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.

Augmented Reality for Facial Recognition

US personnel have difficulty identifying and tracking individuals in unstructured crowd environments. Although centralized surveillance systems can scan crowds, mobile individuals and teams lack wearable technical means for autonomous surveillance. Personnel using Augmented Reality (AR) technology could scan crowds for individuals on a known list (of limited size) while the individual wearing a technical device is focused on another function or task. US forces could benefit from a technology that enables them to constantly scan crowds in structured or unstructured environments to identify individuals that may pose a threat.

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS)

The ability to defeat small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS) is an increasing need for US forces in both military and civilian scenarios. Small UAS are often quick and agile in addition to presenting a small target for a traditional hard kill (i.e. small arms).

The primary focus will be hard kill (i.e., destroy the aircraft in flight or disable its ability to maintain lift) defeat of Group 1 and Group 2 UASs, both vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) and fixed-wing that have a maximum weight of 55 pounds, maximum operating altitude of 2500 feet AGL, maximum speed of 120 mph, and maximum range of 25 miles. These are typically self-contained, portable systems employed for a small unit or base security. They are capable of providing short-to-medium range reconnaissance and surveillance, and in some cases are capable of delivering payloads. They are often analogous to radio-controlled model airplanes. Examples of Group 1 UASs are the DJI Phantom and X-UAV Talon. Examples of Group 2 UASs are the Silver Fox and Scan Eagle.

Big Crypto for Little Things

Little computers have a big future. It won’t be long before everything that can have a processor will have a processor that connects sensors to analytics in the cloud over a wireless network. This connected future is being built by a generation of “makers” who need big crypto suitable for little things like Arduino without having to offload the cryptography to a more expensive piece of hardware. The Open Web Application Security Project has identified their Top Ten vulnerability categories in the Internet of Things. Algorithms like SIMON and SPECK were designed for the Internet of Things and can help secure it.

Countering Asymmetric Drone Activities

ISR and kinetic attacks via unmanned aerial systems are no longer capabilities only held by conventional military forces. Now any non-state actor can buy a drone on Amazon.com for well under $1,000 that is capable of military grade ISR missions and directly threatening servicemen and women.

Distributed, Disposable, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance

The Navy’s 7^th fleet has 50-70 ships, 140 aircraft and 40,000 Navy and Marine Corps personnel. Its area of responsibility covers more than 48 million square miles from the Kuril Islands in the north to the Antarctic in the south, and from the International Date Line to the India-Pakistan border.

Maintaining awareness of all submarine, surface ship, and aircraft activity through the 7th Fleet’s 48 million square miles is a daunting challenge even during peacetime. In wartime, adversaries can destroy our existing intelligence collection platforms in denied areas. Developing a distributed and disposable air, land, and sea sensor strategy is a key element to operating in a denied environment.

Wearable Sensors and Apps for Divers

Navy divers work in extreme conditions, performing various underwater tasks ranging from underwater ship repair, underwater salvage, and special operations/special warfare type diving. Because their area of operations is so varied, they can be required to utilize any type of diving equipment for use in any depth or temperature in any part of the world. Certain diving qualification allows these divers to live and work at extreme depths for days or weeks at a time, a discipline known as saturation diving.

Despite the extreme range of diving tasks, divers don’t have the means to monitor their physiological status and gain early warning of the onset of hypothermia or other physical conditions that can lead to severe consequences if the driver is removed from the water. A study published by the United States Navy Experimental Diving Unit reviewed the long-term health impact on the US Navy diving population. The divers surveyed dive an average of 18 years out of their average 24 active duty years. Sixty percent of the divers surveyed were receiving disability compensation. One in seven of the divers had experienced neurologic symptoms of decompression sickness with 41% of the divers one or more of the nine diving injuries surveyed. Seven percent of the surveyed divers had undergone a joint replacement.[2] Eighty-six percent of the divers rated their health as “Excellent, Very Good, or Good”. When compared to the general population, the divers showed better mental health but poorer physical health.

The Birth of DS4D/H4D

Spring 2018 DOD Problem Sets