Radio repository: And don’t worry, the Army isn’t planning to stop at drones. At the AFCEA and Army Cyber Command’s TechNet event in Georgia this week, Army Futures Command officials said that an e-commerce-style platform for tactical radios is also in the works. Like the drone site, it’ll let vendors list their products for units to buy based on their individual requirements.
Buying direct: The drone and radio storefronts are part of a broader Army push to cut down on the bureaucracy between soldiers and the tech they want. Last year, the Army launched the “Transforming in Contact” initiative to evaluate new tech based on direct feedback from users and has already deployed systems—including drones and mobile EW capabilities—to frontline units.
“Instead of going through a bespoke process where people who aren’t in the fight or in the field write requirements and make purchasing decisions, we take a bunch of commercial and military tech and give it directly to units, and let our acquisition professionals and requirements writers engage directly with our soldiers,” the Army’s CTO, Alex Miller, recently told Tectonic in a Q&A.
“We flooded them with technology—almost to the point of breaking their formations—to see what worked,” he added. “Then we asked for their feedback.”
As Ukraine’s lightning-fast defense ecosystem has shown—especially through Brave1—plugging in user feedback from the frontlines into the factories has been critical to innovation, iteration, and fielding the tech soldiers need in the moment. “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology,” as Steve Jobs once said. “You can’t start with the technology then try to figure out where to sell it.” Looks like the Army’s finally taking notes.