In first public speech, acting Army Secretary promotes Amazon-like drone marketplace

In his first speech as the acting Secretary of the Army, Adam Telle promoted the service’s Amazon-like marketplace to buy drones.

The drone marketplace, launched earlier this year, gives soldiers the ability to buy drones from a website akin to online shopping. Soldiers can leave reviews before purchasing and sellers can change update their inventory. Telle said the marketplace has seen $800 million in sales in four months.

“The soldier’s order arrives in days. No guessing. No glossy slide decks. No bureaucracy,” Telle said. “That’s warfighting procurement at the speed of business.”

Telle’s comments were made during a speech at the Association of the U.S. Army conference in Washington, D.C., on Monday. They were his first public remarks since becoming the acting secretary in September.

Telle said the drone marketplace came in handy for soldiers deployed to the U.S.-Mexico border.

“The cartels are adapting,” he said. “They’re using drones more and more to probe, observe, and try to challenge our forces. They’re hoping with this technology that their high-value packages have a chance to evade our detection. On the border, our soldiers saw this and they were able to adapt right away.”

Telle also promoted the new website for contractors to book time at the services’ test ranges, saying it was like “booking a hotel room” online.

2 secretaries, 2 very different speeches

The conference marked Telle’s first public address as the acting Army Secretary since he stepped into the role at the beginning of September, after taking the helm from Dan Driscoll, who resigned on Sept. 1

Telle’s speech was also a significant departure from Driscoll’s, both in topic and tone.

As Army Times’ Hope Hodge Seck pointed out, where Telle’s address at times came off as a preachy ode to industry, tech, and new-age sayings — the preference leaned toward words like “iterating” over stodgy “buzzwords,” though lethality is still in vogue — Driscoll’s address last year opened up with expletives and took aim at an acquisition process long-criticized for delays and plagued by accusations of graft. 

Back at this year’s AUSA, the Army’s current top civilian wrapped his address by announcing that the service would host its first-ever “manufacturing rodeo” between defense contractors early next year. However, the details about the event were limited.

“We’ve invested a lot in our organic industrial base. Now we need to strain it in the nation’s larger industrial base. We’re going to stress test the supply chain, the manufacturing processes and see where it breaks. We’re going to learn by doing, not by sitting around postulating at the Pentagon. We’re going to find the weak links. We’re going to make them stronger, and we’re going to keep iterating.”

The post In first public speech, acting Army Secretary promotes Amazon-like drone marketplace  appeared first on Task & Purpose.