In the Coast Guard, good ideas can’t afford to wait. That’s the driving force behind CG-RAPTOR, the service’s new rapid innovation team and its energetic leader, Capt. Chad Brick.
Officially known as the Rapid Response Prototype Team, CG-RAPTOR was initiated by Force Design to help accelerate the Coast Guard’s transformation into a more agile and capable military service. Its mission is simple but ambitious: break down bureaucratic barriers and move ideas from concept to operations in less than three months.
The concept started with a wish.
During a Force Design strategic planning session in early 2025, Brick was asked for his best idea. His response was immediate: “I wish I had a team that could just do rapid prototyping and bring capabilities to the field fast.”
CG-RAPTOR was promptly established for this purpose, with Brick, the “Chief Raptor,” reporting directly to the Chief of Staff.
Brick left his major command in Boston a year early to stand up the new office in Washington, DC. Since then, he’s helped drive several notable successes shown in the table below.
What’s different about RAPTOR
The Coast Guard has long embraced innovation, much of it driven by the Coast Guard Research and Development Center (RDC), the service’s science and technology hub. The RDC conducts research, testing, and evaluation to help identify and mature new capabilities for the fleet.
RAPTOR fills a different role: helping proven technologies reach the fleet faster.
“A lot of what we do is serving as a jetpack, as my deputy Cmdr. Matt Eyler likes to say,” Brick said. “We accelerate things to completion.”
Backed by senior leadership and dedicated funding from last year’s spending bill, CG-RAPTOR works in 30-, 60-, and 90-day sprints. Rather than inventing technology from scratch, the team identifies mature capabilities, tests them with operators and rapidly fields prototypes to address immediate mission needs.
That speed depends on close collaboration with partners across the Coast Guard, from the RDC and Program Executive Offices to industry partners and front-line operators.
The team itself remains small – just seven active-duty members supported by temporary-duty personnel. But its influence extends far beyond its size, fueled by volunteers and subject matter experts from across the workforce.
“We are surging to completely change the game on how the Coast Guard delivers our mission through operational agility, integration, and automation,” Brick said. “CG-RAPTOR feeds on this transformative approach, rapidly driving cutting-edge technology directly into the hands of our operators for a more effective workforce and to protect our nation’s maritime interests.”
An energy that pulls people in
The rapid pace suits Brick perfectly.
As the point person for CG-RAPTOR, his enthusiasm is contagious. A former varsity swimmer at the Academy, he brings the same kinetic energy to innovation that he once brought to the pool. He’s in his late 40s, but there’s a boyishness in the way he talks through ideas, with one sparking the next before the first is fully finished.
When our interview was set to begin, Brick nowhere to be found. Minutes later, he appeared, apologizing that a meeting to discuss a new concept had run long. Yet even after taking a seat in his office, he called out to a teammate in the hallway, already lining up the next conversation.
“He’s going to take you on a ride,” said Eyler, who was Brick’s chief of naval engineering in Boston and later moved to headquarters to help build RAPTOR.
Eyler wasn’t kidding.
When Brick talks about unmanned systems, for example, he doesn’t just focus on the platform. He talks about what those systems mean for day-to-day Coast Guard operations — how new sensors might change how cutter crews search for a person in the water, or how artificial intelligence at the edge could scan the ocean surface, flag anomalies, and help crews spot someone faster than the human eye alone.
Then his mind jumps ahead again: If unmanned systems can carry better sensors, what software upgrades could improve legacy aircraft and cutters? How can automation reduce workload? How can technology give crews more time to focus on judgment instead of routine tasks?
For Brick, it always comes back to the same point: better mission execution. “Find a person in the water and save their life,” he said. “That’s what this is all about.”
An innovator from the start
Brick traces his mindset to his first assignment in 2001 aboard Coast Guard Cutter Rush in Hawaii.
As a young officer, he was struck by how hard it was to manage property.
“It was so much time spent accounting for stuff that wasn’t valuable,” he said.
A decade later, as a budget officer, he decided to fix this. He challenged long-standing policies, introduced new performance measures, and focused on a simple question: How long does it take from the moment something is ordered until it’s actually in use?
The efforts streamlined processes and reduced administrative burdens. What began as a property management solution expanded into logistics, contracting, procurement, and emergency management. Over time, Brick helped develop and scale more than 50 systems to improve how bases manage resources, including CG Common Core.
While serving in Miami, he built an online tool to manage local budgets. That platform quickly evolved into a hurricane response management system that allowed teams to coordinate remotely, including supporting operations in Puerto Rico from Miami. When Brick demonstrated it at a budget officer conference, interest spread across the service.
The lesson was clear: many Coast Guard problems are similar. Build the right digital process once, adjust it, and you can solve multiple challenges.
At Coast Guard Base Boston, Brick doubled down on creating what he calls a safe environment for innovation. He encouraged personnel at every level to submit ideas for the Niels P. Thomsen Innovation Awards. In one year, members from the base and supported cutters submitted 60 nominations. More than half won.
Brick himself has earned six of the awards over his career.
“People in the field have better ideas,” he said. “The question is: can we help shape those ideas, so they solve bigger problems.”
For Brick, the vision is bigger than any single tool.
“If we could create that kind of innovation culture at one base,” he said, reflecting on his time in Boston, “and get all these people involved, imagine what we can do across the entire service.”
With CG-RAPTOR now in place, he doesn’t have to imagine it.
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