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Credit to Author: Issie Lapowsky| Date: Mon, 02 Jul 2018 12:00:00 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n Nicole Camarillo was <\/span>touring the Army base at Fort Meade, Maryland in early 2017 when a young captain\u2014I\u2019ll call him Matt, due to the sensitivity of his position\u2014crossed her path.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve got to talk to that kid,<\/em> Camarillo remembers thinking. Just weeks before, she\u2019d seen Matt deliver a presentation on a tool he was developing to counter enemy drone strikes in the Middle East. The technology, he explained, was being developed on a \u201cshoestring budget.\u201d<\/p>\n That caught Camarillo\u2019s attention. As executive director of talent strategy at the US Army Cyber Command, a relatively new branch of the Army, Camarillo\u2019s job is to convince top employees in Silicon Valley that they should sacrifice their stock options and six-figure salaries and apply their technological know-how in the Army instead. The idea that someone with Matt\u2019s skills was scrounging to develop tools that could mean life or death for soldiers hardly boded well for her program.<\/p>\n Camarillo approached Matt and offered to help. She asked him to tell her about the hurdles he encountered trying to develop technology for the Army. Matt decided to show her instead. He led Camarillo to a converted barracks where he and his team had created a makeshift workshop. In an old shower, they\u2019d set up a battery fire, which they used to solder metal for hardware parts. Because the security restrictions on government-issued computers prevented them from coding, they\u2019d purchased replacement parts and were building their own computers. These hacks helped them circumvent the costly, time-consuming military acquisitions process that would have slowed their progress down for months or even years.<\/p>\n The whole scene reminded Camarillo of the storied garages where Apple and Hewlett-Packard began, and there was a certain romance to it all. But Camarillo walked away as inspired as she was concerned. The Army already had plenty of tech talent within its ranks. What they needed was a more nurturing environment.<\/p>\n \u201cThe ingenuity of what they were able to do with their existing resources was pretty spectacular,\u201d Camarillo says. \u201cI thought, What would happen if we unleashed them and gave them all the resources they needed? What could they do?<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n One year later, that seed of an idea has blossomed into a formal partnership between Army Cyber and the Defense Digital Service, a sort of tech startup inside the Department of Defense. Named Jyn Erso, after the protagonist in Rogue One<\/em> who teams up with the Rebel Alliance to steal the plans for the Death Star, the new initiative merges the Army\u2019s top technologists with experts from the private sector. Working out of DDS\u2019s office inside the Pentagon, the Jyn Erso team is rapidly developing tools that in some cases the DoD had already spent hundreds of millions of dollars and many years unsuccessfully trying to build.<\/p>\n It\u2019s the flip side of what DDS set out to accomplish when it began in 2015. The goal then was to get geeks from Silicon Valley to take tours of duty in Washington, cut through the morass of military bureaucracy, and build technology that\u2019s actually user-friendly and doesn\u2019t take years to produce. Since its launch, the DDS team has built technology to help service members keep track of their active duty records track their benefits and even deployed to Afghanistan<\/a> to redesign an arcane piece of software for NATO.1<\/sup><\/p>\n In all that time, though, it never occurred to DDS director Chris Lynch that the same level of talent might be found within the military\u2019s ranks. \u201cI thought, My team is the best the country has to offer and that type of talent wouldn\u2019t exist in uniform today<\/em>,\u201d says Lynch, who accompanied Camarillo on the Fort Meade tour. \u201cThat\u2019s the thing that was wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n For years, the term "technical" in the Army had been used to describe soldiers who knew how a tank works, not soldiers who knew how to write software. Matt, for one, is a West Point-trained computer scientist who spent time working for the National Security Agency and has been in the Army for seven years. But when it was time for him to join a specific branch in the Army, there was no cyber option. The Army didn't develop such a path until 2015.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Army didn\u2019t really know what to do with me,\u201d he says. \u201cSo they sent me to Ranger School. I learned how to jump out of planes and carry rifles and stuff like that.\u201d<\/p>\n Even when Matt transferred to Army Cyber, the computers his team was given were so restricted, he couldn't write code on them. \u201cWe were like, how do people get any work done around here?\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Camarillo and Lynch wanted to give soldiers like Matt the freedom they didn\u2019t have on the base. And so, in the spring of 2017, they approached General Paul Nakasone, the former commander of Army Cyber, with a novel idea: They wanted to bring a small cohort of Army soldiers to the Pentagon for two to three months to work alongside the DDS on any mission of the General\u2019s choosing. Initially, Nakasone was reluctant, Camarillo explains.<\/p>\n \u201cHe thought DDS was trying to take the best soldiers we had,\u201d she says. \u201cI was like, \u2018No. This is for you.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Nakasone, who is now head of the National Security Agency, relented, and agreed to let Camarillo and Lynch borrow a handful of soldiers to work on technology that could disable enemy drones. They called the project Jyn 1, because they hoped it would be the first of many under the Jyn Erso initiative.<\/p>\n Matt set about hand-selecting his dream team from within the Army\u2019s ranks. There was his friend and fellow West Point grad who\u2019d been toiling away in the Fort Meade workshop with him, the talented statistician awaiting assignment at the Army Cyber School<\/a>, and the aircraft technician with a side hobby of hacking cars. One by one, like a scene out of Ocean's Eleven<\/em>, they were tapped to come work alongside the DDS team, whose members had been engineers, designers, and project managers at top private-sector companies like Facebook, Deloitte, and Dropbox. There was also one Marine pilot working for DDS as a civilian.<\/p>\n In May of 2017, the soldiers reported for duty at the Pentagon dressed in full uniform. \u201cWe were like, 'When you come in next week, wear civilian clothes,'\u201d remembers Erin Delaney, who was a DDS project manager at the time. \u201cWe got them some Macbooks and got them ready to go.\u201d<\/p>\n The central question before the Jyn Erso team was, Matt says, \u201cHow do we stop ISIS from dropping grenades on our soldiers\u2019 heads?\u201d<\/p>\n