Innovation system

Uh, yeah, thanks for that question.

First of all, I, I, I would like to start off by saying that our innovation ecosystem at AFRICOM has been, uh, basically kicked off a- about a year ago, and we are taking a unique approach to that.

Uh, part of the reason that we wanted to take a look at what other combatant commands were doing, uh, in this ecosystem is to determine how AFRICOM's unique approach, uh, could be applied based on the dynamics of our organization.

And what we've essentially captured for, for AFRICOM is an approach that is really baselining innovation into the doctrinal aspects of what we do on a day-to-day basis.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

So what we've tried to do on the front end of all this is look at every single entity that's doing something innovative, whether it's, uh, OSWR&E, submission engineering integration, um, um, activity efforts, the joint staff J7, SKO, DARPA, um, all, all of the innovation ecosystem trying to capitalize on what exists, because it is a broad ecosystem.

So part of what we're, what we've been doing is just locating those organizations, figuring out where we have a match in terms of what we can capitalize on, pulling that through from a combat and command perspective, because what we've determined is the combatant command, even though we need to continue to maintain focus on war fighting, we still have to be a part of that innovation ecosystem, so we have to go not just, uh, down and in, but up and out in terms of what we have to offer.