As the Director of the Joint Acquisition Task Force, I led an effort to define the Hyper-Enabled Operator (HEO) vision and the enabling technology pillars that would focus the Special Operations Command Science and Technology Research and Development priorities. We defined HEO as a Special Operations Forces professional empowered by technologies that enhance the operator’s cognition at the edge by increasing situational awareness, reducing cognitive load, and accelerating decision making. The following figure shows the enabling technology pillars and infrastructure foundation needed to hyper-enable the operator.
I instituted a six phased experimental process aligned with the lean startup methodology to integrate prototypes into experimental architectures to test ideas. The process involved defining problems to generate ideas, designing solutions, building prototypes, integrating into a test bed architecture, and testing with well-designed experiments to deliver insights and feedback. The following figure depicts the experimental process.
The experimental process fostered the type of learning culture needed to inform whether we should refine, pivot, or kill an idea. My team and I executed a rapid prototyping event with a collection of engineers, entrepreneurs, developers, and designers to exercise the experimental process. The event focused on the following three concepts: (1) advanced situational awareness with augmented reality, (2) remote enabled operator concept where a remote human would assist an operator sift through a mountain of data, and (3) advanced communications concepts to detect frequencies for heightened awareness.
For an in-depth discussion of the HEO concept and the learning culture described in this post see the following article: The Hyper-Enabled Operator | Small Wars Journal