Innovation Oftware As A Defense Asset - A Conversation With The U. S. Army’s Hannah Hunt Wind River BRANDVOICE Storytelling and expertise from marketers | Paid Program Aug 16, 2022, 12:32pm EDT | Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin This article comes from a recent Forbes Futures In Focus podcast interview with Hannah Hunt, chief product and innovation officer for the U. S. Army Software Factory. She discusses software’s role as a fundamental asset in national defense and how the increasingly software-centric landscape will continue to evolve over the next decade. getty Software as a defense asset — this is an essential shift, impacting how we think about the world. Can you walk through your view of this and the idea of software as a defense asset? Hannah Hunt: I see the ability to build and deliver software capabilities to support a quickly approaching future operating environment as a strategic imperative for the Department of Defense and U. S. Army. There’s a big push to have a joint, all-domain, command-and-control methodology by the year 2030. This means that everything, from sensors to shooters to software to hardware, is integrated in a way that we can rapidly make decisions and be able to quickly resolve a situation. Imagine a military scenario when there’s an adversary or an issue, and you need to make a data-driven decision. How are you going to execute upon that mission? What’s unique about the Department of Defense’s and the Army’s needs is that it isn’t about selling goods but about software becoming something that is a strategic priority, an imperative by which the Army will be able to develop the skill set within its own ranks to be able to build those capabilities. This will inform a much broader vision of how we as a country can rapidly iterate and build capabilities in support of new and different adversaries and challenges that arise. That’s why it’s so critical for the work that we do within the Army Software Factory to ensure that we have soldiers who can build and deliver software. That’s an amazing statement. There’s so much to digest, because in that statement is the idea that someone actually in the throes of conflict would be capable of orchestrating and reprogramming technical capabilities. What triggered this new sort of thinking for army readiness? It is different, it’s unique. To invest in an idea like this is really complicated. What do you think triggered this sort of new RNA for army readiness? Hunt: In the more traditional guerrilla warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, we saw the [value in the] ability to have air dominance and access to networks on the ground and be able to quickly make updates, having the ability for government contractors to be on the fight lines and inside the operation centers to do that. But the future operating environment does not have that. You have contested environments, you have networking that will be jammed and go down. So having the ability for the Army to quickly make changes to the software or make new tools in an environment that is contested is incredibly important. Our adversaries may have air dominance. They may have cyber dominance in certain respects. And so we would need the ability to say, “I am a commander in the field and I’m about to conduct this mission, or I need to know if I can conduct this mission. Do I have the right assets to conduct this mission? Are my sensors in the right place, or my tanks or my ships? Am I able to have soldiers, and even the Army in general, who have that capability to be certain they can show up with this piece of software?” Instead of having to call or radio to confirm that, yes, these assets do exist in the places that need them in order to execute [the] mission. It is incredibly critical, as we enter new warfare scenarios, [to prioritize] that capability. It is an interesting shift, because you may argue that the last major conflicts were relatively traditional extensions of what we’ve seen before. But the nature of warfare going forward will be exponentially more agile, with contested environments on the edge. And one’s ability to respond quickly may in itself be a greater asset than the size of the military force. Hunt: Absolutely. The ability to code at the edge will be key. A lot of people don’t put as much clout into it because of the cloud and the ability to have this kind of hybrid of cloud format. However, when you’re in a disconnected environment, you need that capability, full stop. Yes. And particularly as the edge increasingly comes into play, the capacity to function there — with the need for more resources in real time — becomes extraordinarily difficult. How have you been able to socialize this idea of future warfare when it’s not really being fully seen or understood yet by everybody? Hunt: Within the department, we see senior leaders and general officers calling for these concepts and approaches. They see the data and intelligence gathered that show that this is a real need, something that must happen. However, it still can be very disconnected with what is being prioritized and how we’re going to reach the outcomes where users will actually want to use the software or technology that’s being delivered. There’s still a very antiquated acquisition process that takes anywhere from five to ten years to deliver a certain capability. But we don’t have the luxury of time. We need to be able to rapidly iterate and build software quickly and at scale and in an ad hoc fashion in those more austere conditions. It’s almost like saying to a racing driver, “We’re going to build the car during the race. We’re not going to build it before and test it. ” How are you starting to change this sort of dynamic sense within the construct? Hunt: There is value in having the Army Software Factory structured in the soldiers themselves being able to build capabilities and deploy downrange and make those changes. That’s our grand vision, the ability to have a future force designed in a way where they could say, “I need soldiers who can code and build solutions at the edge. ” This is of strategic importance for the Army. Currently, many departments generally see software building just like you would build a tank or build a jet. It is a more of a waterfall approach — and largely it needs to be, because you’re not going to have a half-finished aircraft fly in the sky. But you can come across pieces of software that are going to provide value, and so you iterate and improve over time until you have a fully fledged capability that can meet all the mission needs of that soldier downrange. The way the Software Factory is structured, and what makes it a relatively unique concept, is that we have soldiers building that software. So instead of contracting out to a vendor to go and build this big system that may or may not meet the needs of the soldier, we have actual soldiers building capabilities and learning how to do that in an agile manner, versus your traditional kind of waterfall approach to software development. Is it easy to recruit within the ranks of current soldiers, or are you specifically having to find software developers who understand and buy into this exciting vision to then become members of the Army? Are you reverse-engineering or are you going to recruit new people? Hunt: Well, the original argument against the Software Factory was that you would have to recruit externally and bring people into the Army. However, we’ve found that there is immense talent within the ranks. We’re actually in our fourth cohort of soldiers. There may be soldiers who code in their spare time or were wrongly assigned to different career fields when they are in fact strong platform engineers or strong software engineers. Our organization gets around 300 applications per cohort for 30 slots. It’s a very, very competitive process. And we have every type of soldier, from your lowest enlisted to your field-grade officers from a variety of different career fields. We have medics, maintenance technicians, cyber officers, signal officers, etc. We have ward officers from varying backgrounds, and many have the soft skills and some of the technical acumen to build software. We invest significantly up front in the level of academics and training through our tech accelerator, where soldiers gain a certain level of practical proficiency in software development, product management, UX design and platform engineering. Then they are assigned different product problem spaces in the areas we want to solve. It’s a really interesting model, because there is a perception that there are no soldiers in the force who can do this and we’ve been able to prove that is immensely wrong. How long does a cohort spend with you before they go on to other roles? Hunt: Soldiers are here for a three-year assignment. They spend about the first 12 months or so in training status, where we front-load some academics through our tech accelerator. Then they are paired with industry partners that are enabling them to actually build software. They’re working on real problems that my team and I evaluate and select. The intent is to reduce support over time, because then the soldiers are skilled to train future cohorts. We’ve only been around for about a year and a half or so, and we’re already seeing it pay dividends with soldiers who are getting a level of skill such that they no longer need that industry enablement. They can then really start to drive themselves forward. Over time, I think we can imagine that we could reduce that industry support even further, and it really becomes something that is fully soldier led. That’s really exciting. Ten years from now, how big could you see this unit becoming? Hunt: We believe that it’ll be capped at around 200 or so soldiers, because after the three-year rotation we may still be working on what that future force design looks like, working with our counterparts across the Army and with our senior leaders. We still want to keep this somewhat of a small, compact unit. We want to be in charge our own destiny, be able to scale in a way that is sustainable. We want to keep it tight and focused. There’s also the potential for soldiers to finish their assignment with us and then go off to different operational commanders or different units or acquisition offices, and build capabilities that way. So we’re not necessarily holding them within the Software Factory itself but enabling different software development units that can be deployed to various organizations to help build software for their particular problems. Let’s imagine you’ve produced this focused group with a multiplier effect. You’re not trying to produce a big, monolithic environment. How many more problems will you be able to help solve in five or ten years’ time, compared to what you’re able to focus on now? Is it 20, 30 times more, or is it difficult to calculate what that net impact might be five or ten years from now? Hunt: It’s difficult to calculate right now. We have 13 product teams that are building software across a variety of problem spaces. We focus on three key areas, including maintenance and logistics — which is a massive pain point right now and definitely underfunded within the Army and tactical operations. This really comes back to the notion of having soldiers who can code and deliver capabilities at the edges of the battlefield. In my role as the chief of product, I really care about delivering value with the product teams that we currently have. However, we’re organizing ourselves in a way that, over time, we’ll begin to have portfolios of products that are interdependent on one another. Instead of having a one-off product that delivers a particular capability, we operate in a sense like a G Suite or Google Workspace, with a wide variety of capabilities versus focusing on specific, tightly scoped implementations. That’s where I really want to push us, because having a suite of capabilities is going to better enable that particular soldier or that particular operational commander to have a full breadth and depth of options as they’re planning their missions and war-fighting needs. Right. They’re sort of like a quarterback. You start with a few plays, but at some point you want to give them access to 150 different plays so that they can make the correct situational decision. Have you seen other ally nations do similar work, or is this unique? Hunt: There’s a large contingency within the British Army and the Royal Air Force that do something similar. The notion is to have their active-duty component upskilled to build software. I’ve also seen it with Australia. They have a very similar desire and need. This is also interest at the NATO level, to have that capability to have allied partners across NATO be able to build software. So it is clearly something of real interest, not just with the Department of Defense and the Army but across all the services and even ally partners. You’re on the Forbes list 30 Under 30. You’re part of a generation for whom software is central to everything, where the commercial upside is obvious, and interest in the armed forces varies across the population. This is a very emotional, passionate mission for you. What triggered you to do this? There must have been something in your background that said, “This is a major problem I want to solve for society. ” What was it? Hunt: I’ve always had a passion for federal service, which sounds kind of cringey but it’s true. My dad worked in Manhattan on 9/11 and he was actually supposed to go to the World Trade Center that day for a meeting. That really changed my perspective on how the U. S. interacts in the world. Seeing the early stages of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq made me really interested in international relations and how we communicate. My degree is not in software. Actually, my background is in international affairs, with a focus on global institutions like the United Nations and global governance. However, I found myself really wanting to serve the government. My entire career at this point has been in the federal space, whether as a federal employee or as a government contractor. I’ve been so passionate about helping and enabling the federal government and the Department of Defense to meet its needs and be able to support internally from a national defense perspective, but also to champion a lot of the goodness that we’re doing here with soldier-led software development in a much broader sense. I have a strong, emotional response to being able to support and provide that level of service to the government. We all tend to have heroes on these very strong mission-type journeys. Are there people that you’ve learned from and pulled experiences from to help you on this journey? Hunt: I’m somebody who is always very growth-mindset focused. So on a personal level, I’m a huge fan of Brené Brown and her emphasis on vulnerability and shame and how you