Marines Partner with University of Hawaii Students

Originally published by Cpl. Benjamin Whitehurst, U.S. Marine Corps Forces, Pacific and writer for DVIDS.

Marines from the U.S. Marine Corps Forces, Pacific G-4 Logistics branch and instructors from the University of Hawaii at Manoa met with UH students virtually for the final presentation of the first ever UH Manoa held Hacking for Defense course May 6.

Sponsored by the Department of Defense and held at UH Manoa, H4D is a 16-week course that accepts students from business, computer science, engineering and policy majors. These students work with service members on real-world, government-sponsored national security problems. The course is a program of the National Security Innovation Network, and is a part of an ongoing relationship between NSIN and UH Manoa.

“The colleges participate in this program in which government entities, like the Marine Corps, submit proposals for,” said Maj. Ross Hrynewych, operations officer and ground electronics maintenance officer, G-4 Logistics. “And that’s exactly what we did, we submitted a proposal.”

In this H4D course, students were given a problem currently affecting G-4 and were tasked with creating a solution in the form of a product. Currently, the process of gathering information on seaports, airports, roads and other modes of travel prior to a mission takes too long. To address this, the students developed a dashboard that is capable of compiling logistical information to be used to plan military operations. The system needed to understand the ports, airfields, and road networks of the country selected for operations and be able to operate on a secure network due to the sensitivity of the information.