War hobbyist

I first began writing on Substack in 2021 as a means of channeling my boredom and procrastination in biology lectures into a productive outlet. In odd and unexpected ways, it led to fruitful conversations and even my first job out of college.

The past year at SiPhox Health working on at-home health testing has been the opposite of boredom, more necessitating a hard workout or meal in silence than an outlet for creativity or rabbit holes.

Since the end of June, I’ve been in Virginia attending Logistics Basic Officer Leadership Course. Once again finding myself in hours-long lectures in a building without wifi, I’ve begun to chase and nurture any semblance of creativity or engaging material.

Below are a variety of topics I’ve chewed on while sitting in class- some Army, some science, hopefully finding an intersection of expertise. This was inspired mainly by Packy McCormick’s piece “Differentiation” where he says “The Personal Monopoly is the intersection of the things you’re good at, the things you’re curious about, and your own personality.”

Life at a Startup vs the Army

Startup

When I started at SiPhox Health in May of 2022 just a few days after graduating from Baylor we had just begun to spin up our at-home testing kits. The worries of the day looked like this:

• what biomarkers should we test?

• how we’d know if users got their kits

• how to ensure users could seamlessly collect a sample

• what our users found valuable

Fast forward to May 2023 right before I left for the Army, and our worries looked like

• what biomarkers should we test?

• how we’d know if users got their kits

• how to ensure users could seamlessly collect a sample

• what our users found valuable

  The same issues to tackle, just for thousands of users across North America, not just employees and friends/family.

Frankly, it was a 3-5 person team just scraping a potential solution together, with no guarantee that this would ever be a viable business. How home health testing is a valuable pursuit for a hardware company is a fascinating rabbit hole in and of itself but for another day.

The team has grown in unique ways since my first days, but what I appreciate about the startup scene and SiPhox Health, in particular, hasn’t. I value the small agile team, able to make sound, actionable decisions each day. If there’s something to fix or something to be done better, you can do it, and you better do it. The lack of “bumpers” on this bowling lane can be alarming and may not be for everyone. But personally, the potential to throw the colloquial ‘bowling bowl” into the gutter brings about the best in me, and especially at SiPhox, has put me around people who make me better.

Army

Transitioning from a startup and its daily rhythm and necessary attributes to the Army was like running into a brick wall. My first couple of months have consisted mainly of PowerPoints and PT, with some sprinklings of cool opportunities.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t admit that I chose an Army career in logistics, not in rappelling out of a Blackhawk and taking out Osama Bin Laden. Yet the regimented, predictable, and copy/paste nature of the military was what drove me away from Active Duty. Below is actually a diagram showing you exactly how your career will unfold. At best, high performance will get you promoted a year or two ahead of schedule.

If a startup is a bowling alley with no bumpers and a lane with uneven terrain, to me the military looked like a lane with big pins, bumpers, and the need to decide which lane you’d bowl on for the rest of your career too soon. And if you were great at bowling, wait in line, because you have a career progression plan to follow to a T.

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Relevant Notes

• The Army plan for 2030 and beyond sees a return to the Division (10-15,000 troops) as the major “unit of action” a change from the Brigade Combat Team (~4,500 troops). This is due to the change from wars fighting counterinsurgencies (Afghanistan) to near pear threats (China). Essentially, the Army is re-grouping so that the pawns it can deploy can more effectively win large-scale combat operations (LSCO).

A Startup Perspective on Modernization

• For the last 20 years, advancements made the most sense around enhancing the warfighter. Whether it be the vehicle they drove or the individual weapon they employed, acquisitions supported the tactical level.

• Given the size of the pawn has increased from a BCT to a Division, does the modernization of our force change directions from enhancements at the soldier level to say the Platoon level? This would be more so driven by the enemy than the internal structuring of the force.

• Enhancements to the individual soldier make sense in the context of counterinsurgency operations, where alterations in power dynamics could be accomplished by defeating smaller, less technologically sophisticated forces.

• In large-scale combat operations, does the payoff of enhancing individual soldier lethality justify its costs? Should the focus of modernization shift toward high payoff technology shifts that lead to division-level payoffs?

These questions and deliberations must also be met by the all-important notion that wars are fought between individuals. Focusing modernization on division-level assets could retroactively leave our soldiers behind.

Parallels in Product Development

Do your users know they need your product?

• SiPhox Health: There is a subset of the US population that is highly knowledgeable about their health, and proactive in seeking out answers and solutions such as at-home blood testing. These users obviously need little convincing, and they become your biggest evangelists.

• Army: Most units in the Army spend the majority of their time attempting to get their soldiers trained up to proficiency on existing equipment and tasks. Soldiers rarely if ever consider new equipment or processes, excluding innovation solutions like the Airborne Innovation Lab at the 82nd Airborne Division. Army Futures Command is focused on “providing research, engineering and analytical expertise to deliver capabilities that enable the Army to deter and, when necessary, decisively defeat any adversary now and in the future.” With Futures Command, product development is representative of a desire to create a new chess piece. The “need” to develop a new technology is a result of two things:

  • To address a gap exposed by an enemy: When the US commenced Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) the Humvee protected itself and those inside from shrapnel and small arms fire. It was preferred over tracked vehicles that had more armor given its mobility and speed. Yet the Humvee saw itself at the will of roadside IEDs and RPG fires, a scenario it was ill-equipped for. This led to the initial use of improvised vehicle armor, colloquially known as “hillbilly armor”, while units awaited a formal solution (see below).

    

    OIF began on March 19th, 2023 and by November the Department of the Army had received urgent requests from the CENTCOM Commander for a formal solution. The solution was the M1114 HMMWV which met armored requirements. By September 2004, the Army had estimated it needed 8,105 of these vehicles. Production at the time had only been ramped up to 400 of the vehicles per month, up from a peacetime production of 50 per month. The Army doesn’t get the benefit of any flywheels. Increased demand didn’t drive down vehicle costs, unlock better contract terms, or allow manufacturing expansion. The increased demand meant American lives were at risk, not a burgeoning business model. Customers, in this case, soldiers, indeed couldn’t wait to get their hands on this new product.

  • To address a gap theoretically posed by a likely enemy: Given the growing threat of China, a long-range fires program is a top priority for Futures Command. The wars of the past 20 years haven’t necessitated fires capacity exceeding hundreds of kilometers, but given the geographical expanse and capabilities of the Chinese, a deep fires program is necessary. One of the most common pieces of artillery used in Afghanistan was the M777 Howitzer, which has a maximum range of 18 kilometers for standard projectiles. The US now employs the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon, which could theoretically reach the eastern shore of China with a range of 2,250 kilometers. This weapon fits the needs of a near-peer enemy. Will it ever be used? Who knows, but maybe the quantification of its success is not like an Armored Humvee for which demand could never be met. Rather success could simply be deterrence, in which its very presence in one Battalion is enough to ensure it’ll never have to be fired, which might be a feature of the product given each missile costs $40 million dollars.

    

How a low margin of error informs development life cycles

• SiPhox Health: With our at-home testing device, we deliver crucial blood tests to our users. There's no room for guesswork. You can’t (both logically and legally) hand users your best effort at blood tests. Yet the miniaturization of the device and FDA approval takes years. So how do you participate in the blood-testing market without being on the sidelines for years? SiPhox Health currently ships at-home kits that use ADX Card technology. While not delivering your cholesterol levels in 15 minutes, we are still enabling low-cost, fast access to your biomarker data. This also does SiPhox Health a service, as we grow a customer base for the device that will be rolling out over the next year.

• Army: Much like delivering inaccurate results is unacceptable, delivering subpar, misguided, or useless equipment to our troops is not tolerated. There are entire jobs, units, and budgets devoted to the acquisition process in the Army. You might even spend weeks like myself discovering new websites and directorates soliciting ideas on behalf of the Department of Defense for enhancing our ability to fight wars. The US Army Operational Test Command is “the only independent operational test organization” that is “responsible for ensuring each piece of equipment is operationally tested before being placed in the hands of Warfighters”. Futures Command has an Army to answer to. Futures Command does not get to build what it thinks would be cool and have the OTC try it out. It is not a blank check organization that the Army created to potentially yield something asymmetric. It’s not a VC taking a chance on founders. It is responsible for creating the Army of 2040 and delivering the modernization standards of 2030. The main issue with Futures Command and its development timeline is that they risk delivering solutions to past problems in the present.

While thinking of what to write, it wasn’t lost on me that I was preparing to challenge product development between a < 20-person startup vs. the world's largest military. Yet this cross-sectional seems to be where my itch is the most natural, and not too many people have successfully ventured. The Army doesn’t challenge young Officers to go out and re-think the way the Force is designed and procured. And a biotech startup doesn’t wish that someone on its product team would leave for 3.5 months to learn about moving oil from the US to the front lines. But here I am, a war hobbyist.