In the 4th Infantry Division, soldiers are cooking up homebrew data tools – By Lauren C. Williams (Defense One) / Dec 26, 2023
And the commanding general is running courses to help others build more.
Army aviators juggle a lot of information to make sure their helicopters are ready to fight. So the 4th Combat Aviation Brigade recently coded up a tool to help.
“They’ve got a maintenance program of record that gives them good information. They’ve got the mission program of record that tells them what they’re supposed to train. They’ve got the funding line of effort that tells them how much they can spend,” said Maj. Gen. David Doyle, who leads the Army’s 4th Infantry Division, to which the aviation brigade belongs. “And by doing just a little bit of coding work, they can pull those different programs of record and give a commander a clear decision, or at least a chance to say ‘this is the sequence in which we do our mission’.”
By taking “existing tools that are free and on the market and then writing just a little bit of code,” the 4th CAB produced a new tool that “scrapes information out of the program record and lets us see it in a more clear way,” Doyle said.
Now Doyle is working to spread this kind of creative, do-it-yourself data processing throughout his division.
