Military Review English Edition July-August 2016 | Page 110

Tactical Utility of
Tailored Systems
Robert E. Smith, PhD
We have to avoid million-dollar solutions to hundred dollar
problems. That doesn’t put us at any advantage. That puts
us at an economic disadvantage at the strategic level.
—Gen. David G. Perkins,
TRADOC commanding general

T

he Army has traditionally been equipped
to confront what is expected, but winning
in today’s complex world requires being
prepared to fight an unknown enemy. Future enemies will have access to off-the-shelf technologies
that previously only large nation-states could afford.
Meanwhile, large nation-states are able to duplicate or
steal U.S. high-technology investments at a fraction of
the research cost. For example, China rapidly duplicates Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA) and other U.S. innovations, often improving
on designs. One can find evidence of such activities
in replicas of the Big Dog robot and the Switchblade
tube-launched drones.1 No longer can the U.S. spend
billions to develop the next stealth technology and
expect a twenty-year payoff; the return on investment
is likely not there.
This article explores the idea of combining virtual environments and rapid manufacturing to create
tailored materiel specific to a region or even a battle.
The Army needs a powerful innovation process to tilt
the cost-effectiveness calculation back in the favor of
the United States and drastically increase the rate of
materiel innovation.
In the 1970s, the United States chose to offset the
Union of Soviet So