Sean Maday, fresh out of Michigan State University and already the head of his own profitable t-shirt making company, was excited to be an officer in the U.S. Air Force. He'd eaten up the positivity in slogans such as "Aim high," "No one comes close," and, one that he now calls comically tragic, "presenting technology that lets you program your own destiny."
His first assignment was at Travis Air Force Base in Solano County, Cal., in 2005, where his job was to make sure pilots and higher-ups had the best intelligence available to make decisions that wouldn't endanger soldiers' lives, or put the U.S. government in an awkward position.
On his desk sat an old-school 15-inch monitor connected to a computer running Windows XP. His email inbox had 50 megabytes of storage.
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"These are the tools I had to work with, and this was a challenge," Maday, who is now a geospatial product manager at Google, said on stage at the Defense Entrepreneurs Forum held in Chicago last October. "Right off the bat this just didn't seem to live up to the expectation."
That feeling was not uncommon to veterans who had gone into intelligence-gathering, data analysis, engineering or other tech-related fields in the armed forces. Though Maday and others said that the leadership, time management and other skills they learned there were invaluable, they were nonetheless dismayed by how much military technology lagged behind what they were used to in the civilian world, then frustrated by how difficult it was to improve that technology even in small ways that would allow them to work more efficiently.
After a few years of service, Maday said, many leave the rigid confines of military life for the open and innovative environments of companies such as Google and Facebook.
Some problems are so basic that they affect every soldier, like the lack of storage space in everyone's email.
"They spend a big part of their week curating and culling their inbox," Maday told Mashable. "Even if it's only 20 minutes a day, that waste of productivity is really compounded in a bureaucracy as large as the Department of Defense."
Fixing a problem like that, Maday and others believe, should often be as simple as getting everyone to sign up for Gmail accounts, which have about 60 times more space than the average soldier's inbox. But it doesn't work that way.
"The system that launches nuclear weapons is literally going through the same accreditation process as someone who, I don't know, has discovered something that will help them manage Excel ," Maday said.
Problems arise at all levels of that accreditation process, and they often begin with the rank of whoever suggested an innovation.
Though the Department of Defense did not respond to a request for comment, a recent article in National Defense Magazine featured Colonel Jennifer Buckner, the head of the Army's "premiere" cyber operations unit, talking about their "Google-like culture of innovation."
“Rank and position mean very, very little, but the skill sets that you bring to a mission will be rewarded, and you will be rewarded accordingly,” Buckner said, according to the article.
Although Maday's experience was with the Air Force, an unrelated branch of the U.S. military, that statement in no way matches up with what he saw while in the military.
He claims that when he was a captain in the military, few people cared about his ideas. But then, a year later, when he had moved to Google, he suddenly found himself in meetings with high-ranking officers.
"I didn't become a different person in the 12 months between when I was on active duty and when I was at Google," Maday said. "When I wear jeans and a t-shirt and I'm at the Google campus riding some stupid little bike, then the general wants to know what I think."
Christopher Spitler, a technical program manager at Facebook who worked as an electrical engineer on a submarine in the Navy, also remembers how rare it was for high ranking officers to consider an idea offered by a junior soldier.
"The chain of command is less of a democracy and more of a dictatorship to support the democracy of the United States," he said.
If an idea is accepted, though, the process only becomes more complicated.
Former Air Force enlistee-turned start-up co-founder Adam Simmons told Mashable that a lot of innovative ideas come from units on the ground, or soldiers who aren't yet high on the totem poll. Troops in Afghanistan may, for example, want a better way to crowdsource what people are saying around Kabul after someone has threatened the city.
But when they introduce that request, military officials write it up "almost how a bill in Congress gets made," he said. "No joke. It's similar to how that happens. That bill's not going to be made just about one item. They're going to package a whole bunch onto that one item."
The bill goes up the chain of command, sometimes taking years to come out the other end, a process that can impact the timeliness that is vital in software development.
At that point, the innovation might be irrelevant, and, because the military shifts the jobs of soldiers so frequently, the person who came up with the idea likely won't oversee its implementation. And, even if they do, Simmons said, the original idea would be unrecognizable because the contractors never talk to the innovator to determine what they need.
Maday and Simmons also claim that the military also has an aversion to using tools that already exist. A good example is Google Earth. Even though the two Air Force soldiers used that software to solve intelligence-gathering problems before, the military may want to build their own mapping software.
Now, if the soldier who had a great idea isn't already beyond frustrated, what often happens next may cause their disillusionment to evolve into rage.
Simmons also believes that innovators in the military are rarely properly commended. He tells the story of working with a soldier who developed intelligence-gathering software that provided the military with better on-the-ground intelligence. The solider got the software approved and then stood by as the Air Force used it to great effect.
"When you're making almost nothing in the military [as an enlistee] and you don't even get recognition for something like that, and people above you get promoted from this, that's a big motivator," Simmons said.
A big motivator to leave, that is.
Simmons stayed an active duty officer for seven years before he determined that he could achieve more in the civilian world. Maday left as soon as his four-year contract was up, tired of waiting around to see the end result of ideas he'd had months ago.
"I don't think I realized how bad it was until I got out of the Air Force and started being exposed to different ways of doing business and sharing information in an organization," Maday said.
Spitler has also been struck by the vast differences in corporate culture between his two jobs.
"Facebook moves a lot faster," he said. "If I think something can be done a better way, or I have a better way to do it, you're more or less encouraged to do that."
Later, he added, "In the military... [you're] not encouraged to go off and do your own thing. And you may take 10 hours to do things, where if you had the opportunity to do it your own way it would only take two."
Of course, the veterans know that the military's procedures are there for a reason. Measures that alter how the armed forces go about protecting the country need to be vetted by multiple people. But Spitler and others believe that the Pentagon either needs a system that can fast-track some ideas, or a kind of cultural shake-up.
Google has been lauded in the past for allowing employees to spend 20% of their time on their own projects. And while Maday isn't suggesting the military adopt the same strategy, he believes a little chatter between innovative employees could go a long way. Gmail was conceived by two Google employees talking around a water cooler, after all.
Simmons decided his ideas could help more people if he worked on them from outside the Pentagon, where he was stationed last. He's since co-founded a start-up called Chaotic Earth. The company name doubles as the name of an app that will alerts users when something dangerous is happening around them, their family or their friends.
Maday wishes people such as his old colleague Simmons and himself, for that matter, didn't feel that the military stifled what they could accomplish.
"It's just frustrating to have so many people who want to do something and want to make a difference, and increasingly the way to do that is go outside the military industrial complex and make a big splash," he said.
Maday also believes that there is no tangible solution in place at these institutions for retaining tech talent or fostering an innovative environment, a situation that only makes matters worse.
"It's going to take policy recommendations to our elected leaders," Maday said during his speech in Chicago. "And it's going to take probably a 'come-to-Jesus' moment with some of our senior leaders when they realize the way we're running this organization is just incompatible with current standards of technological use in an enterprise."
For example, Maday thinks it might be helpful to pay soldiers who know how to write different coding languages, the same way the military pays soldiers to learn real languages. The inspiration behind that idea being: If the Pentagon doesn't develop and reward talented coders, why would they want to work there? Maday also feels that a lack of incentive for coders means the military is not tapping into the talent they need and already have.
Changing the culture of any organization is a chore, and there are few, if any, places more by-the-book than the U.S. military. That procedural mindset, as Maday, Simmons and Spitler point out, is there for good reason.
But in this case, it has caused the U.S. military to inadvertently alienate a generation of talent that it will need to develop cyber defenses, efficiently gather intelligence and build pilot-less planes in the years to come.
The result is a military that has fallen behind its civilian tech sector, and it may be a while before it manages to catch up.
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