The Birth of DS4D/H4D

In 2010, at the height of the surge in US forces in Afghanistan, the Taliban changed tactics. Instead of attacking large vehicle convoys with Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), they began to target the dismounted troops that had started to flood the country. These attacks rapidly climbed from a low of 5 a month in April 2010 to a peak of more than 800 a month by November 2010. With minimal means of finding buried IEDs 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 such as the US Army Rapid Equipping Force (REF) and the Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) had missed the rapid change on the battlefield. 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 began to deliver equipment designed to defeat the dismounted IED threat within six months. Even though six months is a short time by procurement standards, the US would suffer almost 4,000 casualties from IED attacks against dismounted patrols in that same six months. In a bit of soul searching, REF leadership underwent a significant 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 a 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 Help other Army organizations and industry see, understand, and attack emerging gaps.
  • Be aggressive: Push the acquisition envelope, but operate within the law. Negotiate solutions with the users – At REF, the speed of delivery will be slightly more critical than effectiveness and cost. Use iterative development to improve the efficacy and reduce

This new vision at REF leads to adopting 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 to support their problem-solving efforts.

Two years later, fate struck and brought us together. In a conversation in front of a dry-erase board, we realized that the problem curation methods that Pete had built at the REF between 2010 and 2013 and Pete/Joe’s 2013-2015 efforts to recruit Silicon Valley talent to help solve emerging battlefield problems used much of the same methods. They each utilized the same techniques that Steve had been teaching start-ups in his Lean LaunchPad class to do for the past ten years.

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