Why Defense Hackathons Are Critical to National Security: Lessons from Military Innovation Leaders
Defense leaders reveal why hackathons are critical for military innovation. Learn how DOD accelerates adaptation with time-boxed collaboration.
The future of warfare won’t be won by the side with the most equipment - it’ll be won by the side that adapts fastest. This isn’t theoretical speculation; it’s happening right now in Ukraine, where measure and countermeasure cycles are playing out in real-time through rapid adaptation and innovation exercises.
Recently, I sat down with three leaders at the forefront of defense innovation to discuss how hackathons are fundamentally reshaping how we tackle urgent national security challenges. Jen Walsh, Director of Divisions at NDIA, oversees multiple innovation programs connecting government and industry. Kevin McQueary, retired Army Lieutenant Colonel and affiliate professor at George Mason University, has been instrumental in scaling hackathons across the Department of Defense through the Bravo series. And Stuart Wagner, Chief Data and Artificial Intelligence Officer for the Navy and founder of the Bravo Hackathon Series, has pioneered the model of bringing AI-driven solutions to defense at remarkable scale.
Together, they’re leading NDIA’s first-ever global hackathon - a watershed moment that signals defense innovation is entering a new era.
Key Takeaways
For Executives:
Hackathons deliver asymmetric returns: Like venture capital, most value comes from a few breakthrough concepts rather than guaranteed outcomes across all projects
Speed is the new strategic advantage: With 2027 identified as a critical inflection point for military readiness, the systems and people we have today will be what we use in future conflicts
Platform diffusion matters more than prototypes: Harvard research on 160+ hackathons found that knowledge transfer and platform adoption decisions outweigh individual project outcomes
Psychological safety drives innovation: Creating permission to fail productively generates adaptation advantages that traditional top-down models cannot
For Tactical Leaders:
Time-boxing forces output: Unlike conferences that produce only conversation, hackathons guarantee working prototypes and capabilities within fixed timeframes
Subject matter experts meet solution builders: The model connects operators who understand problems with technical talent who can solve them
Competency demonstration opens doors: Working together establishes credibility and creates partnership opportunities that outlast the event itself
“Try it first” beats “admire the problem”: The AI Action Plan’s emphasis on experimentation over perfection aligns with the hackathon model of rapid iteration
Theme One: The Venture Capital Model Applied to Defense Innovation
Understanding Asymmetric Returns
Traditional defense acquisition seeks to minimize risk through extensive requirements definition, testing, and validation before deployment. This approach makes sense for systems where failure means catastrophic loss of life or strategic capability. But it’s fundamentally mismatched to software-driven innovation where iteration speed determines competitive advantage.
Harvard Business School Professor Andy Wu’s research on 160+ hackathons reveals a counterintuitive finding: the primary value isn’t the prototypes themselves. While notable products like GroupMe (sold for over $80 million) emerged from TechCrunch Disrupt hackathons, the most significant outcome is platform diffusion - participants experiencing and discovering new software platforms, gaining knowledge, and making adoption decisions based on direct experience.
This matters enormously for defense technology adoption. Vendor presentations and requirement documents cannot replicate the experiential learning of actually using platforms under realistic conditions. When participants work with tools hands-on and get feedback from others who’ve used them, “platform wars” get decided through demonstrated capability rather than theoretical specifications.
The venture capital parallel is instructive. VC firms don’t guarantee returns on individual investments - most fail at the project level. But diversified bets create opportunities for outsized returns from a small number of successes that return the fund multiple times over. The same dynamics apply to hackathons: you cannot guarantee which specific projects will transition to production, but creating the right conditions allows breakthrough concepts to emerge.
Critical difference from private sector: Defense hackathons must solve an additional challenge that commercial events don’t face - the transition pathway. Private sector hackathons often lead directly to startup formation or product development within existing companies. Defense requires institutional infrastructure to capture value when promising concepts emerge. This is why NDIA’s approach of recruiting judges who are action officers and decision-makers becomes strategically important - not just people who can say “this is great” but who can actually pursue implementation.
Where Public and Private Sectors Diverge
The private sector learned decades ago that innovation requires accepting failure as part of the process. Silicon Valley’s “fail fast” mentality isn’t recklessness - it’s recognizing that learning what doesn’t work is valuable information that speeds iteration toward what does work. Tech companies routinely sunset products, pivot strategies, and celebrate “productive failures” that generate insights.
Defense culture historically views failure differently, for legitimate reasons - operational failures cost lives and compromise national security. But this creates a gap: when every activity must succeed, experimentation becomes impossible. Software and AI-driven capabilities don’t require the same catastrophic failure modes as weapons systems. A prototype that doesn’t work doesn’t explode or crash - it simply doesn’t work, providing data about what not to do.
The AI Action Plan’s language around “try it first” mentality represents policy catching up to operational reality. As Kevin noted, this “trivial phrase” enables exactly what hackathons embrace: try something first, see what works, adapt and innovate until reaching the right solution. The phrase matters because it provides top-cover for the psychological safety required to experiment.
Theme Two: Time-Boxing as Strategic Forcing Function
The Output Guarantee Problem
Government operations struggle with concrete deliverables within defined timeframes, particularly for exploratory work. The default mode is to “admire the problem” - spending months or years analyzing requirements, conducting studies, and building consensus before any working capability emerges. In rapidly evolving technical domains, this timeline means solutions address yesterday’s problems.
Hackathons invert this dynamic through rigid time-boxing. Events start at a fixed time and end at a fixed time, with working demonstrations required at the conclusion. This structure creates multiple forcing functions:
Pre-event forcing function: Everything required for the event must be ready at the start. For industry participants, this means software must be finished by the event start or it won’t appear. For government participants, data must be accessible and problems clearly articulated. For infrastructure, networks, security, and logistics must be operational. Stuart’s comparison to “classified weddings” captures this perfectly - like throwing a wedding, everything must come together at once.
During-event forcing function: Participants know they have a fixed window to produce working capabilities. This eliminates the traditional government pattern of extending timelines when problems emerge. Constraints force prioritization, creative problem-solving, and rapid iteration rather than perfect planning.
Post-event forcing function: Public demonstrations and judging create accountability for outputs. Teams can’t simply claim progress - they must show working capabilities to operators, decision-makers, and peers.
Compare this to traditional conferences. A three-day conference produces exactly one guaranteed output: talking. Networking happens, relationships form, and knowledge transfers occur - all valuable. But no working capabilities emerge. At minimum, a hackathon produces software outputs that may or may not be useful, but represent actual attempts at solving problems rather than just discussing them.
The 2027 Imperative
The Davidson Window creates concrete urgency. Admiral Davidson’s assessment that 2027 marks the point when China could credibly attempt seizing Taiwan isn’t speculation - it’s based on naval modernization timelines and force projection capabilities. That’s not far off. In that timeframe, defense won’t rebuild fleets, dramatically increase aircraft production, or fundamentally transform munitions stockpiles.
This makes the “bits to effects” cycle - the time from data creation to operational effect - the critical path for near-term readiness. The only way to influence 2027 capabilities is through how quickly existing systems get adapted and how effectively personnel get trained on those adaptations.
Ukraine demonstrates this reality daily. The measure and countermeasure cycles for drone warfare - speed to jam, speed to adapt to jamming, speed to modify munitions and counter-adapt - happen faster than traditional acquisition can observe, much less respond to. Ukraine publicly announced running multiple hackathons focused on countering Shahed drones specifically because traditional processes couldn’t keep pace with operational need.
Where private sector leads: Technology companies have decades of experience with rapid iteration cycles. Facebook’s famous “move fast and break things” philosophy (later refined to “move fast with stable infrastructure”) reflected understanding that speed of learning determines competitive position. When Google, Amazon, and Microsoft deploy software updates continuously rather than in quarterly releases, they’re applying the same principle - compress the cycle between learning and action.
Defense is now applying this learning to operational contexts where it matters even more. As Kevin observed from the US National Drone Association conference, at least 50% of participants were directly involved in real Eastern Europe operations. These practitioners are living the adaptation cycle in real-time where it matters most - but doing so at the tip of the spear rather than in practice. The goal is making adaptation reflexive through training so forces don’t learn it under fire.
Theme Three: Psychological Safety and Bottom-Up Innovation
Creating Permission to Experiment
Stuart’s observation that psychological safety to pursue new concepts without top-down authority is “extremely unusual” in government understates the challenge. The entire structure of military hierarchy and government bureaucracy exists to provide clear direction, maintain accountability, and ensure coordination. This works extremely well for 90% of operations - command and control, execution of defined missions, and management of complex logistics all benefit from top-down clarity.
But that remaining 10% is where novel concepts emerge. People at the top of organizations, no matter how talented, cannot see all possibilities or understand all operational nuances that frontline operators experience daily. Those using tools and systems every day understand their flaws and inefficiencies but typically lack positional power or resources to affect change.
Hackathons eliminate this barrier by creating explicitly permissive environments. The model is: anything legal is permitted, and engineers are free to develop new concepts. This represents deep contrast to how hierarchies normally function and creates space for what Kevin calls “productive stupidity” - the ability to try something, fail safely, and learn from it.
The phrase matters because it reframes failure from career-limiting disaster to valuable learning. When technical skills atrophy because military members get assigned to administrative roles (Kevin’s example of spending a year as a party planner despite being a network systems engineer), hackathons become critical opportunities to exercise technical muscles and demonstrate competency to those who can recognize and leverage that talent.
The Classification Challenge and Trust Building
One unique challenge defense hackathons face versus commercial events is classification. Working with real operational data from weapons systems, platforms, and missions means managing confidentiality and classification across large groups. This scales the difficulty dramatically versus unclassified commercial hackathons.
Stuart’s team has run events from controlled unclassified information (CUI) all the way up to very high classifications across multiple physical locations. Each classification level adds complexity but also credibility - participants work with real operational data rather than sanitized examples or simulations. This authenticity creates outputs relevant to actual missions rather than academic exercises.
The trust requirements extend beyond security clearances to cultural acceptance. Kevin found the most effective tactic for overcoming skepticism remarkably simple: having people Google “hackathon” to see the actual definition versus Hollywood stereotypes. The word traces back to MIT’s AI laboratory and railroad club, where “hack” meant emergent capabilities or calibrations - small tweaks to hardware or software that produced novel functions. The entertainment value and problem-solving were the original “hack value.” The collision with cybersecurity came later when people realized novel software could also become malicious, but hackathons simply mean novel capability development.
Where sectors can learn from each other: Private sector has normalized psychological safety as prerequisite for innovation, with companies like Google institutionalizing “20% time” for experimental projects and Amazon’s “two-pizza teams” enabling autonomous experimentation. Defense can adopt these structures in appropriate contexts while maintaining necessary hierarchy for operations. Conversely, private sector can learn from defense’s structured approach to capturing and transitioning experimental results through defined pathways - commercial hackathons often produce interesting prototypes that die because no transition mechanism exists.
Theme Four: The Relationship and Platform Diffusion Effects
Beyond Prototypes: Network Effects of Collaboration
The Maximus platform story illustrates how participation creates cascading effects beyond immediate projects. The lead developer who built NDIA’s hackathon collaboration platform was himself a participant in the Indo-PACOM hackathon. His experience created passionate advocacy that led to building better infrastructure for future events. This pattern repeats across multiple dimensions.
When subject matter experts who understand operational problems work directly with technical talent who can solve them, relationships form based on demonstrated competency. This creates more durable partnerships than traditional vendor relationships or program office interactions because collaboration proves capability rather than just claiming it.
The platform diffusion effect magnifies this. Participants don’t just learn what tools exist - they experience using them under realistic conditions, get feedback from others who’ve used them, and make informed decisions about adoption. This accelerates technology diffusion in ways that requirement documents and vendor presentations cannot match.
For government participants, especially military members whose technical skills may erode during non-technical assignments, hackathons provide crucial opportunities to maintain and demonstrate technical competency. For industry participants, embedding talent on government teams provides exposure to how DOD thinks about problems - perspective that informs better product development.
For academia, represented through venues like George Mason University’s FUSE building, hackathons create research opportunities and student engagement with real operational problems rather than theoretical exercises.
The Ecosystem Infrastructure
NDIA’s model of connecting participants globally - outstations from Germany with combatant commands, Hawaii with Indo-PACOM, Washington DC with policy makers - creates an ecosystem that maximizes probability of transition. When judges are action officers and decision-makers rather than just evaluators, promising concepts find champions and resources.
The event structure reinforces this: teams working at GMU’s FUSE building during the week, with finalists presenting on the main stage at the Emerging Technologies for Defense conference. This progression from focused development to broad exposure ensures visibility to the right audiences - program officers, industry partners, other operators facing similar challenges.
Jen’s emphasis on rewarding all participants, not just winners, recognizes that exposure itself represents value. Even projects that don’t transition create relationships, demonstrate capabilities, and contribute to collective learning. Trophies and recognition on the main stage validate the effort participants invested and encourage future engagement.
Private sector parallel: Silicon Valley’s ecosystem effects - where engineers move between companies, VCs connect startups with resources, and accelerators provide structured support - create network effects that compound innovation. Defense hackathons are building similar ecosystems connecting government, industry, and academia around rapid capability development. The infrastructure required differs (security clearances, classified facilities, acquisition pathways) but the network effects operate similarly.
Theme Five: Global Competition and Operational Urgency
Learning from Ukraine’s Real-Time Innovation
Ukraine’s public announcement of multiple hackathons focused on countering Shahed drones isn’t coincidental - it reflects operational necessity. Traditional acquisition timelines measured in years cannot respond to threats emerging in weeks or months. When adversaries field new drone capabilities or jamming techniques, waiting for formal requirements definition and contracted solutions means accepting defeat.
The measure and countermeasure cycles playing out demonstrate exactly what hackathons prepare forces to do: rapid adaptation under pressure. The speed to jam, speed to adapt to jamming, speed to modify munitions and counter-adapt all require teams practiced in fast iteration. Ukraine is learning this at the tip of the spear, where mistakes have immediate consequences.
Kevin’s observation from the US National Drone Association conference is telling - practitioners directly involved in Eastern Europe operations were unknowingly living the bits-to-effects cycle in real-time. They’d adapted to operational necessity, but this isn’t where you want to develop these skills. The goal is making adaptation reflexive through practice so it’s faster and more effective when it matters.
The Competition Dimension
Russia and China running hackathons isn’t speculation - it’s observable fact. This is happening regardless of any individual’s opinion about hackathon value. When adversaries are developing rapid adaptation capabilities, choosing not to engage isn’t strategic caution - it’s unilateral disarmament in the adaptation competition.
The global nature of NDIA’s event - connecting Germany, Hawaii, and Washington DC through unified platforms with coders, operators, warfighters and creators collaborating on real use cases - reflects the distributed collaboration model that future operations require. Coalition operations demand interoperability not just in platforms but in how rapidly allies can adapt to emerging threats.
Strategic implication: The shift from “decision advantage” to “adaptation advantage” reflects recognition that perfect information processed slowly loses to imperfect information acted on quickly. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff statements increasingly emphasize this reality - winning in current environments requires venturing into adaptation space rather than just decision space.
Making It Actionable: What Leaders Must Do
For Government Leaders
The responsibility is creating space for innovation within existing structures. This doesn’t mean abandoning hierarchy - it means recognizing that bottom-up innovation complements top-down command for that 10% of activities where novel concepts emerge. Specific actions:
Provide top-cover for experimentation: The AI Action Plan’s “try it first” language matters because it gives explicit permission to experiment. Leaders must amplify this message and protect teams engaging in productive failure.
Create transition pathways: Promising concepts die without institutional mechanisms to move from prototype to production. Action officers and decision-makers must engage as judges and champions, not just evaluators.
Measure what matters: Traditional metrics of perfect execution don’t capture learning value. Measure speed of iteration, breadth of concepts explored, and platform adoption decisions rather than just success rates.
Address the classification challenge: Real operational data creates credible results, but classification adds complexity. Investment in classified facilities and secure collaboration tools enables more ambitious events.
For Industry Partners
The value proposition extends beyond immediate sales opportunities to long-term relationships and platform adoption:
Embed talent with government teams: Sending teams to demonstrate products is valuable, but embedding engineers on government teams provides insights into how DOD thinks about problems - perspective that informs better product development.
Contribute to ecosystem infrastructure: The Maximus platform example shows how participation creates opportunities to improve future events. Industry bringing commercial best practices to defense contexts accelerates maturation.
Think platform diffusion, not just demos: The goal isn’t perfect demonstrations but experiential learning where users can evaluate tools under realistic conditions. This requires more openness than typical vendor relationships.
Support the full cycle: Hackathons need pre-event preparation (data, tools, access) and post-event follow-through (supporting transition, providing continued access). Short-term transactional approaches miss the relationship-building value.
For Academia
Universities and research institutions play crucial bridging roles:
Provide venues and infrastructure: George Mason’s FUSE building hosting NDIA’s hackathon creates neutral space for government-industry collaboration while giving students exposure to real operational problems.
Engage students as participants: Next-generation talent needs exposure to defense challenges and operational contexts. Hackathons provide this more effectively than classroom instruction.
Conduct research on the model: Harvard’s study of 160+ hackathons provides evidence for platform diffusion effects. More research on defense-specific contexts, transition pathways, and long-term impacts would strengthen the case for investment.
The Innovation Muscle: Building Lasting Capability
Innovation is a muscle - learned through doing and strengthened through repetition. The power of hackathons lies not just in individual outputs but in building organizational muscle memory for rapid adaptation. Each event trains participants in fast iteration, teaches teams to work under time pressure, and demonstrates that ambitious goals can be achieved quickly.
The resistance often stems from never having experienced it. People saying “we can’t move that fast” may have legitimate concerns about cybersecurity, classification, or acquisition rules. But often they simply haven’t seen fast movement done properly. Building positive momentum through rewards and recognition creates cultural shift where more people say “we can do that too.”
The call to action from the AI Action Plan crystallizes the imperative: “To secure our future, we must harness the full power of American innovation.” This isn’t rhetoric - it’s recognition that adaptation speed determines strategic outcomes in the current security environment.
For defense organizations still on the sidelines, the question isn’t whether to embrace hackathons - it’s how quickly you can start building that innovation muscle before competitors pull further ahead. The Davidson Window closes in 2027. The systems and people we have today will be what we deploy. The only variable we control is how prepared they are to adapt.
Getting Involved
NDIA’s inaugural global hackathon runs August 25-29, with the Emerging Technologies for Defense conference from August 27-29. Registration is free at hackathon.ndia.org for hackers, sponsors, data providers, judges, and volunteers. The model explicitly welcomes individuals without pre-formed teams - problem owners present challenges on stage, with subject matter experts and solution builders self-organizing into teams. All hackers are invited to the conference, with free admission for finalists and $250 for others, creating opportunities to meet decision-makers and industry leaders regardless of project outcomes.
Hey, great read as always. Your insights on adaptation as the key strategic advantage are spot on. It is clear that rapid innovation and platform diffusion, not just prototype development, are critcal for national security. This article really captures the essence of modern defense challenges.