Every year, the United States Department of Defense (DoD) allocates billions of dollars and millions of training hours to equipment and personnel readiness. Personal and equipment readiness refer to the various tasks and checkpoints that U.S. military forces are expected to have prepared and passed at any given moment. Personal readiness includes job-specific training, medical clearances, recruitment targets and compliance requirements. Equipment readiness requires experienced maintainers as well as knowledge and assessment of equipment age and condition. Personal and equipment readiness together determine how effectively and quickly United States forces could respond if needed.
If all of that sounds like a headache to keep track of across all the personnel and equipment funded by the military’s $146 billion annual budget, that’s because it is. An incredible amount of time, energy and money is spent trying to keep everything and everyone ready to go at a moment’s notice.
“Anyone who has worked in a professional environment understands the struggle of trying to meet your mandatory training requirements while completing your usual duties, and that problem is only exacerbated in the military, where missing training credentials creates a massive readiness issue,” said Max Weintraub, senior program manager at the National Security Innovation Network (NSIN).
Now, a startup created by a trio of Duke graduates is trying to solve these problems with the help of AI. Called “EZTrain,” the company has secured a series of startup grants from the DoD worth $125,000 and is poised to become a regular feature across several branches of the military.
But it all started with a single applied entrepreneurship class held by Duke Engineering in 2020. Called “Mission Driven Startups,” the class is part of a national program called “Hacking for Defense” that is sponsored by NSIN. The program assigns DoD problems to universities across the country and challenges them to use “Lean Startup” methodology to develop solutions.
The founders of EZTrain—Luke Sommer (Public Policy ‘21), Roberto Medrano (Public Policy ‘21) and Thomas Chemmanoor (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science ‘22)—were first approached by the Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro, North Carolina. The problem that the team was given to tackle was Air Force training inefficiency.
“What the DoD needs is tools that more efficiently leverage their time and money investment, and that’s where EZTrain comes in. We’re here to save them time and money and make sure that their operations are as efficient as possible.”Roberto Medrano
Duke Public Policy ’21
Over the course of the semester, the EZTrain team conducted hundreds of interviews and visited the base multiple times to nail down the cause of this training inefficiency and readiness crisis.
“Through our interviews and time spent on the base, we found that up to a third of these training sessions were unutilized because people didn’t have clear instructions and there weren’t formal communication streams,” Sommer said. “A lot of the technology to support readiness management was completely outdated, so that was the root cause of a lot of the issues that we found.”
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