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.