Excerpt
This article analyses two such programmes: the Army Warfighting Assessment (AWA) and the Marine Corps Sea Dragon 2025 (SD2025) programmes. Both are live-exercise experimentation programmes through which warfighters can (and do) contribute to peacetime innovation. I find that these programmes encompass two essential mechanisms. Firstly, warfighters contribute to peacetime innovation by helping to establish a baseline understanding of the distance between current systems and future ones, thereby revealing gaps in current doctrine, organisation structure and materiel. Secondly, warfighters become active authors of the operational and tactical components of emerging systems, thereby helping to develop training, leadership and education systems. Both the AWA and SD2025 seem to suggest increasing recognition among the services of the need to achieve a more balanced innovation model that harnesses the potential contribution of actual practitioners.
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