How Military Veterans Are Finding Success in Small Business Leveraging the benefits of their training and specialized resources, military veterans are increasingly turning to entrepreneurship. Here's a look at their battle plans.

Robert Dyer was sitting around a campfire with some buddies in late 2007 when they came up with an idea for a business. That may not seem unusual, but the campfire was in Afghanistan, and the buddies were all active-duty members and officers of the U.S. Navy, as well as Marines. Their idea was to develop a nutritional supplement designed for the rigors of war.

"Our missions would last about a week at a time, and if we did get resupplied, it would be five or six days into it, so pretty much the food you had with you--that was it," Dyer says. "But you still need to maintain peak performance; the enemy didn't really care if you didn't get any sleep last night or if you weren't used to the altitude. So pretty much all of us were taking some kind of supplement."

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