During his deployment, as a multi-million-dollar drone tracked the enemy ground vehicles, Capt. Kroger used Google Earth to estimate distance and then crudely time the vehicle’s drive between known points to estimate vehicle speed while also estimating the weapon’s time of flight, drone flight speed, and impact location. This mismatch between sophisticated weapons and unsophisticated planning tools risked any number of problematic outcomes, from civilian casualties to operational failure. Moreover, it was unnecessary: the drone was able to pinpoint the location of the vehicle using its GPS and sensors, but no one had added the additional algorithm to estimate the vehicle’s speed, even though this is required data for an engagement. No one was talking to the users and Capt. Kroger wanted to fix that while modernizing the suite of tools.
That was from an excellent article by Jim Perkins and James Long, “Software Wins Modern Wars.” Read the whole thing.
Captain Bryon Kroger went to his superiors and was able to start an in-house software development organization later called Kessel Run. It’s big success in terms of publicity was the tanker refueling planning tool, because that had easily observable cost implications. How many tanker flight hours were saved and what’s the cost per hour? Then you can calculate the return on investment, which was pretty high.
But for the targeting tool, there was no easy dollar metric to track. Here are the authors:
The team also made a crucial choice to initially focus on a specific targeting tool rather than trying to boil the ocean with an entire aerial operations system. Less than ninety days later, the team produced its first tool and put it in the hands of real users. Estimating the cost savings of a targeting tool is difficult—what’s the cost of a strike or a miss?
Also notice the move to a minimally viable product rather than leap into a complex program.
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