Closing the Loop: Improving Innovation Feedback Between Soldiers, Startups, and Strategy

Executive Summary

In February 2022, five days before the Army deployed the author’s company as the European Contingency Response Force in response to the Russian buildup ahead of the invasion of Ukraine, paratroopers conducted a final test flight of the RQ-11 Raven. The Raven was not a sophisticated platform; flying it sometimes felt like playing a legacy video game. But it was reliable for at least 30 minutes of flight time and a few kilometers of range, with a clear feed.

Today, after billions of dollars of Pentagon investment and three years of watching small drones reshape the front lines in Ukraine, if called upon again, “Sky Soldiers” of the 173rd Airborne Brigade would deploy to war with worse equipment than it had in 2022. The Skydio X10D, which replaced the Raven, advertises superior range and capability. In practice, operators at the 173rd Airborne Brigade reported losing connection at less than 2 kilometers, controllers that take ten minutes to boot up, and supply shipments arriving with incompatible batteries. When operators are asked whether anyone has ever solicited their feedback on these systems, they answer: “No.”

This report’s central question is why.

Informed by over 35 hours of interviews spanning PFC drone operators to Defense Innovation Unit program managers, field research conducted at the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Vicenza, Italy, and consultation with stakeholders across the U.S. Army, USAREUR-AF, NATO, and the defense technology industry, this report hopes to offer an answer:

The Army is applying a scaling strategy to a problem that first requires iteration to develop the best technology, and the scaling strategy is actively destroying the conditions needed for iteration.

The Army’s procurement, approval, and fielding systems are designed to acquire finished, established products at scale. For small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS), this procurement system has produced platforms like AeroVironment’s Raven and Puma: mature, program-of-record systems procured through traditional channels over the years. This model helped produce the world’s most capable conventional military. However, the novel sUAS platforms the Army is now trying to adopt require iterative development with end users. To institutionalize sUAS innovation, the Army must be willing to solve undefined problems with unproven solutions. We assess that this mismatch between the current procurement process optimized for scaling and the iterative, user-driven development these platforms demand is both a systems failure and a culture failure.

Our diagnosis of the 173rd Airborne Brigade identifies six interrelated failures that prevent the 173rd and larger Army from achieving what this report terms “product- market fit”¹ for sUAS at the tactical unit level:

• Broken Feedback Loops. The system asks for the wrong feedback, seeking solution specifications rather than problem statements. Operators have no structured channel to industry. Input is diluted up the chain, corrupted by intermediaries, and undermined by small sample sizes. The Army has no equivalent to the platforms and processes that enable Ukraine’s 2-4 week innovation cycles.

• Integration, Training, and Tactical Employment Gap. The Army treats drones as individual weapons, even though the battlefield has demonstrated they are crew-served, and the institutional training pipeline produces pilots, not crews. Commanders lack practical employment understanding. No doctrine exists for how an infantry unit fights with drones.

• Absence of Interoperability Standards. The government has not operationalized standards for batteries, radios, data formats, or flight controllers, despite having written many of the relevant frameworks (MOSA, RAS Architecture, DoDI 8330.01). The result is incompatible supply chains, redundant approvals, vendor lock-in, and industry independently converging on suboptimal technical solutions.

• Approval Architecture and Risk Aversion. Overlapping echelons default to “no.” Approvals consume an estimated 60% of the timeline from procurement decision to operational deployment. Proven capabilities sit unfielded while authorities designed to enable rapid acquisition go unused.

• Contracting and Legal Capacity Gap at Brigade. Units lack the contracting officers, agreements officers, and legal counsel needed to execute procurement at speed, even when authority and funding exist. The inability to provide sustained demand signals threatens the survival of the domestic drone industrial base.

• European Theater Multiplier. Every domestic friction point is compounded by host-nation approval processes, spectrum restrictions, and testing prohibitions, which can add 9 or more months per system. Emerging efforts at the USAREUR-AF and NATO level (e.g., G-TEAD, Task Force X, DIANA) are attempting to build parallel pathways but have not yet achieved the speed the operational environment demands.

To address these failures, we outline a two-part guiding policy:

First, the Army must achieve product-market fit before attempting to scale. Product-market fit for sUAS has three components: sufficient performance in tactical conditions, unit economics that enable mass, and integration into communications and maneuver. The Army’s current posture inverts this sequence, privileging firms that can produce at volume over firms that have built something that works. Policy should help validated products scale, not classify a product as validated because its manufacturer can produce in quantity.

Second, the government must operationalize interoperability standards and validate them in phases. Units should define operational problems, not prescribe solutions. Existing standards frameworks should be operationalized and enforced. A phased validation model, similar to clinical trials in pharmaceuticals, should structure the pathway from problem statement to fielded capability. Elements of this model already exist in the DIU’s Project GI program, in NATO’s DIANA, and in USAREUR-AF’s G-TEAD procurement accelerator. What is missing is the institutional commitment to link them into a coherent pathway.

Recommendations are tiered by echelon: actions within the brigade commander’s authority that can begin immediately, and actions requiring advocacy at higher echelons.

1. The report defines “product-market-fit” for sUAS selling to Army units as meeting three criteria: sufficient performance in tactical conditions, unit economics that enable mass, and integration into communications & maneuver.

About the Policy Analysis Exercise

The Harvard Kennedy School’s Policy Analysis Exercise (PAE) is a year-long, public-sector consulting project conducted by graduate students. Unlike a traditional master’s thesis, the PAE is a hands-on, client-driven project designed to uncover real friction points and offer practical policy recommendations.

This report was conducted for the 173rd Airborne Brigade, headquartered in Vicenza, Italy, by three Master in Public Policy (MPP) candidates at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS). The research team includes a former rifle company commander in the 173rd Airborne Brigade with operational planning experience across the European theater, a recent Air Force Academy graduate, and a policy researcher with experience at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. It was completed within the International and Global Affairs (IGA) policy area of concentration of the MPP program.

The report is written for decision-makers from the brigade command level up to Pentagon leadership, using the 173rd as a case study to identify systemic problems and generalizable, Army-wide recommendations.

This paper reflects the views of the authors and should not be viewed as representing the views of the Harvard Kennedy School, The Belfer Center, the Department of War, Harvard University, or any of its faculty. Any omissions, errors, or factual inaccuracies are the authors’ alone.

PAE Advisor: Lt. Col. Nick DuPre, USAF & HKS National Security Fellow.

IGA Seminar Leaders: Professors Matthew Bunn and Juliette Kayyem.

Disclosure: This research was started in the fall of 2025, prior to the current tensions between the Department of War (DoW) and Harvard University. Since the announcement of the Department’s policies regarding select universities, the research team has operated independently.

The findings and recommendations reflect our analysis of systematic challenges facing any brigade attempting to integrate and deploy sUAS technology and are not contingent on any formal institutional relationship.