Army PEO Soldier Calls on Industry for Smarter, Lighter Tech

The Army Program Executive Office (PEO) Soldier is turning to industry to provide warfighters with the right technology at speed of relevance, Program Executive Officer Brig. Gen. Troy Denomy said during a DCode event last week.

PEO Soldier works to enhance soldier capabilities and equipment such as body armor and weapons. Denomy explained that the office works to provide soldiers with the right technology, but field testing is required to decide what should be supplied to soldiers at scale. As tech developers create new solutions, it’s essential to identify soldiers’ needs and gaps in equipment or tools.

“Our customer is the soldier. We call ourselves the soldier’s PEO and that connection is important. Most of the staff came here from service, or are currently active duty,” Denomy said during the discussion. “We spend a lot of time in the woods with our customers, so we fully appreciate their challenges.”

Leveraging Industry Partnerships

Denomy said his office’s effectiveness relies on industry partners who understand soldiers’ challenges and know how to work with the DOD at large. He pointed to initiatives at PEO Soldier like Project Polaris, an effort to make the infantry soldier more lethal by lowering their equipment load. He noted collaboration with industry will be important to ensure that new tech helps rather than burdens the soldier.

“We just have a good idea and a good, cool piece of tech, and we throw it on top of the soldiers back. Right now it’s gotten to the point where soldiers as they’re moving, they’re carrying a lot of weight, and so we were challenged to reduce that, to try to get under 50 pounds for comfort,” Denomy explained.

Denomy emphasized that one piece of technology is unlikely to solve the equipment load issue for soldiers, but a collective effort between industry and the DOD will yield results.

“I don’t think there’s one technology that solves it. I think it’s how we stack different technologies together,” he said.

Denomy added industry must not only be able to work with PEO Soldier but be interoperable with other industry partners as well.

“I think it’s important for us on the government side to explain where those critical interfaces are and what needs to communicate with what. We are investing in an architecture at the soldier squad level,” he said.

He said PEO Soldier works on two- to three-year transformations to rapidly scale technology for today’s challenges. However, Denomy cautioned against short-sightedness in preparing for the future.

“We have to be cognizant, though, that if you solely focus on the here and now, you may not get something that’s game changing in the future, and that’s where that dialogue’s got to be consistent with our industry partners and others, frankly, on some of those things that are a little bit more science-y and make us a believer,” Denomy said.

Incorporating Feedback to Drive Tech Solutions

The office is collecting soldier feedback to lower equipment load. Denomy said that the more training and combat experience a soldier gets with specific equipment loads, the more feedback they are able to give commanders so that PEO Soldier can adjust.

“There’s a forcing function for them to use it, which is also really important,” he said. “You put an event on the back end of that for the unit, and it forces them to train it, which then gives us more feedback, whether it’s on the reliability, whether it’s the performance, whatever it might be.”

Denomy said that even as PEO Soldier considers its stakeholders within industry and Congress, its critical function will be to solicit feedback from the soldiers themselves, who are the ones who will be tasked with using equipment in battle.

“It’s so important to have empathy over that customer and understand what their problem set is. You can write words on a board all day, but until you walk 12 miles in the rain when it’s cold — and somebody, by the way, is trying to kill you — understanding and appreciating that is really, really important.”