DARPA Concerned About Its Image
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is stepping up its public relations
efforts to communicate better to the public the nature of the work being done
at the agency, said DARPA’s director Anthony Tether.
DARPA has lots of talented scientists and inventors, Tether told reporters.
The problem is that they only talk to other “techies” and not to
the public, let alone the Congress, he said.
They tend to come up with names for projects that “are cute,” said
Tether, but to an outsider, “if you have a concern over the Patriot Act
or stuff like that, [it] could scare you.”
A case in point is a project initially entitled “Cities That See.”
It was designed to collect images from multiple cameras in various locations
and build a database that would help track vehicles, for example.
“If we had this technology today, we would have it in Iraq,” to
help track car bombings, said Tether.
But these technologies are not well received in the United States, because
they are perceived as infringing on personal freedoms.
“That wasn’t obviously our intent,” Tether said. “By
naming the damn thing ‘Cities That See,’ we kind of helped people
who wanted to see it in that way.”
Based on that experience, DARPA proceeded to change the project’s name
to “Combat Zones That See,” said Tether. “We are really trying
to be much more careful about how we describe these projects, that we don’t
instantly put the wrong message on them,” he said.
Other programs that became public relations nightmares for DARPA were the “Total
Information Awareness,” a now-defunct program to detect, classify, identify,
and track terrorists, and a futures-trading Web site designed to predict terrorist
attacks, among other things.
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Can the Pentagon Protect Intellectual Property Rights?
The military services will keep struggling with the “interoperability”
of their weapon systems unless the Pentagon can figure out how to deal with
the intellectual property rights of defense contractors, said Marine Lt. Gen.
James Cartwright, Joint Staff director for force structure, resources and assessment.
The Pentagon’s “network-centric” model for future warfare
is incompatible with the need for companies to protect their technologies from
piracy, Cartwright told a conference of the Institute for Defense and Government
Advancement.
The so-called “Napster” debate over the property rights of recording
artists is a comparable situation to what the Defense Department faces today,
he said. “I am watching very closely the music industry, with great interest.”
The Pentagon ideally would like to tell defense contractors to hand over their
applications and algorithms, so the services could employ the same technology
Defense Department-wide, Cartwright said. But that is not possible today. “The
policy, the law, isn’t quite right yet.”
Ultimately, “I think you have to get at that issue culturally. How do
you protect and give value to what industry will provide in this very fuzed
environment?”
In years past, he said, the push has been to eliminate military specifications
in the development of software. The problem is that, “in the direction
we are heading, specs will be minor in comparison to the demands that we will
put on systems for interoperability, the demands we will put on industry for
interoperability. … It appears that industry is heading in a direction
that is going to answer those questions before we have to.”
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Training Iraqi Army Is a ‘Wild Card’
Contractors in charge of training the Iraqi Army are not sure what to expect
from day to day, given the changing environment. The project can be best described
as a “real wild card,” said Don Winter, vice president of Northrop
Grumman.
“It seem to me that we are still evolving our strategy there,”
he told reporters. Vinnell Corporation, a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman, was
awarded a $48 million contract to train selected Iraqi Army units.
Vinnell’s experience includes training the Saudi Arabian National Guard
for more than 25 years. “It is not just setting up the force, but it is
also providing continuous exercise and support and training activities,”
Winter said.
Winter said he does not know how the training of the new Iraqi Army is going
to evolve. There is an influx of inputs on how to do this job, including talks
of bringing coalition forces on board. “We are are putting a lot of effort
[into] getting the right people,” he said.
The goal is to have the Iraqi Army “take over most of the security functions,”
Winter said. The first unit that enlisted for the Vinnell training program is
a light-infantry division. The training has to be completed within a year.
Vinnell’s subcontractors are MPRI, Alexandria, Va.; SAIC, San Diego;
Eagle Group International, Atlanta, Ga.; Omega Training Group, Columbus, Ga.
and Worldwide Language Resources, Inc, Rumford, Maine.