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Stanford Business magazine

 

Entrepreneurs

Voluntary Tech Support for Troops in Iraq

By Janet Zich

One is an energy trader for Goldman Sachs in New York City, the other is managing director of Envest Partners, an environment and energy investment firm in Los Angeles. The two Business School alumni have never met, but they joined forces long distance over a volunteer project in Iraq.

Last year Marine Major Owen West, MBA ’98, while on leave from Goldman Sachs, was stationed in Iraq’s Anbar Province, where he led a transition team that was helping to outfit and train an Iraqi Army battalion nicknamed “Snake Eater.” West had a problem. “Everyone knows when you’re fighting a counterinsurgency you need a census, some way to identify those who do not wear uniforms,” West said. He wanted his Snake Eaters to know their enemy.

West knew of a nonprofit in the United States that might be able to help. Spirit of America, founded and run by Jim Hake, MBA ’83 [see Stanford Business, May 2004], helps Americans, both military and civilian, assist people in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Horn of Africa. West had used SOA’s services before, most recently to get winter clothing for residents of an Iraqi village. Last December he asked for a portable fingerprinting device for Iraqi soldiers to carry that would allow them to upload fingerprints into a database of insurgents’ biometrics back at headquarters, something modeled on an identification system used by the Chicago Police Department.

Spirit of America found a small electronics company that would build a prototype (dubbed “the Snake Eater,” of course). Goldman Sachs donated $14,000 and Spirit of America contributed $30,000 for the project. In a matter of weeks, Spirit of America was able to deliver a package containing a PDA capable of recording fingerprints, along with a laptop to upload the information back in the troops’ Humvee and another for headquarters. The computers were loaded with a version of Coplink, a software communication and database system originally developed for law enforcement and border surveillance. Finally, Hake found a volunteer, Bill Roggio, to hand carry the Snake Eater to Iraq in time for West to test it before finishing his tour in February.

Roggio went along on the first test and noted an unintended psychological effect. “Several of the young men who were stopped and had their data gathered were clearly nervous about the device,” he wrote in his blog. “They knew their fingerprints and pictures were being taken and stored. Despite Anbar being a backwater of Iraq, the people still understand technology and modern policing. I’ve seen CSI on TVs in homes during raids,” he added.

West returned home in early March. This had been his third tour as a Marine and his second in Iraq. After six years’ service in the 1990s, he re-upped for Operation Iraqi Freedom One in 2003. “My first son was born when I was over there,” he said, “and I promised that that was the last time. And then of course it begins to wear you down when you’re just sitting in front of a computer and you know lots of people over there fighting,” and so he went back last year. West sees Iraq as no more than a battle in a long, ongoing war. “We’ve made a lot of mistakes, but I think this is really early in a conflict we—and, unfortunately, my boys—will face.”

In one sense, the Snake Eater represents what’s going wrong with the American military effort. Although the prototype worked fine (there are two devices in Iraq now), “each unit is doing its own little census and nothing is tied together,” West said. But, he added, on the positive side, the Snake Eater demonstrates the quick and effective support of organizations like Hake’s Spirit of America. “It shows that America, even though it’s not mobilized, has many people who care and want to do their part. Entrepreneurs like Jim give one outlet. If the leadership were to establish more things like this, I think we would all be bolstered.