How important – and in what ways is it important – for military labs to continue pushing the envelope on “DARPA-hard” research?
It’s important, and we do a fair amount of work for DARPA and their project managers. They fund things where they think there are solutions, not at the basic research level, but above that in high-risk areas where there is an opportunity for success. And it is important to have an organization that does that; it’s kind of like venture capital.
Overall, how dependent is the government – especially the military – on commercial R&D?
We leverage from commercial R&D, staying very much involved with them in terms of the software and products and capabilities they are developing. But a lot of what they do only covers a portion of our requirements, so we work with them or do additional research to expand that capability to fully cover the full scope of our requirements.
In terms of computing power and what they are doing with chips and communications systems, we absolutely have to leverage what they are doing to make ourselves better. And when we put out RFPs in those spaces, those companies bid and we work with them as they develop the products that address our requirements, using their expertise and products where it makes sense to do so.
In a tight economy, R&D sometimes feels a heavier ax than other areas, such as maintenance: What priority do you believe military R&D should have when cost-cutting dominates budget considerations?
With a chaotic and uncertain world, with rapid advances in technology in many different spheres and domains, to be relevant we need to keep our fingers in a lot of different pies, especially those where we have real core competencies, and be knowledgeable about what is going on elsewhere. Otherwise, you run the risk of some capability being developed and you are not ready for it or ready to use it or even develop a countermeasure if it is used against you.
The issue is, we can either plant the seed corn of S&T and continue to fund the scientists and engineers who do that work and push out the state-of-the-art, or we can eat our seed corn for other operational considerations. But when we need it, we won’t have it, and it is hard to grow that again.
I have a lot of scientists and engineers 45 and older and a lot 35 and younger, because we really didn’t hire anybody in the ’90s. If we start letting go of too many of those – junior ones who typically end up leaving and senior ones who retire – we won’t have a next-generation S&T workforce who have been mentored, trained, and educated so we don’t lose a beat and we keep on going. So it is important to look at our intellectual capital and how we preserve and maintain and keep building to it and not potentially go back and try to regrow it again because we lost it. That gets real hard.
The president and SecDef [secretary of defense] have said it is important for us to continue to push those technologies, because what the military develops migrates into the civilian world. For example, GPS was set up for a military application, but now is one of the things the military has developed that has fundamentally changed the way we live our lives.
