The war on terrorism—with its emphasis on laser-guided munitions,
unmanned vehicles and satellite communications—highlights
a need for in-creased funds for research and development of new
defense-related technologies, according to Pentagon officials.
The Bush administration has requested $53.9 billion for Defense
Department research, development, test and evaluation programs in
fiscal year 2003, said Robert W. Baker, deputy director of the department’s
science and technology programs. That is a $5.5 billion increase
over 2002—a nearly 10 percent jump—he told the 2002
Science & Engineering Technology Conference, in Charleston,
S.C., organized by the National Defense Industrial Association.
The RDT&E request is part of a total proposed defense budget
of $379 billion in 2003. That is an increase of $48 billion, or
12 percent over 2002, officials said.
The plus-up for RDT&E is intended to support the priorities
established by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Navy Rear Adm. Stanley
R. Szemborski, deputy director for force structure, resources and
assessment (J-8) for the Joint Staff. The surprise attacks of September
11 forced the chiefs to reshape those priorities, he told the conferees.
The new list, he said, includes winning the global war on terrorism,
improving the joint warfighting capabilities of the armed forces
and transforming those forces, so that they are ready to face future
challenges.
The anti-terror campaign is “a new kind of war,’”
with diplomatic, financial, intelligence and law enforcement aspects,
Szemborski said. “Even the Internal Revenue Service is involved,”
he said. “Thankfully, they’re on our side.”
The involvement of all of these players “requires a greater
level of interagency coordination than ever before,” Szemborski
noted. The United States is working to improve military and interagency
collaboration, but he confessed: “We have a problem with interoperability.
There’s not enough money in the world to make everything interoperable,
but we don’t have to do that.”
“We must foster a climate of innovation and change,”
he said. “We need to build a process and organization capable
of rapidly infusing currently unknown changes into the entire force
as effortlessly as possible,” he added.
With this in mind, he said, the department is establishing “standing
joint-force headquarters within the offices of each of the five
unified commanders in chiefs, or CINCs. The U.S. Joint Forces Command,
in Norfolk, Va., stood up the first of these SJFHQs in February.
These new units—to be made up of 55 planners, operations experts
and communications specialists—are supposed to do the advance
planning and training necessary to form larger joint task forces
to handle rapidly developing crises.
The SJFHQs are meant to develop relationships with academic, industrial
and government centers of excellence, collaborating with them during
crises and pulling their specialized knowledge into the CINC’s
planning process, Szemborski said.
Promising Concepts
The department’s research and development program is designed
to develop new technologies that will give the services “revolutionary
war-winning capabilities,” said Baker. Recent examples, he
said, included stealth, night vision, global positioning systems,
adaptive optics and lasers, and phased array radar.
Of the $53.9 billion proposed for defense RDT&E in 2003, $9.9
billion—or 19 percent of the total—would go to the Pentagon’s
science and technology programs, which conduct basic and applied
research into promising concepts.
S&T funding reached about the same level in the early 1990s,
Walter E. Morrow Jr., director emeritus of MIT Lincoln Laboratory,
told a congressional hearing. “By 1998, the proposed funding
had decreased to $7.4 billion,” he said.
A study by the Defense Science Board found that typical high-technology
companies devoted about 3.3 percent of their revenue to research,
Morrow said. If U.S. military forces are to maintain their current
technical advantage, a minimum of 3 percent of the Pentagon budget
should go to S&T, Morrow said.
The Bush administration has set a goal for doing just that. Thus
far, Pentagon officials conceded, they haven’t been able to
meet that goal. But they are getting closer, Defense Undersecretary
and Controller Dov Zakheim told the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The administration’s S&T request, $9.9 billion, is about
2.68 percent of the total of $379 billion proposed for defense in
2003.
That is a slightly higher percentage than the administration sought
last year, Zakheim said. “A year ago, we were at 2.65 percent,”
he explained. “So we are headed towards the 3 percent goal.
We are maintaining that goal, even though the baseline is larger.”
Some scientists are hoping that Congress will increase the S&T
budget beyond the administration’s request, as it has in the
past. Last year, for example, the administration “asked for
$9 billion, and we got $10 billion,” Baker told the conference.
If defense S&T received only the amount recommended by the
administration, that would represent “zero percent growth”
over last year’s congressional appropriation, Baker said.
At least, that would mean stability for S&T funding, he said.
“It’s very important to maintain stability in S&T
funding,” Baker said. When funding increases, he explained,
the laboratories hire new people and add facilities. “If you
don’t keep funding at that level, all of that effort is wasted,”
he said. “So far, this administration has said we are going
to grow S&T, because we need the technology.”
The department’s Basic Research Plan guides work in 10 broad
areas, Baker explained. These include physics, chemistry, mathematics
and computer science, electronics, materials science, mechanics,
terrestrial and ocean sciences, atmospheric and space sciences,
biological sciences, and cognitive and neural sciences.
The research is arrayed in a detailed Defense Technology Area Plan
that focuses on 12 “militarily significant” categories,
Baker said. These are air platforms, chemical and biological defense,
nuclear technology, information systems, materials and processes,
weapons, biomedical systems, battlespace environments, sensors,
electronic warfare, space platforms, human systems, and ground and
sea vehicles.
The DTAP tracks research for each of these areas throughout all
of the services and defense agencies, blending emerging technologies
into a Joint Warfighting S&T Plan to meet combat needs, Baker
said. As an example, for Military Operations in Urban Terrain, he
said, this plan helped develop:
Some projects take longer than others, officials said. For example,
Baker said, the department has been trying for years to reduce the
cost of space operations—with little success. “It still
costs as much to put a pound of material into space as it did back
in the Challenger era,” he said. “We haven’t made
a lot of progress in that area.”
Rapid Fielding
Other projects are fielded much more rapidly, said Ronald M. Sega,
director of Defense Research and Engineering. As an example, Sega—a
retired Air Force major general and shuttle astronaut—cited
the thermobaric weapons first introduced during the war in Afghanistan.
These laser-guided bombs are designed to suck the air from the kinds
of deep caves and tunnels favored by al Qaeda and Taliban troops.
“The thermobaric weapons ACTD (Advanced Concept Technology
Development) program was approved on September 21,” Sega said.
“The weapon was flight tested on December 14. It went from
chemistry to weapon in three months.” It was put to use immediately
against enemy complexes in Tora Bora.
It’s important for the Pentagon research program to have
“a balance between projects that can be fielded immediately
and those that will take a long time to develop,” Sega said.
In deciding whether a program can be speeded up, Sega said, “we
have to ask does it work? Does it work in an operational context?
We may find out that a program works just fine, but it doesn’t
have that much military utility.”
The September 11 attacks have increased pressure on the Army to
speed up its transformation, said Jerry Chapin, deputy director
of that service’s Objective Force Task Force, which is guiding
Army efforts to become lighter and more mobile. “We’re
still going to do pretty much what we planned to do, but we’re
going to have to do it quicker,” he told the conferees.
A lot of people say that the Army’s transformation plan “is
too much to do,” said Michael Andrews II, deputy assistant
secretary of the Army for research and technology. “The point
is: We must. We cannot fail.”
The Navy, meanwhile, is “not quite as far along as the Army
on transformation,” conceded Capt. David M. Schubert, assistant
chief of naval research. One of the reasons, he said, is a “technology
valley of death” that the Navy is trying to bridge. There
is a time gap between the expiration of S&T funding provided
by the Office of Naval Research and the availability of money for
R&D during the acquisition process, Schubert said.
“When the Navy doesn’t have the money to buy a technology,
it goes on a shelf, and it starts to gather dust,” he said.
To get around this problem, he said, “we’re going to
fund longer and ask the acquisition people to buy earlier.”
To kick start Navy transformation, Schubert said, the chief of
naval research is focusing on a handful of initiatives, including
electric warships and directed energy weapons, high-speed littoral
vessels, a revolution in training, a hypersonic strike weapon, unmanned
combat air vehicles, Navy utilization of space and force protection.
The Air Force is emphasizing a balanced program, according to Donald
C. Daniel, deputy assistant Air Force secretary for science, technology
and engineering. “I’m very keen on maintaining a portfolio
balance—15 percent basic research, 50 percent applied research
and 35 percent advanced technology development,” he explained.
Air Force S&T efforts involve 22 program elements, with thousands
of individual projects, said Daniel. The work is conducted by “highly
leveraged formal and informal partnerships and alliances,”
he explained. “Much of it is long-term in nature, with no
guarantee of success.”
The Air Force’s most immediate S&T objectives, Daniel
said, are improved target location, identification and tracking;
command, control, communications, computers and intelligence; precision
attack; access to space; aircraft survivability; sustaining aging
systems, and support for the new air expeditionary forces.
The service also plans to step up its work with NASA and the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency, Daniel noted. “We want
to do more with NASA than we’re doing right now,” he
said. “And, DARPA, we love you. We’ll love you more,
if you’ll love us more.”
For its part, DARPA is looking for projects that will encourage
“radical technological innovation,” said the agency’s
deputy director, Jane A. Alexander. “What we want to know
is does this change the equation?”
DARPA’s mission, she explained, is to find technical solutions
to national-level problems.
For example, DARPA recently created two new offices. One unit is
seeking to improve the informational awareness of U.S. combat forces.
It is looking into ways to pull all available informational sources
into models to discover the intent of opponents, Alexander said.
“Given this data, what is likely to happen? What are the options?”
The other office is focused on information exploitation. “It
is concentrating on improving “the kill chain,” Alexander
said. It is trying to create a “persistent flow of actionable
information from the sensor to the shooter,” she said. “It’s
not enough to have battlefield awareness, if you can’t kill
the target.”