After three decades of uncontested overmatch, America finds herself in a new age of strategic competition against a rival who drives military innovation using a whole-of-society approach. To outpace China technologically in an era rife with emerging offset strategies, the traditional, plodding ways that the US military has engaged with emerging technology will not work. Leaders must integrate radically new technologies, equipment, and operational structures from all of society through rapid iteration and design thinking. With the private sector spending nine times as much on research and development as the government, military leaders must understand and be able to work with both traditional and nontraditional contractors. To win, the US military cannot lean on figure-it-out adaptability, collateral billets, a blizzard of innovation buzzwords or new organizations stood up without mandate, funding, or specialized education. Instead, the services must systemically educate leaders to understand how to rapidly iterate with using new technology at every echelon and must do so as early in officers’ careers as possible. Offering a full-semester Hacking for Defense course at the service academies would teach leadership, improve DoD’s ability to integrate the latest technology into the fighting force, and be easier to implement than defenders of the status quo might believe.

What is H4D?

Hacking for Defense (H4D) is a thirteen-year-old course taught at some of our nation’s top universities designed to teach students how to approach complex challenges faced by Department of Defense and intelligence community organizations, It is based on the Lean Launchpad methodology, which has spawned hundreds of technology companies in the past decade. Instructors pair student teams with a DoD or intelligence community “problem sponsor” facing complex issues. These problems can range widely, from managing food waste at an on-base dining facility to tracking space-based junk to mitigating risk in subterranean complex clearing operations. Student teams learn to rapidly develop and test assumptions by interviewing dozens of experts and stakeholders each week across the government, the services, and industry. In many courses, students develop minimum viable products (MVP) about midway through the course and begin iteration based on user feedback. The class culminates with student teams presenting their MVPs to their government sponsors, who choose whether and how to implement it.

Why H4D?

H4D courses have produced some of the most innovative new companies tackling DoD problem sets. Yet the purpose of the service academies, of course, is to graduate leaders prepared for service, not to produce startups—so why teach H4D there? The number of successful companies that have emerged from H4D notwithstanding, the core benefit of the course actually lies in talent development. H4D exposes our nation’s future leaders to deep technology development and commercialization while providing a unique perspective into the friction between services, agencies, and industry. This kind of hands-on experience replaces blind idealism or cynicism in a junior officer with effective curiosity and a structured methodology for solving complex problems. Providing young leaders with experiences and tools for use in their service is the raison d’être for the academies, and H4D is proven to do so.

Why the Service Academies?

H4D is relatively easy to implement at the institutional level, as it involves adding one course that relies primarily on adjunct faculty, but execution will be critical to achieving value. Thankfully, the service academies are ideally positioned with a semester teaching system, requisite human capital and facilities, and a laser focus on leadership.

The academies’ semester teaching system provides H4D student teams with the time necessary to interview stakeholders, develop MVPs, and navigate their inevitable pivots. Teams conduct a steady stream of interviews while iterating on their MVPs and providing weekly presentations on their progress. Doing this effectively takes time—historical attempts to do H4D over 3–4 weeks in an intensive summer session undermined the curriculum. The course requires a great deal of time and energy and should be reserved for students in their final year with a light schedule. Many seniors take relatively light course loads in their final semester as they prepare to transition to the active force. H4D would be a perfect course to allow seniors to integrate the skills of a diverse team together into building a product for a DoD customer.

The academies also have an ideal mix of faculty and other features optimized for H4D. At West Point, for instance, around 50 percent of faculty have recent experience in active military units and could easily connect student teams with existing stakeholders. Some faculty even took H4D prior to coming to West Point. The other 50 percent of West Point faculty have PhDs in their respective fields. The academies have robust alumni networks which could further advise teams on the development and commercialization process. There will be no shortage of motivated, capable volunteers for industry adjuncts in the defense venture capital community who can provide a level of support beyond that available from course mentors. All cadets and midshipmen receive secret clearances by their junior year and could candidly interact with problem sponsors—eliminating a huge barrier to innovation in existing H4D courses. Finally, once a student team develops an MVP in one of the many makerspaces available on campus, the students can simply walk outside and test it using their issued military equipment, their knowledge of small-unit tactics, and the robust military training infrastructure already in place. The requisite physical and human capital that already resides at the academies make them ideal locations for implementing H4D.

The academies’ focus on building broadly skilled leaders who display initiative aligns perfectly with H4D. The course is by nature interdisciplinary, and while it is often housed in engineering departments the best iterations of this course are available to students of all departments. Students form interdisciplinary teams and interview with faculty to take the course. The best teams combine their disparate skill sets and data gathered from interviews to rapidly iterate on an MVP that satisfies a customer need. West Point already employs the flipped classroom method that defines H4D and West Point’s new innovation hub could serve as the ideal place to host the course.

Finally, the course should be an elective and very selective. The academy could incentivize competitiveness by offering an entrepreneurial scholarship. Students on a team that builds a successful MVP could receive a one-year scholarship to continue working on their idea prior to being sent into the force, similar to the existing Rhodes and Marshall scholarship programs. A junior officer building a product to help deter and win the next conflict using private capital is a huge win for DoD, the taxpayer, and our nation’s innovation economy.

H4D delivers a huge benefit in leader development and technological adoption, which is directly aligned with our academies’ missions and our national security needs. The H4D classes at our nation’s top universities are routinely oversubscribed. Faculty have to turn away students at places like Stanford, Columbia, and the University of Chicago because the course is so popular and delivers so much value. As students and instructors, we have seen diverse groups meld into cohesive teams to deliver products that solve national security problems again and again. We’ve watched many of these teams go on to receive follow-on funding and start companies that are still solving national security problems. Good solutions don’t get put on a shelf—they’re delivered to service members as products that help deter or win wars.

But Where Do We Find the Time?

While the benefits are huge, the biggest cost to implementing H4D is student time. Life at the academies is a nonstop grind with wake-up time at 6:30 a.m. and classes throughout the day (cadets average around eighteen credit hours per semester). Activity, club, and sports participation adds even more of a claim on students’ time—athletes, for example, end practice around 7 pm every night. At West Point, faculty can deliver instruction across thirty seventy-five minutes lessons over an eighteen-week semester. In H4D, in-class presentations act as a valuable forcing function for students to synthesize their findings, refine their hypotheses, and receive feedback from their peers and mentors. However, most H4D learning occurs outside the classroom during stakeholder meetings and team discussions. For an H4D course, faculty can create time for cadets by reserving half of those thirty classes for work done outside the classroom— offering what are known as “drops” to provide time in cadets’ busy schedules to work on projects. While students at service academies’ have many claims on their time, the existing class schedule can also be leveraged to largely defray the large time cost of H4D participation.

Some would argue that existing clubs or project-based learning can meet this need, but clubs lack the rigor or accountability of H4D and project-based learning is far too prescriptive. Clubs provide a valuable outlet for exploratory learning but are often focused on creating for the sake of creating—not customer-driven design thinking. Project-based learning often has a set of defined lesson objectives with an implied correct answer. In H4D, no one knows the correct answer (definitely not the instructors). Students must get outside the building and figure it out by collecting data from customers in a methodical process. Clubs and project-based learning, while important, are extremely unlikely to consistently deliver the design-based thinking outcomes our junior officers need.

Moreover, H4D does not need to be an entirely new additional requirement, but can be integrated into academic activities already in place. Talented seniors from multiple disciplines could take the course as part of the exiting capstone process and present their prototypes on Projects Day. H4D relies on rapid prototyping and iterative improvement based on customer feedback to build a minimum viable product—a small step above the Projects Day requirement. Students will spend much of their time translating customer needs into their prototypes. H4D Projects Day presentations will likely have multiple prototypes as well as an explanation of each team’s learning journey.

A Simple First Step Forward

By implementing H4D at its academy, the services can prepare future leaders to adopt and innovate technology at the speed of competition and provide them a set of leadership tools broadly usable across their careers. The gold standard for H4D is Stanford’s course, which was the initial pilot course and can provide the best example of the course executed to maximize learning. The Stanford H4D instructors and the teams at the National Security Innovation Network and Common Mission Project have already agreed to provide context and support wherever helpful. We should leverage the service academies to drive meaningful cultural change across the services and help DoD regain its’ technological edge.

Justin Fanelli is the acting chief technical officer of the United States Navy and the technical director of the Department of the Navy’s PEO Digital. He is an adjunct professor for the Hacking for Defense course at Georgetown University.

Tip Myers is a partner at Marque Ventures, a national security–focused early-stage venture capital firm, and a former Marine infantry officer. He is a student team mentor for the Hacking for Defense course at Georgetown University.

Major Caleb Stenholm is an instructor of economics at the United States Military Academy and an intelligence officer in the United States Army. He took the Hacking for Defense course at Stanford University while a student at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

Image credit: Brandon OConnor, United States Military Academy at West Point