Jeff Decker

This year marks the ten-year anniversary of Hacking for Defense, a bold national experiment in education that has become a durable movement. What began as a single course has grown into a cross-country network of universities, instructors, and student teams, all united by a shared mission: to tackle urgent national security problems with the speed, discipline, and creativity typically found in the private sector.

At the center of that movement is a growing community of educators shaping its future. Jeff Decker is one of them.

Jeff joined the H4D effort in 2016, shortly after the inaugural class. A former Army Ranger turned academic, he brought operational insight and a conviction that real-world defense innovation could be taught in the classroom. Today, as Educational Director of the Common Mission Project, Jeff leads CMP’s national educator programming strategy and curriculum design. His mandate is clear: make the course more rigorous, more scalable, and more transformative, for students, educators, and government sponsors alike.

Over the past eight years, Jeff has seen a powerful pattern emerge. Students often enter the classroom with misconceptions about public service. They assume government is too slow or too complex to be part of serious innovation. But over the course of the semester, as they interview stakeholders, test assumptions, and refine their understanding of real defense problems, something shifts. They learn a structured, repeatable process for making sense of ambiguity. And they begin to see public impact not as an abstraction, but as something they can help create.

Many choose to keep going. Roughly half of H4D alumni move into defense-adjacent careers, whether in startups, venture, research, or federal service. Others leave with a sharpened sense of how to build for problems that actually matter. Not every team launches a solution. But every student walks away with an experience few of their peers ever get: the chance to look under the hood of the national security enterprise and contribute to it.

CMP is proud to launch this series of educator profiles in celebration of the program’s ten-year anniversary. Because after a decade of growth, one thing is clear: H4D is no longer just a class. It’s a movement. And it’s being built by educators like Jeff Decker.

Jeff is also the author of The Hacking for Defense Manual: Solving National Security Problems with the Lean Methodology, a guide for applying entrepreneurial rigor to some of the most complex and consequential challenges in the world with clarity, speed, and purpose.