These College Students Invent Things for the Pentagon, and Maybe Find a Business
These College Students Invent Things for the Pentagon, and Maybe Find a Business by Aaron Gregg, Washington Post
The U.S. military usually develops its advanced technology in classified labs staffed by gigantic defense companies. But as the Pentagon looks for new ways to reach out to Silicon Valley, some unexpected characters are getting a shot at the action.
The Defense Department’s Hacking for Defense program (which, despite its H4D handle, does not focus on cybersecurity) is a graduate school course designed to let students invent new products for the military. Students without security clearances — including some foreign nationals — are put to work on unclassified versions of real-world problems faced by military and intelligence agencies.
A Pentagon-funded unit called the MD5 National Security Technology Accelerator, which coordinates it all behind the scenes, gives students a modest budget to try to solve military problems using off-the-shelf products.
After a test run at Stanford University last spring, the accelerator is starting similar courses at least a dozen universities. The University of Pittsburgh, University of San Diego, James Madison University and Georgetown University are among those trying to replicate Stanford’s success.
To spearhead its effort, Georgetown hired a former Special Operations Marine with a deep Rolodex and a long history of doing business with the Pentagon…
SWJ / El Centro: Jihadi Terrorism, Insurgency, and the Islamic State
Small Wars Journal / El Centro’s latest book, Jihadi Terrorism, Insurgency, and the Islamic State, is now available at Amazon.
This work is the third Small Wars Journal anthology focusing on radical Sunni Islamic terrorist and insurgent groups. It covers this professional journal's writings for 2015 and complements the earlier Global Radical Islamist Insurgency anthologies that were produced as Vol. I: 2007-2011 (published in 2015) and Vol. II: 2012-2014 (published in 2016). This anthology, which offers roughly six hundred and fifty pages of additional analysis, follows the same general conceptual breakdown as the earlier works, and is divided into two major thematic sections--one focusing on jihadi terrorism, insurgency, and the Islamic State in context and the other focusing on US-allied policy and counter-jihadi and counter-Islamic State strategies.