Fieldcraft

Every veteran we listened to described the same shape of failure: the knowledge that would have saved them months already existed, in another veteran's head. It was never written down anywhere findable, and it never reached them in time.

A denied claim read as a final verdict, when the denial letter was actually a work order listing the missing evidence. Six years driving heavy trucks treated as zero experience, because nobody mentioned a time-boxed credential waiver during outprocessing. Weeks of midnight website searching for housing help, when one county veteran service officer solved it with three phone calls.

The gap is not information. Information is everywhere. The gap is compiled, findable, attributed experience - and a system that gets stronger every time a veteran talks.

How it works

We capture, compile retrieve and compound the information. A veteran chats with FIELDCRAFT, and our app compiles it into a fragment of an intelligence graph: situations, signals, constraints, failure modes, resources, etc: the transferable principle the next person needs, connected by typed relationships. When another veteran asks a question, FIELDCRAFT retrieves the relevant subgraph and answers only from those nodes, naming which veteran's experience each part came from, stating plainly what the graph doesn't know yet, and flagging anything to confirm with an accredited VSO.

A directory tells you a programme exists. A chatbot tells you what a website says. Neither knows that a denial usually means missing evidence rather than missing entitlement, because no page says that. A veteran says that.

What veteran input shaped

Two choices came directly from what we heard. Under time pressure the system routes to a person, not to a page, because the account that stuck with us was someone searching websites at midnight two weeks from sleeping in their truck, and what finally worked was one accredited person with a phone. And it never states a rule a veteran didn't state: it surfaces a verification list instead, because being confidently wrong about someone's benefits is worse than being honest about a gap.

What's next

Durable storage, consent and revocation for contributors, and an attribution so credit follows the experience. Beyond the weekend, FIELDCRAFT isn't just benefits navigation, we are building the intelligence. Roughly 17.5 million living US veterans hold it, and the VA projects that population falling to about 11.2 million by 2053.

What's functional - live speech and text capture, real compilation into the graph and retrieval with attribution, live graph visualisation that grows as contributions land.