U.S. troops swap combat ideas on new Web site

Troopideas.com is not exactly “MySpace for war fighters," but it’s a Web site that invites frontline troops to post their ideas for improving the combat experience. Engineers and developers then use Web 2.0 techniques such as mashups and wikis to turn those ideas into reality.

Dozens of U.S. servicemen and women have so far posted submissions to the Web site since it was launched early in August. The ideas range from low tech to high tech: Creating a helmet-mounted mirror that lets a soldier see behind his back, for example, and a scheme for blocking the cell phone transmissions used to detonate roadside bombs.

Increasingly, many of these problems are being solved by applying Web 2.0 technologies, such as service-oriented architectures (SOA), wikis and social networking that can help compress the typical product development timetable.

In keeping with the nature of the Web itself, Troopideas is a simple way to share information. On the surface, Troopideas.com is little more than a home page and a barebones Web form that lets you identify your problem and then suggest an answer. The site’s creator, Gestalt LLC, an energy and defense consulting firm in Camden, N.J., analyzes the submission and starts working on it or passes it along to directly relevant commands or agencies inside the Department of Defense.

For plenty of active-duty soldiers and Marines with front-line combat experience, that Web form is all they need. Intriguingly, many of the suggestions for both low- and high-tech solutions mirror the approach taken by Gestalt itself: Apply familiar commercial technologies and processes, widely used in civilian life, to the very special demands of war fighters.

The helmet-mounted mirror idea was modeled explicitly on the mirrors used by bicyclists. The contributor who wants to block cell phone transmission referred to technology that’s used in hospitals and theaters for the same purpose. Another identified a starkly basic idea for outfitting troops in the Middle East with cold water. The proposed suggestion adapts a technique already in use – slipping a bottle of water into a wet sock, which cools it by evaporation – into a new type of water bottle carrier for troops in the field.

Still another contributor proposed using voice recognition software and a handheld computer to translate between English and the local language to “limit the need for translations and give soldiers an on-site tool to communicate with the locals.”

Not all the ideas are combat-related. One trooper outlined the difficulty he experience trying to obtain and file absentee ballots when he was stationed in Iraq during the 2004 presidential elections. His suggestion? Voting machines at overseas bases.

Making ideas real

Underlying the simple Troopideas UI is a sophisticated approach to quickly implementing workable solutions to these problems. Founded in 2001, Gestalt specializes in bringing commercial technologies and “user-centric processes” to the government arena, says President and CEO William Loftus. “We were always interested in talking with the people who had the real problems,” he says. “If you can short-circuit the information flow, make it more efficient, you can do what Amazon and eBay did. They didn’t fundamentally change commerce: they made it much more efficient.”