Racing the clock: NSWC Dahlgren Division hosts Australian team in humanitarian mission engineering hackathon

By Kristin Davis, NSWCDD Corporate Communications

Far beneath the South Pacific, in one of the deepest oceanic trenches on Earth, a powerful earthquake has struck. On the nearby nation of Vanuatu, a string of some 80 islands stretching across 800 miles, a humanitarian crisis unfolds. Buildings have collapsed. Major roads are impassable. Telecommunications are down; communities are shut off from the outside world. There is no power or running water. A fractured runway has made incoming and outgoing flights impossible.

In the nearby Coral Sea, two guided-missile destroyers, the U.S. Navy's USS Higgins (DDG 76) and Australia's HMAS Hobart (DDG 39), are on regional maritime security. The Vanuatu government has issued a formal international request for help. Higgins and Hobart must provide immediate support.

With that, the stage is set for the International Mission Engineering Hackathon, a first-of-its-kind event that recently brought together small, hand-selected teams of defense and national security specialists from Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division and their Australian counterparts. The objective: Put into place the initial phase of a joint humanitarian assistance disaster response mission for this crisis scenario.

Mentors from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, and the University of New South Wales Canberra in Sidney, Australia, have come to support their respective countries, which are competing to come up with the best rapid, combined-U.S.-Australian naval response.

They have just six hours to complete the challenge. At the end, a panel of distinguished, international judges that include Dahlgren Division Technical Director Shawna McCreary, SES, Mission Engineering Senior Scientific and Technical Manager Melissa Smith and Royal Australian Navy Commodore Andrew Macalister, will choose a winner.

The Australians have come up with a trophy for the winners; by the end of the day, they'll know whether they get to keep it or ship it overseas.

Maximize, stabilize

Each team is tasked with giving themselves a name. After some back-and-forth, and in a friendly nod to their competitors, the U.S. team decides on "Dahlgren Dingoes." By 8 a.m., they've gathered in an auditorium at Kitty Hawk Technologies.

It's 10 p.m. AEDT in Australia, and Team Aussie completed their mission plan hours ago. That team's mentor, Dr. Braden McGrath, a former flight test system engineer for the Royal Australian Navy and now a professor at Canberra, has also discovered that the hackathon has too many objectives for the time allowed. This is the hazard of being the first to take on a brand-new challenge. Before he goes to sleep for the night, McGrath shares this knowledge along with a note that the U.S. team should focus their plan only on the first 24 hours - not days.

McGrath's U.S. counterpart, Dr. Thomas Irwin, executive director of Old Dominion University's Center of Mission Engineering, shares these insights with the Dahlgren Dingoes. Before Irwin held positions in the Senior Executive Service, he worked on Aegis Combat Systems at NSWCDD.

Irwin goes over the objectives with his team. They'll need to establish emergency communication links between the capital city of Port Vila and the outside world and assess the island to determine the worst of the damage and most urgent needs. They'll need to find safe landing points and provide first-wave relief - drinking water, medical kits and basic food.

This will be a challenge on multiple fronts. There is weather, dangerous debris and potential aftershocks to deal with. And the Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer from which they are operating is not equipped for a disaster response of this scale. USS Higgins carries one SH-60 Seahawk helicopter and two rigid hull inflatable boats; it is designed for combat and self-sustainment, not humanitarian missions. There are no large cargo holds, no large hospital ward, just a sickbay that can accommodate 20 stabilized casualties.

The Dahlgren Dingoes must figure out a way to maximize their impact and stabilize the situation until follow-on forces and humanitarian groups can get there.

Mission engineering

In this madness, the teams are given a method: mission engineering. This relatively new concept looks beyond a traditional systems engineering approach that focuses on individual systems or components and instead considers how all parts perform together. Instruments in an orchestra may perform well on their own, for example, but without coordination, the music won't sound right. The same is true for military missions.

"Mission engineering is the way of the future," says Grant Dunn, a program manager for Warfare Analysis and Digital Modeling Department at NSWCDD who participates in the challenge.

"For me, it's easier to go do something rather than explain how I'm going to do it," Dunn says. But mission engineering is about pausing to fully understand what a mission requires.

Dunn and his teammates are among those who recently took a four-day workshop on mission engineering; they were then selected to put the approach into practice through the hackathon.

As modern military mission operations become increasingly complex, the Department of War has increasingly focused on mission engineering. In 2017, Congress directed the department to strengthen mission integration management in areas like air defense, surveillance and close air support. And this August, the department instructed the Pentagon's top research and acquisition officers to establish the Mission Engineering and Integration Activity, a new group tasked with ensuring defense technologies work seamlessly across mission goals.

"We want to get engineers thinking at the mission level," says Irwin, who stood up the Center for Mission Engineering at ODU in January 2024.

To that end, the hackathon calls for a mission concept of operations sketch, a system-of-systems architecture design showing how multiple systems work together and a mission impact matrix - objectives vs. capabilities vs. constraints.

Irwin motions to the front of the room, where there is a white board, easel pads, Sharpies and stacks of sticky notes. Except for a step-by-step Mission Engineering Guide 2.0, this is what the team has to work with. Their presentations will be low-tech - handwritten and hand-drawn, then photographed and placed into a PowerPoint.

With that, the Dahlgren Dingoes get to work.

Knowns vs. unknowns

There is no time for a proper lunch break, not when the clock is ticking and a (hypothetical) humanitarian crisis is unfolding. Naturally, the Dahlgren Dingoes want to win. They eat while they work.

By one o'clock EST, the team has papered over a front wall with notes and diagrams. Easel paper hangs from tables. One team member sketches a scene on a whiteboard: the outline of an island, a partially collapsed building, a tent meant for triage. The Higgins and two inflatable boats sit offshore, and a helicopter hovers overhead.

They've made lists and posed questions about knowns and unknowns. They'll commence operations on the island within 12 hours of the request for aid. They'll establish at least one landing zone. They'll assess initial island damage, capabilities and needs.

There are environmental factors to consider - these are mountainous islands with destroyed infrastructure. With an earthquake of this magnitude, will there be aftershocks? Debris in the water? What time do they receive the call for help? Is it nighttime? And if so, does the crew proceed in darkness through unfamiliar territory?

There is a discussion about whether to bring earthquake causalities back to the ship; they decide against it. They'll keep the ship's 20-bed sick bay for injured crew. It is simply not vast or well-equipped enough to treat the island's residents.

They identify onboard medical providers - nurses, EMTs, a corpsman. They decide to establish an on-the-ground triage center. They consider the host country's potential resources, from medical providers to offshore vessels, and identify an onsite point of contact for aid.

Irwin reminds them of the time. They have just two hours left, and they still have a PowerPoint to build.

'Better together'

By 4 p.m. EST, team members, their mentors and Dahlgren Division's distinguished judges take a seat around a large table at NSWCDD. A screen at the front of the room comes to life; here, both teams will share their presentations. It's early in Australia - 6 a.m. AEDT - and no one has gotten much sleep. There are the usual technical challenges to work out.

But it all comes together - McGrath, the Australian professor, appears on the screen and introduces the team, who walks through their presentation before turning it over to the Dahlgren Dingoes.

Each team is judged on the following: mission relevance and operational effectiveness (25%); systems engineering (25%); innovation and creativity (20%); collaboration and presentation (20%) and impact and sustainability (10%).

Both teams leave their respective rooms so the Australian and American judges can talk it over. They remark on how both teams made different assumptions. Each brought their own set of biases.

"Both are rocking up to these islands without any federal oversight," one of the judges remarks with a laugh.

In the end, it is a draw, really - the Aussie's took a more mission engineering approach while the Americans came up with a stronger narrative and dug more diligently into the resources available to them, the judges decide. The Americans also had a slight advantage having gone second, and working from lessons learned from the Australians.

The Dahlgren Dingoes come out ahead by one point. But although it might sound trite, everyone has won today. Two allies came together to tackle a challenge, laying the groundwork for how they might mission-engineer real-world problems.

"We are better together," Macalister, the Australian commodore tells them. "As we say, mission first, people always."

For Ibrahim Bah, a systems security engineer for the Strategic and Computing Systems Department, the hackathon gave him the opportunity to step outside his comfort zone.

"I appreciate how each person has a different way to approach things, though at the end the outcome is still the same, which is the mission," Bah said. "It was great collaboration and teamwork. I'm looking forward to doing a second one if ever there is an opportunity. I feel there is more I can offer."