Self Sabotage: Why Doing the Right Thing Results in Failure

In January 2010 improvised explosive device (IED) attacks against dismounted infantry squads in Afghanistan numbered in the single digits — with only two or three reported on a monthly basis. In the fall of 2010 however, the U.S. Army was blindsided by a surge in these attacks that by the end of November had reached over 900 per month — essentially rendering a $1.5 billion effort to protect vehicle mounted patrols out of sync with a growing need to provide more lightweight counter-IED equipment to dismounted patrols. Within days of recognizing the change on the battlefield, as the director of the U.S. Army Rapid Equipping Force I made countering these dismounted IED attacks our top priority and within months the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization would do the same.

Over the course of the next six months members of the Rapid Equipping Force became experts on the problem and the technologies available to solve it. With all the permission we needed to move fast and break things, we set out to produce an array of immediate responses to deliver to the battlefield while also prototyping more durable options. For a few months, things went well, then we found our delivery timelines slipping despite our expert knowledge of the problems we were working on and our intent to solve them with the first, best prototypes we could move into theater. Worse, we began to struggle to transition our minimum viable products into working prototypes that we could deploy.

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