Hacking for Defense (“H4D”) students are helping the U.S. Department of Defense augment integrated deterrence. H4D alumni team Project Agrippa created a concept for an unmanned logistics vessel to better decentralize maritime logistics in the Indo-Pacific theater. Thanks to the promising end user discovery during H4D, the team decided to form a startup to continue their work post-course and are now working to field and scale their solution.

The team took on an Office of Naval Research-sponsored problem headfirst to investigate methods of improving ballast tank inspections. The 10-weeks of Lean Launchpad problem validation, customer discovery, and rapid prototyping processes unexpectedly revealed that the US Navy was experiencing a crisis of vessel maintenance availability delays.

The 355th Maintenance Group at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, AZ works to ensure deployment readiness of over 1,900 personnel by training mission-ready pilots and maintenance personnel. With a shortage of sufficiently trained maintenance crew, H4D Team “No Sim, No Train” from Arizona State University was tasked with increasing training efficiency to ensure safe and efficient missions for soldiers.

In the Air Force, the demand for Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) pilots has grown over 76% since 2013. Despite this demand, the retention rate for RPA pilots is below 10%. RPA pilots often struggle with burnout, anxiety, and work-life balance, which explains the extremely high departure rate. Furthermore, RPA pilots suffer from significantly higher rates of suicide ideation than the general Air Force population. During the summer of 2020, NSIN X-Force fellows Sahana Bhagat and Campbell Turner began investigating the specific challenges faced by RPA pilots.

Each year, roughly 10 fighter pilots must eject from their aircraft, and breaking a limb upon ejection or landing is not an uncommon occurrence. Currently, there are no splint type devices within the survival aid kit of a fighter jet. Fighter pilots who need a quick and easy way to become mobile to evade hostile environments turn to sticks or other resources they are able to find upon landing.

Team Splint-X was tasked with addressing this challenge and spoke with over fifty Air Force members, nurses, EMTs, and researchers to identify a viable solution. Initially the team struggled to identify a solution but with a combination of speaking to people and research, they began to recognize what the customer needed. They realized they needed to identify a splint solution that required little to no training to use, was small enough to fit into ejection kits, and something that would allow for quick mobility.

Isolated personnel (IP) such as downed fighter pilots need an integrated power source on their person to ensure access to power for necessary electronics and to increase rescue probability. Team Anthro Energy used ‘polymeric solid-state ion conductor’ battery technology to develop flexible, non-flammable lithium ion batteries that can be stretched and flexed.