Nicole Camarillo was touring the Army base at Fort Meade, Maryland, in early 2017 when a young captain—I’ll call him Matt, due to the sensitivity of his position—crossed her path.

I’ve got to talk to that kid, Camarillo remembers thinking. Just weeks before, she’d seen Matt deliver a presentation on a tool he was developing to counter enemy drone strikes in the Middle East. The technology, he explained, was being developed on a “shoestring budget.”

That caught Camarillo’s attention. As executive director of talent strategy at the US Army Cyber Command, a relatively new branch of the Army, Camarillo’s job is to persuade top employees in Silicon Valley that they should sacrifice their stock options and six-figure salaries and apply their technological know-how in the Army instead. The idea that someone with Matt’s skills was scrounging to develop tools that could mean life or death for soldiers hardly boded well for her program.

Camarillo approached Matt and offered to help. She asked him to tell her about the hurdles he encountered trying to develop technology for the Army. Matt decided to show her instead. He led Camarillo to a converted barracks where he and his team had created a makeshift workshop. In an old shower, they’d set up a battery fire, which they used to solder metal for hardware parts. Because the security restrictions on government-issued computers prevented them from coding, they’d purchased replacement parts and were building their own computers. These hacks helped them circumvent the costly, time-consuming military-acquisitions process that would have slowed their progress for months or even years.

The whole scene reminded Camarillo of the storied garages where Apple and Hewlett-Packard began, and there was a certain romance to it all. But Camarillo walked away as inspired as she was concerned. The Army already had plenty of tech talent within its ranks. What they needed was a more nurturing environment.

“The ingenuity of what they were able to do with their existing resources was pretty spectacular,” Camarillo says. “I thought, 'What would happen if we unleashed them and gave them all the resources they needed? What could they do?'”

One year later, that seed of an idea has blossomed into a formal partnership between Army Cyber and the Defense Digital Service, a sort of tech startup inside the Department of Defense. Named Jyn Erso, after the protagonist in Rogue One who teams up with the Rebel Alliance to steal the plans for the Death Star, the new initiative merges the Army’s top technologists with experts from the private sector. Working out of DDS’s office inside the Pentagon, the Jyn Erso team is rapidly developing tools that in some cases the DOD had already spent hundreds of millions of dollars and many years unsuccessfully trying to build.

It’s the flip side of what DDS set out to accomplish when it began in 2015. The goal then was to get geeks from Silicon Valley to take tours of duty in Washington, cut through the morass of military bureaucracy, and build technology that’s actually user-friendly and doesn’t take years to produce. Since its launch, the DDS team has built technology to help service members keep track of their active duty records and even deployed to Afghanistan to redesign an arcane piece of software for NATO.1

In all that time, though, it never occurred to DDS director Chris Lynch that the same level of talent might be found within the military’s ranks. “I thought, 'My team is the best the country has to offer, and that type of talent wouldn’t exist in uniform today,'” says Lynch, who accompanied Camarillo on the Fort Meade tour. “That’s the thing that was wrong.”