#209: Delivering Lethality, Survivability & Mobility - XVIII Airborne Corps Joint Innovation Outpost Colonel Tom Monaghan
The Jedburgh Podcast
Colonel Tom Monaghan joins The Jedburgh Podcast to detail the creation and mission of the Joint Innovation Outpost (GIOP) at XVIII Airborne Corps, an initiative designed to drastically shorten the
Key takeaways
- Colonel Tom Monaghan stood up the GIOP from scratch with zero initial funding or personnel, leveraging a $50M acquisition authority delegated directly to an operational command.
- The outpost utilizes four entry points for innovation: soldier-derived solutions via online portal, commander-directed objectives, Army/PM requests, and direct industry submissions.
Main topics
- Joint Innovation Outpost (GIOP) mission and structure
- Army acquisition reform and ACAT process tailoring
Notable quotes
"Speed of innovation will be the deciding factor on today's battlefields."
Conclusion
The episode demonstrates a replicable model for accelerating military innovation by embedding
Transcript preview
Speaker 1 (0:01) Speed of innovation will be the deciding factor on today's battlefields. The technology soldiers need to survive and win cannot take years to field. For generations, one of the Army's greatest challenges has been closing the distance between the soldier who identifies a need and the acquisition system responsible for delivering the solution. At Fort Bragg, the 18th Airborne Corps is attacking that problem head-on. Colonel Tom Monaghan has a mission. Build a joint innovation outpost. Putting soldiers, acquisition professionals, industry funding testing, and Army program offices together to accelerate the development of solutions. No red tape, no delays, no endless discussion about contract vehicles. Just legality, survivability, and mobility. We discuss the theory behind the GIOP, Dragon's Lair, artificial intelligence, and why some of the Army's best innovations are coming directly from the soldiers closest to the problem, including counter-drone and unmanned systems. For Monaghan, the leadership philosophy behind that mission is just as important as the technology. Provide clarity, listen to the soldier, and solve problems. The GIOP is proving that acquisition doesn't always begin thousands of miles from the operational force. Most often, the person with the best answer is already sitting on the drop zone, inside the vehicle, or carrying the equipment that needs to change. Innovate. Accelerate. Dominate. The Joint Innovation Outpost is building the model designed to ensure that when America's soldiers identify the battlefield need, the Army can move fast enough to solve it. The Jedberg Podcast is brought to you by OneBreathe, enabling military leaders to make innovative, informed, and deliberate decisions faster than ever before. Superhuman command wins wars. Follow the Jedberg Podcast and the Green Beret Foundation on social media. Listen on your favorite podcast platform, read on our website, and watch the full video version on YouTube as we show you why America must continue to lead from the front, no matter the challenge. Speaker 1 (1:56) Colonel Monaghan, welcome to the Jedburgh Podcast. Speaker 2 (1:58) Hey, thanks, Fran. Great to be here. And thanks for inviting us here to the Joint Innovation Speaker 1 (2:02) Outpost at 18th Airborne Corps. Before we came in here, and we're going to explain this room, we're going to talk about what you're doing here, you had me out here in the streets of Fort Bragg this morning for a four-mile ruck march. Speaker 2 (2:13) It's the great way to start a day, right? Every day, PT, think through the day, check on my soldiers. So you jumped right in at 0630 this morning and kind of were a part of what we call the beginning of... One day here at Fort Bragg. You Speaker 1 (2:27) got to set your mind right. Yeah. And I think when we look at being effective leaders, you know, always what we come back to is like, what are those grounding foundational things? And that has gotten away from me over the last year, two years, as I've scaled my security company, built the podcast, but. I guess I have to thank you for the opportunity to strap the ruck on 35 pounds this morning and get after it. Yeah, Speaker 2 (2:51) I don't think we set any speed records, but it was two older guys getting out there and just getting after it this morning. Speaker 1 (2:56) I was watching the one group of guys in the ruck run thinking to myself, I remember those days and then realizing maybe I could or could not hang with them, but I would at least give it a go. Speaker 2 (3:07) Yeah, we could have tomorrow. Speaker 1 (3:09) Tomorrow. Yeah. Yeah. I got to leave. Speaker 1 (3:13) Anyway, thank you so much for spending the time with us coming down here. This organization that you found yourself in charge of here over the last year, now coming up on a year, was kind of the brainchild of Lieutenant General Anderson. So the 18th Airborne Commander, 18th Airborne Corps Commander. And we were able to sit down with him a couple of weeks ago. And immediately, I think we were maybe 10, 12 minutes or so into the conversation. And he said, You need to go down to the Joint Innovation Outpost. You need to see what they're doing because this is changing how the Corps, the Army, and the Joint Force is approaching warfare today. The battlefield is evolving at rapid pace, faster than we've ever seen. And so what was required in his mind was the creation of this. So in your words, being here for a year, this organization, as we walk through it today, there's a number of folks here. But there was a time where you were standing here alone and unafraid with a mission to go build this thing. So what is the Joint Innovation Outpost and why is it so important now to the Army and the Joint Force? Speaker 2 (4:19) Great question, Fran. So kind of backing up the origin of this whole story, I didn't inherit an organization. I had to stand it up and then lead it. So I was down in Orlando, Florida in command. I got a phone call from the Pentagon that said, hey, you're going to go to Fort Bragg. And I said, TDY, no, you're going to PCS there in three weeks. You have no money. You have no people. Go find General Anderson. Talk to him. He has a huge problem set and a huge mission. So I drove up here, sat down with General Anderson, read through the campaign plan and said, okay, I understand your mission, your vision, and where you've identified gaps. And I think I can build an organization and help a process along to help fill some of those gaps. So through the campaign plan, we... We built a funding profile. I hired the right people, convinced the Army to turn this into an actual organization. Now there's a CSL, Command Select List, Lieutenant Colonel, myself, and a couple of capability leads that are helping the Corps address problem sets, helping soldiers take ideas that they have to solve their own problems or solve Army problems, and put a little bit of RDT &E-type funding behind it to get it going, and then... tie that into the Army's overall PAE structure, Program Acquisition Executive structure, so that if it's something that the Army could use to solve a bigger problem, they know that there's some great work going on down here at the 18th Airborne Corps where soldiers have kind of gotten after it and provided some input. Speaker 1 (5:52) Well, it's important to define the problem set. And we spend preponderance of our time on the show talking about the other end of the spectrum, right? Where the rubber meets the road, right? We're putting guys out there into the field, into the operational force. What are they doing? But what are they doing it with? And what are the things that they need to effectively combat? today's enemy. And that problem set has what's been put to you. And so when you look at having a stand up this organization, what you're trying to do is flatten those lines of feedback from the operational force. And so can you talk from your perspective about how are you taking the information? on what soldiers need in the field and then translating that into the acquisition process. Speaker 2 (6:44) Yeah, first thing we do, we concentrate on anything that improves soldier lethality, survivability, mobility. And that could be anything from a different type of frangible round, better body armor, better pouches to mold sensors in the barracks. You know, you can't deploy a fighting force if they're not healthy. Some holistic health, other options there. So all the things the soldiers are kind of thinking through and building themselves. We then pull in the appropriate program office that may be working on that or may receive the Army's requirement to work on that. Imagine a world where we close that time gap. We actually get rid of that valley of death. We have the individual or soldier or the team or the unit that owns that problem or that actually developed that operational need. And we tie them in with the industry partner who may provide a solution and tie the program office that may build that solution and tie the funding in that may fund that solution. And we put them all right behind us here in the Joint Innovation Outpost. We have them work through that problem set and develop actionable courses of action. It could be we buy it and they directly employ it. Or we develop a test case or a test set and we pull Army Test and Evaluation Command in. Or we take the information we know and we transition all the information that we learned out on one of the ranges here and directly dump that into a program office and then picks that up. and starts to build it out for the mass army. So we get rid of that gap that's existed since the dawn of the army. Speaker 1 (8:10) Well, let's talk about acquisition, like in general for a minute. So you started your career as an armor officer. Correct. And then somehow found your way into the acquisition corps, which we're not going to make fun of, because even though we could make fun of tankers before we're going to make fun of the acquisition corps. Because I was in mechanized infantry, so I could do so with my brothers in the tanks. Although I did have a couple of those fired directly over my head. And that is, although a powerful act, it hurts you in the morning. It does. The acquisition process. We've heard everybody talk about the military act. The Department of War acquisition process. I mean, everyone from the president down to the new private. who comes in and goes through CIF to get their equipment, has some opinion about how Army acquisition works. So can you explain how Army acquisition actually works? Or maybe that's a thesis paper for like NPS, but how is Army acquisition supposed to work? Speaker 2 (9:11) So it is a very robust series of processes, and that's probably the problem set for a good reason. So doctrinally, There's an operational need generated from something, either a unit or a white paper or a problem set that comes up, and that's translated to one of the requirements writers. The requirements writers draft it. They do research. The requirement is then approved at an Army requirements process in the Pentagon. Then it'll get actually pushed down in the ASALT where they'll assign it to a program office. Funding is assigned to it. That all takes time. And honestly, if you're building a new tank or a new helicopter, that's the appropriate process because the right resources, the right data, the right people need to get assembled and put on that long process to build that new piece of equipment. And those are what we call like ACAT 1 programs. But for the ACAT 2 and below, we can kind of tailor and shorten that process and not skip the steps, but combine the steps. And that's, again, what we're trying to do here. And we are doing here in the Joint Innovation Outpost where... Everything I talked about, instead of those sub-processes starting and ending and transitioning to different stovepiped organizations in the Army, we just kind of pull them all together here and put