Hacking for Defense™ Solving National Security Issues with the Lean LaunchPad™ The Educators Guide Steve Blank, Joe Felter, Pete Newell V6.3 Preface Copyright © 2016 by Hacking for Defense Incorporated (H4Di.org) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the authors, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, email [email protected] or write to: H4Di.org 117 South California Ave, Suite D200 Palo Alto, CA 94306 www.H4Di.org Hacking for Defense™ (H4D): v6.3 Page i Educators Guide Preface Author Bios Steve Blank: is an entrepreneur, consulting associate professor of innovation at Stanford, co-author of the bestselling, “Four Steps to the Epiphany” and “The Startup Owner’s Manual” and is one of Silicon Valley’s most important thought leaders. He created the methodology popularized by his student Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup. In recent years he has developed and taught innovation methods that are being used widely by the Department of Defense, The National Science Foundation, and The Department of Energy. Steve’s career has taken him from repairing fighter planes in Thailand during the Vietnam War, to spook stuff in undisclosed location(s). He was lucky enough to arrive at the beginning of the boom times of Silicon Valley in 1978, and was part of 8 technology companies in the next 21 years, including a military intelligence systems supplier. Dr. Joseph Felter holds senior research and teaching appointments at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), Hoover Institution, and Management Science & Engineering Department. Joe retired from the US Army in 2012 as a Colonel following a career as a Special Forces officer with service in a variety of special operations and diplomatic assignments including deployments to Panama, Philippines, Afghanistan and Iraq. Prior to arriving at Stanford, he led the International Security and Assistance Force, Counterinsurgency Advisory and Assistance Team (CAAT) in Afghanistan reporting directly to Gen. Stanley McChrystal and Gen. David Petraeus and advising them on counterinsurgency strategy. He has published widely on the topics of counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and stabilizing conflict areas. Joe is coauthor of “Small Wars, Big Data: How the Empirical Revolution Can Help Fight and Win Today’s Conflicts” forthcoming (2017) at Princeton Univ. Press. He served as Director of West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, where he was also a member of the Army Science Board, testified before the US Senate and House of Representatives and appeared regularly on major news networks discussing terrorism, insurgency and national security issues. Joe is a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, holds a master’s degree from Harvard Kennedy School of Government and Ph.D. from Stanford. Pete Newell was awarded the Silver Star Medal (America’s third- highest military combat decoration), for leading a U.S. Army battalion into the Battle of Fallujah, where he survived an ambush and left the protection of his armored vehicle in an attempt to save a mortally wounded officer. From 2010 to 2013 Pete led the US Army Rapid Equipping Force (REF) in the investment of over $1.4B in developing solutions to answer Soldiers’ most pressing needs. Defense News Media named him to their list of the top 100 most influential people in the defense industry in 2012. Among the initiatives he developed were the Army’s $66M Hacking for Defense™ (H4D): v6.3 Page ii Educators Guide Preface effort to develop and deploy renewable energy systems on the battlefield and the Army’s $45M effort to design an integrated system to gather the data required to determine the potential causes of Traumatic Brain Injury on the battlefield. He was also responsible for the Army’s first deployment of mobile advanced/additive manufacturing labs in a bid to more closely connect scientists and engineers to problems on the battlefield. Peter’s experiences with REF are also the subject of case studies used in the classrooms at both the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School. He is now the managing partner at BMNT Partners, a company that brings together innovators working at the intersection of business, government, academia and society. He also serves as a Senior Visiting Fellow at the National Defense University. Hacking for Defense™ (H4D): v6.3 Page iii Educators Guide Preface Preface The goal of this document is to share why we created the Hacking for Defense (H4D) class and the practice of how we have run it. Think of this document as an annotated guide to how we built and taught the class. As educators, we expect you will adapt the class to your own school and curriculum as appropriate. As sponsors, we hope this gives you insight on what the teams are trying to accomplish and how they can deliver value to you and your organization. History In 2010, at the height of the surge in US Forces in Afghanistan the Taliban changed tactics and instead of attacking large vehicle convoys with Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), they began to target the dismounted troops that had begun to flood the country. The frequency of these attacks rapidly climbed from a low of 5 a month in April 2010 when US Forces first started to the surge to a peak of more than 800 a month by November of the same year. With very little means of finding buried IED’s or the pressure plate triggers that set them off, dismounted patrols could do little to protect themselves. The resulting casualties were horrific. Between April and November 2010 the Department of Defense was in the middle of a $1.5B effort to provide better armor protection and IED detecting capabilities to vehicle convoys traveling the roadways in Afghanistan and Iraq. Defeating IED attacks against dismounted patrols was not on the Afghanistan Theater or CENTCOM Commander’s priority lists. Even the rapid acquisition programs like the US Army Rapid Equipping Force (REF) and the Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) had missed the rapid change on the battlefield as they had become focused on delivering products to the warfighter vice searching for new problems to solve. In late 2010 the REF, then JIEDDO identified the change and within six month began to deliver equipment designed to defeat the dismounted IED threat. Even though six months is an exceptionally short time by procurement standards, in that same six months the US would suffer almost 4,000 casualties from IED attacks against dismounted patrols. In a bit of soul searching, REF leadership underwent a major review of how the REF found and acquired problems to solve. The revised vision that grew out of that review would lead the REF to restructure itself to focus on finding problems, not just providing products A new vision statement for the REF reflected clarified this change of focus in five simple bullets: Be present: Maintain forward presence at the tactical edge of operations. Close the gap between the Soldier and the scientist Be predictive: Find emerging problems. Provide Senior Army Leaders “peripheral vision” Be intuitive: Organize to quickly gain an understanding of a problem and the environment it exists in Be inclusive: Form partnerships and look for multiple paths to solve problems. Help other Army organizations and industry see, understand and attack emerging gaps Be aggressive: Push the acquisition envelope, but operate within the law. Negotiate Hacking for Defense™ (H4D): v6.3 Page iv Educators Guide Preface solutions with the users - At REF the speed of delivery will be slightly more important than effectiveness and cost. Use iterative development to improve effectiveness and reduce cost This new vision at REF lead to the adoption of a new more aggressive problem sourcing strategy and a wholesale change in their effectiveness in finding problems and building teams to attack and solve them. By the middle of 2013, REF had used this approach to attract and execute more than $1.4B in support of their problem solving efforts. Two years later serendipity struck and brought us together. In March 2015 Pete and Joe led the design and execution of the first “Hacking for Defense” initiative at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). Stanford graduate students with military backgrounds were recruited to participate in an intensive problem solving exercise aimed at identifying technology informed solutions to a number of discrete problem facing the DoD. This initiative was part of a broader DoD effort to more effectively identify and access defense relevant technologies across the global market place and connect and scale defense innovation efforts. The National Security Technology Accelerator (NSTXL) based at the National Defense University provided support for the “Hacking for Defense” pilot at Stanford. After the weeklong exercise, Pete, Joe and the Team Leads for the individual problems out briefed former Secretary of Defense William Perry, Director of the Stanford- Harvard Preventive Defense Project, on the results. Secretary Perry was impressed with the accomplishments of the Stanford graduate student teams had made towards addressing these critical DoD challenges and encouraged us to consider developing Hacking for Defense as an academic class and get more students involved in helping to solve DoD problems. Joe and Pete took this for action and endeavored to determine how best to transform this problem solving initiative in support of DoD in to an academic curriculum consistent with Secretary Perry’s vision. Fortuitously, one of the exercise’s participants, a Graduate School of Business student and former special forces operator, was also enrolled in Steve’s extraordinarily popular Lean Launch Pad class.