The Army Just Ran a Shark Tank in Alaska — and a Soldier's Enemy-Sniffing Drone Won

Sharks, we have an idea - because the Army held their very own Shark Tank event.

At Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, soldiers from Alaska's 11th Airborne Division — privates and sergeants standing up alongside warrant officers and lieutenants — pitched their own battlefield inventions to a panel of generals, scientists and Arctic-warfare experts. They called it Angel Ascent, and it was the division's first.

The top prize went to a flying spy. Warrant Officer Brian Raab, of the division's Multi-Functional Reconnaissance Company, built Wardrive — a small drone payload that silently listens for enemy wireless signals, pinpoints where they're coming from, and beams the locations back to its operator automatically. It's a hunter that finds the enemy by the radios, datalinks and devices they can't help broadcasting. The name nods to "wardriving," the old hacker trick of cruising a neighborhood to map every wireless network in range. Raab just gave it wings.

The point of all of it is the cold. The 11th Airborne — the Arctic Angels — trains to fight in a place that wrecks ordinary equipment: batteries die, loads get heavier, supply lines stretch hundreds of frozen miles. So the pitches went straight at those problems — cold-weather power, better ways to haul a soldier's load, new approaches to keeping troops supplied in the Arctic. The kind of fixes most likely to come from the people actually living it, not a contractor in a warm office Outside.

Maj. Gen. John P. Cogbill, the division's commander, insisted it wasn't a one-off show. "The hardest part of today was picking a winner, because every Soldier who stepped into the arena to pitch their idea is a winner," he said, promising that every concept — not just Wardrive — would enter the division's formal innovation plan. "My promise is that every one of these ideas will continue to move forward because we want to see them scale and make a difference on the ground."

Angel Ascent is built to repeat, twice a year, alternating between JBER and Fairbanks' Fort Wainwright — the Army betting that the best ideas for fighting in Alaska will keep coming from the people freezing in it.