AFRL engineers awarded for fostering innovation, teamwork

  • Published
  • By Leslie Klein
  • Secretary of the Air Force Acquisition Excellence and Change office
Two Air Force electronics engineers received the 2014 National Security and International Affairs Medal for saving the lives of Soldiers in Afghanistan by creating and deploying a new aerial sensor system to help U.S. Army and special forces units detect and destroy deadly improvised explosive devices.

Ben Tran and Sean Young, both from the Center for Rapid Innovation in the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson AFB were honored recently by the Partnership for Public Service with one of the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals (SAMMIES). The SAMMIES are presented annually to honor members of the federal workforce who have made significant contributions to the United States. Recipients are selected based on criteria including commitment, innovation and the impact of their work on the nation as a whole.

Tran and Young led the development, testing and deployment of sensors, which were placed on unmanned aerial vehicles. In the first fifteen months of their first deployment, with new small unmanned aerial system (SUAS) technology in support of an Army division in Afghanistan, no Soldiers in the unit were killed by roadside bombs. The second implementation has been in place for the past year and has exposed many IEDs and other malicious acts against coalition forces.

Miniature radio frequency sensors, which have increased sensing coverage over traditional SUAS technology, were inserted on the aircraft and enabled complete visibility on the range. This innovative technology was the first to use radio frequency sensors together with electro-optical and infrared sensors in this manner.

Tran and Young attribute much of their success to the relationships developed with their customers and integrated teams. By attending their customers’ exercises and mission briefings, they developed a foundational understanding of the missions and the tools currently in existence to address the missions and find the gaps.

“At the beginning, it’s difficult for anyone to establish a relationship with the customer,” Tran said. “But working with leadership and other senior engineers, we were able to make the initial connections and continue to develop relationships.”

Now, they receive phone calls from returning special forces who provide feedback on their systems and where they could make improvements.

“We’ll take that feedback and we’ll try to loop it back into our systems to continue developing the technology to address their concerns or fill capability gaps,” Tran said.

Once the development teams are established, Tran and Young are mindful to provide as much information to as many government and contractor personnel as possible.

“Understanding there are security and proprietary limitations, we operate under a full disclosure,” Young said. “We want everyone to have an appreciation for the type of work they are doing and how it ultimately contributes to the war effort or technology gap.”

“The question that always comes up,” Young continued, “is ‘Who is actually part of your team?’ We make the team as inclusive as possible. It’s not just the engineers and program managers. It includes the finance folks and the contracting officers and the security team. We really try to include everybody in all aspects, even if we know they have no equity on a certain part of the program. We give them a briefing on exactly what the system is and why it’s important, which goes a long way in fostering a holistic team approach where everyone is motivated by the common purpose.”

The team knows that due to the nature of their rapid acquisition work, everything they do needs to be done ‘yesterday.’ They said they take technical barriers in stride, and know nothing ever works exactly as planned. They acknowledge the challenges and continue to move forward.

“It takes the right mindset,” Young added. “You have to appreciate the work that’s required and understand where you need to go and how you need to get there. We follow the same processes as everybody else. Just having these relationships help make our processes move faster.

“Putting people together with unlike minds where they have different backgrounds, different experiences, and different expectations really fosters innovation,” Young continued. “We’ve taken engineers, and put them directly in the room with people who spend their days fighting wars, and ask how we can take their experience and our technology and provide them the best resources.”

They also rely on a network of military, academic, and industry experts that they called iNET, short for the Center of Rapid Innovation Network. Composed of about 60 experts around the country spanning all areas of technical expertise, Tran and Young know they can reach out to any number of experts to help when problems arise.

“iNET allows us to go across the country and find the best of the best in every technical area,” Young said. “If we could only reach out to one geographic area, we wouldn’t have access to the same caliber of resources. It’s more difficult to manage a project where people are distributed, but with communication and regular status calls to make sure we’re all working towards the same goals, it works.”

Similar to USSOCOM’s Ghost Program, the AFRL Center for Rapid Innovation deploys company grade officers and junior civilians as liaison officers to different deployed systems. Since 2009, more than 20 people have witnessed their systems in action through these volunteer deployment opportunities.

“Our leadership has been extremely supportive, allowing our folks to take their innovative ideas and implement them directly into the field, and then come back to the Lab with their niche technical areas and feed those lessons learned back into the Lab and Acquisition Cycle – it’s been huge,” said Tran, who deployed to and Iraq once and twice to Afghanistan since 2011.

Asked to advise the acquisition community on how to think outside the box and create innovative solutions, both engineers stressed the importance of relationship building and teamwork. Tran recommended attending professional conferences and operational exercises to meet technical counterparts and continue to build these crucial relationships.

“We show everyone their work is appreciated and use that to motivate the entire team,” Young said.