Grad students to help Army, DoD solve national security challenges

What can a bunch of grad students at a California university contribute to national security?

A lot more than you'd think, according to the faculty for an innovative new class at Stanford University.

Hacking 4 Defense met Tuesday for the first time. Teams of students will attack national security problems with business principles and startup methods that can get new ideas to the military and agencies more efficiently. Two retired Army colonels and two academics lead the class.

To start, a group of 70 graduate students examined 24 national security challenges submitted by Pentagon and intelligence organizations, including U.S. Special Operations Command and the National Security Agency. Faculty members, with eight military liaisons, picked the eight most promising proposals for the class.

And it won’t stop at Stanford. Program founders say other major universities are clamoring to adopt the concept and launch their own programs next year.

“This is a game-changer. It’s help from an unexpected area,” said retired Col. Peter Newell, a faculty member. “We’ve never been faced with threats that are evolving and changing so rapidly.”

Steve Blank, the lead faculty member and an entrepreneurship/startup expert, said the class can be traced to when a student introduced him to Newell last year.

From 2010 to 2013, Newell directed the Rapid Equipping Force, an Army program to get gear to soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan more quickly than the acquisitions process could. During their conversation, Newell and the student realized they had independently reached virtually identical conclusions on quickly pushing an idea from conception to the field — whether new gear to a deployed soldier or a start-up product to market.

“REF was built to do the exact same thing that Steve was teaching, even though we had never met,” Newell said. “We both did the same things naturally.”
The problems the H4D class solicited, by design, are not research and development problems, but more applied, practical challenges.

For example, the Army’s Asymmetric Warfare Group wants ideas for countering enemy drone operations now that the aircraft have become cheap and available to low-budget militias. Army Cyber Command wants automated tools to counter enemies' use of social media, while the NSA wants an automated way to detect catfishing (people who pretend to be someone they’re not online). A Naval Special Warfare Group wants sensors that can detect a wearer’s core temperature, pressure, oxygen in tank, geolocation and oxygenation in the blood.

Students were encouraged to look at the proposals, pick one and assemble a four-person team. Participants include active-duty officers, former startup founders and Silicon Valley project managers, engineers, data scientists, MBA candidates, product designers, a chemist, a lawyer, a Rhodes scholar and Ph.D. candidates with hard technical backgrounds, Newell said.

The students will contact experts and “customers,” and work with faculty and military liaisons from the requesting organization to develop solutions that could be used quickly.

“That really motivates the students,” said retired Col. Joseph Felter, another faculty member. “It’s not just getting a grade. They’re doing something that can make a difference.”

Track record

Blank has implemented the concept behind the H4D class before. His Learn LaunchPad teaching method, started with a class in 2011 to promote innovation and entrepreneurship, flips traditional class structure. Lectures are part of the homework, along with fine-tuning the proposals and extensively interviewing potential customers. During class time, the teams present their progress and listen as other teams and experts critique them and offer ideas for moving forward.
The faculty team says a course guide for conducting the H4D class is 90 percent complete; they will add lessons learned this spring so they can teach a sort of train-the-trainer educators’ class in August. By early 2017, the concept could be in another 10 to 15 schools, including the University of California-San Diego, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Arizona, Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, University of Pittsburgh, Purdue University, New York University and Columbia have all been fairly aggressive, according to Newell.

Different schools have different areas of expertise, which could influence what kinds of innovations they develop, the faculty said. The University of California-San Diego sits near Navy and Marine bases as well as a “blue tech” (open ocean-based technologies) entrepreneurial hub. Arizona performs a lot of space technology research. Pittsburgh showed interest in robotics. Columbia wanted to run a policy group.

“When we scale to multiple universities, we’re going to have people step up to help their country like we never expected, like DoD never expected,” Blank said. “These kids are the ones on the cutting edge of creating solutions.”

The projects

Below are the eight initial projects, including the sponsoring organizations that came up with the problem. The sponsoring organizations will offer liaisons to help the team of students understand the needs and what could work to address them.

Newell said it's important that the organizations are vested: "If a student picks up a phone at 10 p.m., someone on the East Coast is going to pick up the phone at 1 a.m."

For a more detailed look at all 24 of the proposed projects, click here.

• Team AquaLink: Wearable sensors for divers, sponsored by Navy Special Warfare Group III.

• Team LTTT: Virtual advise and assist, sponsored by the Joint Improvised Threat Defeat Agency.

• Team Sentinel: Distributed, disposable ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance), sponsored by the commander of US Navy 7th Fleet.

• Team Narrative Mind: Countering adversaries use of social media, sponsored by U.S. Army Cyber Command.

• Team Guardian: Countering asymmetric drone activities, sponsored by the U.S. Army Asymmetric Warfare Group.

• Team Fish Reel: Counter Cat-Fishing, sponsored by the National Security Agency.

• Team Skynet UI: Autonomous unmanned aerial system control and threat warning, sponsored by U.S. Special Operations Command.

• Team Capella: Synthetic aperture radar imagery from space, sponsored by the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental. This project was a "walk-on selection" that was not among the initial proposals but presented by students; DIUX subsequently agreed to sponsor it.