 The United States Army Futures Command, or AFC, is advancing Army modernization strategy with one focus – to enable soldiers and units to win our nation's wars, then come home safely from multi-domain operations. To assist in this mission, AFC's Combat Capabilities Development Command, or DEVCOM, is building crucial environments for bottom-up soldier innovation – in makerspaces focusing on design, innovation, research, and technology in a collaborative setting. At Fort Campbell, the first of these spaces is the Eagle Works Applied Tactical Innovation Center known as the ATIC, and in just its first year of operation has made a significant impact on frontline innovation. With some napkin math and some YouTube videos, took our idea, we used the tools here, we built what we wanted. Once the ATIC's name got out saying, hey, there's a place you can go that has all this cool equipment and everything else, we were getting emails from people all across the United States saying, hey, we want this too, we have use for it, and it's not just those in the fire section or the electronic warfare section. We had aviation come in, cavalry, the infantry, all these officers from different branches had ideas of what they could do with our prototype. Soldierspaces create a progression for frontline concepts to become prototyping solutions, allowing innovation in the dirt to transition from the abstract to the actual. This is a key asset that allows us to improve our mission effectiveness and allows us to tie in the tactical level to the higher echelons. If we don't have this ability, we're going to slow down and we're not going to be able to empower our soldiers to solve problems at the basic level. Cannot predict the kinds of benefits that will come out of this type of asset, but I guarantee you it will surprise you every time and it will make us better for it. In these makerspaces, soldiers are embracing innovation in action and seeing results. They bring their creative ideas and receive engineering support and guidance as they collaborate with academic and defense experts on novel technologies critical to army operations. The Pathfinder program empowers the soldier who best understands a given problem to develop a solution for the rest of the team. Soldiers know more about field artillery than certainly I ever will. You have an enormous resource of people in the army to inform a designer or an engineer like myself or others in the lab as to what we really should be focusing on when we're making something for soldiers. This interaction with academic and industry researchers makes a significant impact on research and in solving real challenges facing soldiers. So this collaboration impacts innovation because it gives us access to soldiers and problems. So as an academic, you know, the more you understand the context and challenges of the space, the better the solution you can come up with. And so having a place like the attic and innovation officers, it gives you access to soldiers. You can go out in the field, you can do observations, you can do interviews, click video, click pictures. And again, really just expand your understanding of what are the realm of acceptable solutions. In addition to traditional maker spaces, the Pathfinder program also offers specialized maker facilities like Torch, a centralized hub to test and evaluate cyber vulnerabilities using access to physical and logical practice environments. Torch emphasizes cybersecurity and readiness in a testing and research environment. In the DoD, our next fight is going to move at a much, much faster pace than what we've seen previous conference deal with. And our ability to respond either to contingencies, humanitarian crises, or, you know, a full up fight, speed is going to be important. And so what we're likely going to find is in the future, we'll be out in the field, some kind of crisis, and there will be a problem. And we will know how to solve it, but we will need the means to do it at the tactical level. Whether you seek a general facility or a specialized space, Pathfinder maker spaces allow for specialization and solution development to support warfighter modernization.