From the Classroom to the Tip of the Spear – Designing a System to Track USMA’s Intellectual Capital

Abstract

As the world becomes increasingly interconnected and unstable, the US Army’s mission becomes more complex. This reality, when coupled with a smaller force, is increasing the Army’s reliance on foreign partners and its need for non-traditional skills. Given these challenges, deployed units often offset capability gaps using “reachback,” the act of contacting external organizations for critical expertise. Based on recent support to the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq, the United States Military Academy (USMA) possesses considerable reachback potential; however, to fulfill such requests, USMA must first understand its capability and capacity. With this in mind, our research shows that although USMA’s faculty is quite willing to help deployed units, no formalized process exists to catalogue and leverage its collective intellectual capital. As such, we identify the requirement for an intuitive system to fill this void, and we develop and analyze several alternatives