Lieutenant Colonel Nick Dubaz, U.S. Army Southern European Task Force, Africa| Advanced Capabilities Directorate, leads the Advanced Capabilities Directorate at the United States Army Southern European Task Force, the Army's headquarters for Africa. In this conversation, he walks through how his team identifies capability gaps across a continent of 54 countries and more than two billion people with a fraction of the resources available elsewhere in the Army, and how emerging technology, from AI-enabled sensors to autonomous vehicles, is being used to close those gaps faster than traditional defense procurement typically allows.
Two of the biggest constraints Dubaz's team faces are speed and survival: promising technologies from small startups often die in the \"valley of death\" between early development and a fielded capability, a process that has historically taken 10 to 20 years through federal acquisition regulation-based contracting. At the same time, threats ranging from hybrid adversaries to emerging pathogens like H1N5 require the Army to detect and respond to changes faster than legacy systems allow.
To address both problems, Dubaz's directorate partners with the Army's Global Technology Acquisition Directorate to fast-track promising startups into live testing environments like the African Lion exercise, compressing fielding timelines from decades into months while using AI-driven biosurveillance tools to flag disease and security threats before they escalate.
What You'll Discover in This Episode
00:37 — LTC Nick Dubaz introduces the Advanced Capabilities Directorate and its role combining innovation, science and technology, and operational data under one command
05:59 — LTC Nick Dubaz explains how the Army is helping African partner nations \"leapfrog\" technological development stages rather than repeat the slow evolution the U.S. and Ukraine went through
07:50 — A mosquito trap capable of analyzing pathogens internally and remotely transmitting disease trend data is discussed as part of the Army's biosurveillance strategy
10:05 — Dubaz describes the \"valley of death\" facing defense startups and how new acquisition authorities are compressing fielding timelines from decades to months
14:42 — Dubaz breaks down the three combat-realistic scenarios inside African Lion 2026, including a counterattack vignette involving autonomous vehicles breaching minefields
Let’s Connect
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