CISAC senior fellow Martha Crenshaw challenges statements from presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump that “thousands upon thousands of people” are entering the United States, “many of whom have the same thought process” as the Orlando shooter, and his assertions that they are forming “large pockets” of people who want to “slaughter us” in an OpEd for The Washington Post.

You can read Crenshaw's full article here.

It’s a quintessential Silicon Valley scene. A group of tech-savvy Stanford students are delivering a passionate pitch about a product they hope is going to change the world, while a room full of venture capitalists, angel investors and entrepreneurs peppers them with questions.

But there’s a twist. This Stanford classroom is also packed with decorated military veterans and active duty officers. And a group of analysts from the U.S. intelligence community is monitoring the proceedings live via an iPad propped up on a nearby desk.

These Stanford students aren’t just working on the latest “Uber for X” app. They’re searching for solutions to some of the toughest technological problems facing America’s military and intelligence agencies, as part of a new class called Hacking for Defense.

A student team briefs the class on a wearable sensor they're developing for an elite unit of U.S. Navy SEALs – a product they're pitching as "fitbit for America's divers."

Kulkarni’s team is working with an organization within the US Department of Defense to devise a system that will provide virtual assistance to Afghan and Iraqi coalition forces as they defuse deadly improvised explosive devices.

“At Stanford there’s a lot of opportunities for you to build things and go out and learn new stuff, but this was one of the first few opportunities I’ve seen where as a Stanford student and as an engineer, I can go and work on problems that will actually make a difference and save lives,” said Kulkarni.

A 21st century tech ROTC

That’s exactly the kind of “21st century tech ROTC” model of national service that Steve Blank, a consulting associate professor at Stanford’s Department of Management Science and Engineering, said he had in mind when he developed the class.

“The nation is facing a set of national security threats it’s never faced before, and Silicon Valley has not only the technology resources to help, but knows how to move at the speed that these threats are moving at,” said Blank.

MBA student Rachel Moore presents for Team Sentinel, which is working with the U.S. 7th Fleet to find better ways to analyze drone and satellite imagery.

Former U.S. Army Special Forces Colonel Joe Felter, who helped create the class and co-teaches it with Blank, said the American military needs to find new ways to maintain its technological advantage on the battlefield.

“Groups like ISIS, al–Qaeda and other adversaries have access to cutting edge technologies and are aggressively using them to do us harm around the world,” said Felter, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and is currently a senior research scholar at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and research fellow at the Hoover Institution.

“The stakes are high – this is literally life and death for our young men and women deployed in harm’s way. We’re in a great position here at Stanford and in Silicon Valley to help make the connections and develop the common language needed to bring innovation into the process, in support of the Department of Defense and other government agencies’ missions.”

Startup guru Steve Blank shares a light moment with a group of students.

“It’s like a smorgasbord of all these people coming together from different parts and different schools of Stanford, and so I think that’s just a really cool environment to be in,” said Rachel Moore, a first-year MBA student.

Moore’s team includes electrical and mechanical engineering students, and they’re working together to develop a system to enable the Navy’s Pacific Fleet to automatically identify enemy ships using images from drones and satellites.

Tough technological challenges

Months before the course start date, class organizers asked U.S. military and intelligence organizations to identify some of their toughest technological challenges.

Class co-teacher Pete Newell throws his hands up to celebrate a student breakthrough.

The Navy Special Warfare Group asked students to design wearable sensors for Navy SEALs, so they could monitor their physiological conditions in real-time during underwater missions.

Intelligence and law enforcement agencies were interested in software that could help identify accounts tied to malicious “catfishing” attempts from hackers trying to steal confidential information.

And those were just a few of the 24 problems submitted by 14 government agencies.

Developing Solutions

The class gives eight teams of four students 10 weeks to actively learn about the problem they are addressing from stake holders and end users most familiar with the problem and to iteratively develop possible solutions or  a “minimum viable product,” using a modified version of Steve Blank’s “lean launchpad methodology,” which has become a revered how-to guide among the Silicon Valley startup community.

Rachel Olney, a graduate student in mechanical engineering, tries on a military-grade dry suit on a visit to the 129th Rescue Wing at Moffett Field.

“If you’re not crawling in the dirt with these guys, then you don’t understand their problem,” Blank told the class.

One student team, which was working on real-time biofeedback sensors and geo-location devices for an elite team of Navy SEALS (a project they were initially pitching at “fitbit for America’s divers”), earned a round of applause from the class when they showed a slide featuring photos from a field trip they took to the 129th Rescue Wing at Moffett Field to find out what it felt like to wear a military-grade dry suit.

Rachel Olney, a graduate student in mechanical engineering, said the experience of squeezing into the tight suit and wearing the heavy dive gear gave her a better appreciation for the physical demands that Navy SEALs have to deal with during a mission.

“They’re diving down to like 200 feet for up to six to eight hours…and during that time they can’t eat, they can’t hydrate, they’re physically exerting a lot, because they’re swimming miles and miles and miles at depth and they can’t see and they can’t talk to each other,” Olney said.

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Another group came in for some heavy criticism from the teaching team for failing to identify and interview enough end users.

But the next week, they were back in front of the class showing a video from a team member’s visit to an Air Force base in Fresno, where he logged some time inside the 90-pound bomb suit that explosive ordinance disposal units wear in the field.

“You can’t address a customer issue unless and until you really step into the shoes of the customer,” said Gaurav Sharma, who’s a student at Stanford's Graduate School of Business.

“That was the exact reason why I went to Fresno and wore the bomb suit, to get into the shoes of the end customer.”

Navigating the defense bureaucracy

Active duty military officers from CISAC’s Senior Military Fellows program and the Hoover Institution’s National Security Affairs Fellows program act as military liaisons for the class and help students navigate the complex defense bureaucracy.

“[The students] have really just jumped in with both feet and immersed themselves in this Department of Defense world that for so many civilians is just very foreign to them,” said U.S. Army Colonel John Cogbill, who has spent the last year as a senior military fellow at CISAC.

“I think they will come away from this experience with a much better appreciation of what we do inside the Department of Defense and Intelligence community, and where there are opportunities for helping us do our jobs better.”

Cogbill said he hoped that some of the inventions from the class, like an autonomous drone designed to improve situational awareness for Special Forces teams, could help the troops on his next combat deployment, where he will serve as the Deputy Commanding Officer of the U.S. Army’s elite 75th  Ranger Regiment.

“It’s not just about making them more lethal, it’s also about how to keep them alive on the battlefield,” said Cogbill.

Students also get support from their project sponsors and personnel at the newly established Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx) stationed at Moffett Field.

Tech saves lives on the battlefield

Another key member of the teaching team is Pete Newell, who was awarded the Silver Star Medal (America’s third-highest military combat decoration), for leading a U.S. Army battalion into the Battle of Fallujah, where he survived an ambush and left the protection of his armored vehicle in an attempt to save a mortally wounded officer.

Class co-teacher and Silver Star Medal recipient Pete Newell explains some of the classic reasons why military products fail in the field.

“What I realized is that the guys on the front edge of the battlefield who were actually fighting the fight, don’t have time to figure out what the problem is that they have to solve,” Newell said.

“They’re so involved in just surviving day to day, that they really don’t have time to step back from it and see those problems coming, and what they needed was somebody to look over their shoulder and look a little deeper and anticipate their needs.”

One of the first and most urgent problems Newell faced on the job was responding to the sudden spike in IED attacks on dismounted infantry.

The Army was still using metal detector technology from the ‘50s to find mines, but the new breed of IEDs, which were often hidden inside buried milk jugs, were virtually undetectable to the outdated technology.

Former U.S. Army Colonel Pete Newell demystifies some military jargon for the class.

Newell’s solution was a handheld gradiometer, the kind of technology used to find small wires in your backyard during a construction project, paired with a ground penetrating radar that can see objects underground.

But by the time the new technology reached troops in the field last summer, more than 4,000 had been wounded or killed in IED attacks.

Newell said he hoped the class would help get life-saving technology deployed throughout the military faster.

“I think it’s important to enable this younger generation of technologists to actually connect with some of the national security issues we face and give them an opportunity to take part in making the world a safer place,” Newell said.

Tom Byers, an entrepreneurship professor in Management Science and Engineering and faculty director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, rounds out the teaching team and brings his experience in innovation education and entrepreneurship to the classroom.

Inspiring the next generation

Students said the opportunity to find solutions to consequential problems was their primary inspiration for joining the class.

“When I first came to Stanford, the hype around entrepreneurship was very much around, ‘go out, make an app, do something really fun and cool, and get rich’,” said Darren Hau, a junior in Electrical Engineering.

Students share a laugh during a class break.

Felter said he was humbled that so many students were willing to serve in this way.

“It’s encouraging to find out that students at one of our top universities are very interested and highly motivated to work very hard and use their skills and expertise and talent and focus it on these pressing national security problems,” said Felter.

The teaching team said they planned on expanding their class to other universities across the country in the coming years, to create a kind of open source network for solving unclassified national security problems.

For military officers like Cogbill, who will likely soon be leading U.S. soldiers into combat, that’s welcome news.

“Every time you run a course, that’s eight more problems,” Cogbill said.

“If this scales across 10, 20, 30, 40 more universities, you can imagine how many more problems can be solved, and how many more lives can potentially be saved.”

The coordinated suicide bombings that killed more than 30 people and wounded 250 more at an international airport and downtown subway station in Brussels on Tuesday were “shocking but not surprising” and shared many of the hallmarks of previous European terror attacks, according to Stanford terrorism experts.

“My research shows that in general, terrorist plots in Europe involve larger numbers of conspirators than do plots in the United States,” said Martha Crenshaw, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).

Belgian authorities said that as many as five people may have been directly involved in the bombings, including two Belgian-born brothers with violent criminal records, and that several suspects were linked to the same terrorist network that carried out the deadly Paris attacks last November.

“It is common for terrorist conspiracies anywhere to be formed from prior social groupings – friends and relatives,” said Crenshaw.

“The bonds that link individuals are not entirely ideological by any means. Criminal backgrounds are also not surprising. Indeed prison radicalization is a well-known phenomenon.”

A Notorious Neighborhood

Many of the suspects in the Brussels bombings had ties to the inner-city neighborhood of Molenbeek, a majority Muslim enclave of mostly Moroccan descent with a long history as a logistical base for jihadists.

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“Brussels and particularly Molenbeek is one of those places that comes up a lot when you’re talking about counter terrorism,” said Terrence Peterson, a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC.

“You do have terrorism networks that use these areas, in the same way that organized crime does, to thrive…It seems to be the place where all the networks are locating in part because Belgian security hasn’t been very effective in fighting terrorism.”

Foreign Fighters Bring the War Home

Belgium is a small nation, with a population of around 11 million people, but it has the highest per capita percentage of any Western country of foreign fighters who have joined the battle in Iraq and Syria, according to a recent report, which estimated the total number at 440.

“People were even saying it was not a matter of if, but when Belgium was attacked,” said Joe Felter, a CISAC senior research scholar and former Colonel in the U.S. Army Special Forces.

“You’ve got a high concentration of radicalized individuals in that neighborhood of Brussels, so logistically it was easier for them to recruit, plan and coordinate the execution of these attacks. Local residents loading up explosive packed suitcases in a cab and driving across town to the airport exposes them to much less risk of compromise than would a plot requiring cross border preparation and movement by foreign citizens.”

Felter said he was concerned that the Brussels bombings, for which the Islamic State group has claimed responsibility, would inspire copycat attacks in other countries.

“The real risk now is these home-grown, self-directed terrorist attacks,” he said.

“A successful attack like this, with all its media attention and publicity, is only going to inspire and motivate more attempts going forward.”

Former U.S. Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton delivers a foreign policy address at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies on March 23, 2016.

“The most urgent task is stopping the flow of foreign fighters to and from the Middle East,” Clinton said.

“Thousands of young recruits have flocked to Syria from France, Germany, Belgium and the United Kingdom. Their European passports make it easier for them to cross borders and eventually return home, radicalized and battle-hardened. We need to know the identities of every fighter who makes that trip and start revoking their passports and visas.”

Turkey’s president announced at a press conference on Wednesday that his country had deported one of the suspected Brussels bombers back to the Netherlands last year with a clear warning that he was a jihadi.

Identifying Hot Spots

Clinton said authorities also needed to work to improve social conditions in problem areas such as Molenbeek.

“There…has to be a special emphasis on identifying and investing in the hot spots, the specific neighborhoods, prisons and schools where recruitment happens in clusters as we’ve seen in Brussels,” Clinton said.

Other European countries such as Denmark, which has also been struggling to deal with a high percentage of foreign fighters, are trying to proactively to discourage citizens from travelling to Syria to fight, said Anja Dalgaard-Nielsen, former executive director of the Danish Security and Intelligence Service and a CISAC affiliate.

“Politicians are likely to talk about tougher legislation, but there are also measured voices, calling for a strong, long term preventive effort against radicalization to prevent problems from growing out of hand,” said Dalgaard-Nielsen.

Cover of the book "Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies" co-authored by Stanford Political Science professor David Laitin.

Stanford political science professor David Laitin, who recently published the book “Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies,” in collaboration with Claire Adida and Marie-Anne Valfort, said his research found that Muslims faced higher discrimination in the economy, in society and in the political process compared to Christians from similar immigrant backgrounds.

“But there is no evidence that higher degrees of discrimination lead Muslims into the unspeakable acts that members of an inhuman cult are performing in the name of Islam,” said Laitin, who is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences.

“From what we have tragically seen, the attractiveness of the present murderous cult does not derive from everyday discrimination," he said. "Research has shown that it is not the poor and downtrodden who are radicalized in this way; but rather reasonably educated second-generation immigrants from largely secular backgrounds.”

Europe Divided

Laitin said he expected to see many European countries tighten their border controls in response to the Brussels attacks, as well as greater support in the United Kingdom for the movement to leave the European Union in the upcoming referendum.

“The biggest short-term effect, in my judgment, will be the erosion of one of the great achievements of European integration, namely Schengen, which promised open borders throughout the continent,” Laitin said.

“I foresee greater security walls that will come to divide European countries.”

Fighting a Hostile Ideology

Felter said that while it was undoubtedly important to improve intelligence sharing and invest in greater security measures as part of concerted efforts to target ISIS and interdict future terrorist plots, the key to undermining support for and defeating ISIS was combating its perverted version of Islam.

And, he said, that effort would have to come largely from within the Islamic community itself.

“The symptoms may be suicide bombers in airports, but the root cause is this hostile ideology that’s being pushed on these at-risk individuals through aggressive radicalization and recruitment efforts carried out largely via the internet that then inspires them to carry out these self-directed, ISIS-inspired attacks,” Felter said.

“There’s got to be a longer-term effort to address the root causes of this, to discredit and delegitimize the appeal of this ideology that they’re promulgating online and through social media that’s inspiring these young men and women to go off and commit these horrible acts in the misguided belief that it is their religious obligation to do so.”

U.S. Secretary of the Air Force Deborah Lee James speaks at a roundtable on cyber policy at Stanford University on January 6, 2016.

The U.S. military needs to train and recruit more “cyber warriors,” and improve its offensive and defensive capabilities in cyberspace, Secretary of the Air Force Deborah Lee James said during a visit to Stanford University last week.

“Today we’re not sufficiently strategizing, organizing, training or equipping to be cyber warriors,” James said at a roundtable discussion on cyber policy. “We’ve made progress over the last year or two, but it’s not good enough. We need to do more, to be open to different ways of bringing people on and retaining people so we can bring the best and brightest into our ranks.”

She called on Silicon Valley to “move past the debate over Edward Snowden and the debate over encryption” and help the military combat cyber threats to U.S. national security. “Particularly here in Silicon Valley, how can we get better access…and work better with some of the great innovations here in Silicon Valley?” she asked.

U.S. Secretary of the Air Force Deborah Lee James (left) meets with former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry (second from right) and former Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and George P. Shultz (far right) during a visit to Stanford University on January 6, 2016.

Stanford University was just one of the stops on James’ schedule, which also included meetings at Google, Facebook, FireEye and In-Q-Tel (the investment arm of the U.S. intelligence community).

James said she’d come to Silicon Valley to “listen and learn” and search for “the next big thing” – from drones to big data.

“We’re actively on the hunt for what will be our next advantage as the military,” she said.

She said the military was working to streamline its procurement process so it could move more quickly fund new technological development using what she called “rapid acquisition.”

“You can’t build the next fighter aircraft under this, but you can build smaller types of technological products and get something under contract within 30 days,” she said.

Protecting networked weapons systems and critical infrastructure at military bases were two top priorities for the Air Force, James said.

It is also working to develop better defensive capabilities to protect satellites and other assets in space, and prevent adversaries from disabling critical missile warning and global positions systems, James said.

“Space had been a fairly tranquil, uncontested area,” she said.

“Nowadays, space is much more contested and congested. There are many more companies and countries up there.

“If a conflict on earth bleeds into space in some way, how do we defend our constellation?”

Military operations centers will need to integrate more cyber capabilities in order to create more options for defense and offense, James said.

“What we need in future is a multi-domain operations center where we’re fully plugged in terms of cyber and space...so that a commander at every turn has military options that go beyond bombing a target,” she said.

“The President, the Secretary of Defense, everybody is pressing, ‘We want more options. We want more targets.’.”

But James acknowledged that even digital conflict could cause collateral damage in the physical world.

“Let’s say we take out a power grid to shut down a particular part of a country to stop a military action,” she said.  “Maybe you’d shut off power to a hospital and people would die.”

That’s why cyber operations would continue to be governed by the law of armed conflict.

“Before a cyber target would be hit, there would be a legal decision with other parts of the government,” James said. “It’s not solely [up to] a commander on the scene.”

In an indication of the growing importance of cyber operations, political and military leadership in Washington are considering elevating U.S. Cyber Command from under U.S. Strategic Command to become its own unified command, James said.

The Air Force currently has around 1,700 personnel working directly on cyber offense and defense, spread among the National Guard, Reserves and active duty. And it recently established a new Cyber College at Air University on Maxwell Air Force base in Montgomery, Alabama to train more internal talent.

But military leaders are also looking for other ways to scale up their cyber forces, James said.

“Maybe leveraging the private sector and leveraging Silicon Valley can help us,” she said.