Every Soldier a Software Builder: Governing the Army’s New Digital Workforce

The U.S. Army has unintentionally created a new digital workforce of "soldier-developers" who can build software tools within approved platforms like Army Vantage. This new capability presents a governance challenge, as there is no system to identify, support, and scale useful tools while avoiding duplicated efforts. A proposed three-tiered governance model would manage this ecosystem, starting with local tool building, followed by an evidence-based review, and culminating in enterprise-level integration. This approach shifts from predicting software needs to observing actual usage, allowing the most effective, soldier-created tools to be identified and scaled across the force. The system relies on an automatic tool registry to track usage data, which triggers a formal review when a tool demonstrates persistence, high usage, and adoption across multiple units.