In a historic building where Teddy Roosevelt and Winston Churchill once laid their heads and where, more recently, tattoo artists plied their trade, US Special Operations Command has now set up shop, hoping to find the next big thing in battlefield gadgetry.
Students, professors and members of the military come together in this non-traditional military lab tucked away in Tampa’s Ybor City that seems more like a Silicon Valley tech start-up than an arm of the US military.
It’s called SOFWERX, and it’s the brainchild of US Special Operations Command headquartered just a few miles away at MacDill Air Force Base.
“What we wanted to create was an inviting place,” said James Guerts, acquisition executive at Special Operations Command, “somewhere you would want to come to work, where if you’re a 19-year-old and you have a great idea, you’d be happy to come here.”
Indeed, anyone with thoughts on how to make the life of Special Operators easier and more effective is invited to walk in off the street.
The idea is simple: With Special Operations Forces facing life-and-death decisions and in need of regular equipment replacement or upgrades, SOFWERX can serve as a faster alternative to the slow and deliberate bureaucratic acquisitions process for military equipment.
The creative types who work here run the gamut from high school and college students to people from the tech field to members from the military who have expertise in what’s needed in battle.
They take advantage of speedy, non-traditional resources — ranging from 3-D printers to Play-Doh — to quickly design new products and build prototypes to get innovations to soldiers in the field.
Gadgets in the works range from thermal imagery that would allow an operator in the field see if there is someone on the other side of a door or wall during an operation to designing special flaps for military jeeps that can prevent mud or sand from getting into the vehicle.
An exo-skeleton utilizing electronic motors to help augment the strength of operators in battle is in development, as is an effort to use Play-Doh in the design of rifle grips to make a weapon even more versatile.
And 3-D printers on site can print out drones or weapons parts — designed with input from Special Operators themselves — to replace broken equipment. Once perfected, these designs and the printers that produce them will be sent to the battlefield so that the warfighters themselves can make those replacements right in theater.
“A lot of what we also do here is rapidly prototype things, talk to operators, get the idea flowing, and try to get it from cocktail napkin to here’s an actual thing we are thinking about,” Guerts explained.
While most of the technology used here is already commercially available, the collaboration has led to new advances, such as a special antenna you can attach to a cellphone to turn it into a radio in hard-to-reach areas not serviced by a cell tower.
Medical innovations are also being sought. Tony Davis, director of science and technology at Special Operations Command, is working with special pellets that can be injected into a wound and rapidly expand, thereby clotting and cutting off bleeding — and allowing a wounded soldier to be evacuated from the battlefield much faster.
This isn’t the first unusual use the building that houses the enterprise has been put to. The building previously served stints as a tattoo parlor and data call center, and before that a much more illustrious purpose.
It once was a hotel where a British war correspondent by the name of Winston Churchill and a future American president called Teddy Roosevelt once stayed on their way to Cuba in the late 19th century.
With an eye now on the 21st-century battlefield, Guerts is asking anyone, no matter how young or old, whether they’ve served in the military or not, to stop by to share their ideas.
“It’s the power of the idea,” he says. “It doesn’t matter where the idea comes from. They don’t have to be a Special Operator to have an idea on how we can do things better.”