Helping Partners Help Themselves Through Grassroots Innovation

Helping Partners Help Themselves Through Grassroots Innovation

By Ernest John C. Jadloc, Leo Blanken, and Kevin Jones

Security cooperation with partner nations is increasingly important for the success of American security policy in an era of strategic competition. After twenty years of large-scale counterinsurgency operations, during which security cooperation largely consisted of the rapid building of (often inappropriate) “mirror imaged” partner forces, new thinking is required. We provide a novel and scalable mechanism for partner force enablement efforts here: grassroots innovation among partner force personnel through the leveraging of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) technologies. More specifically, we show the potential for partner forces to create affordable, sustainable, and tailored solutions to their own capability gaps as a mechanism for better partnering.

            We begin our story with a real operational challenge for an important partner force…