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rESEARCH & dEVELOPMENT - ANALYSIS
November 2007
Defense Department Should Refocus Technology Spending, Experts Warn
By Sandra I. Erwin
 The Pentagon’s research and development budget has never been bigger. Despite such largesse, investments in technology tend to miss the mark and do little to enhance the United States’ competitive standing as a high-tech powerhouse, said Pentagon advisors and outside analysts.
Defense research and development budgets will exceed $80 billion in fiscal year 2008, of which about $12 billion will be allocated to long-term science and technology projects. Most of the funds pay for so-called “applied research” for near-term needs — including modifications of existing weapon systems and war-related projects such as technologies to help troops detect and disarm roadside bombs.
But despite a steady rise in R&D spending, the Defense Department has not been able to replicate the technological success witnessed during the Cold War, when the Pentagon delivered a string of breakthrough technologies that, to this day, continue to provide military forces major advantages, such as unmanned aircraft, cruise missiles, stealth and Global Positioning System satellites.
The problem today appears to be a “lack of strategic direction,” said an April 2007 report by the Defense Science Board, a senior-level advisory panel.
“The Defense Department science and technology programs are not well positioned to meet the nation’s strategic challenges,” the panel wrote. Further, the Pentagon “needs to understand the technological possibilities available to the United States and the options available to adversaries.”
R&D funding priorities come under particularly tough criticism from the science board. The panel carps repeatedly about the Defense Department cutting science and technology budgets and shifting funds to applied research and other accounts. While these financial maneuvers may help pay for immediate needs, they undermine long-term U.S. strategic goals, the DSB said. “In recent years, there has been a shift in Defense Department R&D from research into development.”
During the past 40 years, the panel said, “The resources devoted to basic research have been cut in half, as a percentage of Defense Department science and technology (S&T) funding, from 25 to 12 percent.”
As a result, in many science and technology fields, the Defense Department no longer leads the world. According to the DSB, among G-8 nations, 50 percent of S&T investments are made outside the United States, 36.5 percent by U.S. commercial firms, 7 percent by other U.S. government agencies and 6.5 percent by the Defense Department.
“Currently only about half of the world’s investment in R&D is performed in the United States and this percentage is getting smaller,” the DSB report said. Approximately 27 percent of U.S. research and development is funded by the federal government and less than half of that is funded by the Defense Department. Overall, federal R&D dollars have been flat for 30 years and have decreased from a 1997 peak.
Given its diminishing clout as a developer of advanced technology, the Pentagon must learn how to take advantage of what other organizations provide, the DSB said. “If the Defense Department wants to be a leader in using technology, it needs to become very adept at finding and using globally available resources, whether funded by industry or academia or other government agencies.”
The warnings of the Defense Science Board also were echoed by Navy Secretary Donald C. Winter in a recent speech at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s technology symposium in Anaheim, Calif.
But Winter also cautioned that a techno-centric view of the world is not helpful in the context of current wars.
“America’s technological superiority has thus far not proven decisive in this war,” Winter said. “Because of the stark differences in literacy rates, in economic development, and in technological advances between those seen in the West and the rest, we have a tendency to underestimate the ability of the enemy — whether a country or a non-state actor — to use technology.”
The 9/11 attacks and the roadside bombs that target U.S. troops in Iraq, for example, were not technology surprises, he said. “Rather, they were unanticipated tactics and uses of technology, not unlike the use of kamikaze pilots in World War II.”
In the near term, Winter said, “We need to defeat this enemy’s ability to make tactical use of technology to strategic effect.”
The U.S. military also must consider that future adversaries will have access to militarily useful technology as readily as Americans do, he added. The harsh reality, said Winter, “is that the most technologically advanced country in the world is finding that its technological edge is not always a decisive advantage.”
That advantage has been eroded by those who are not competitive in technology development, but who are focused on the application and employment of technology, he said. “The playing field has thus been leveled, and technological differentiation takes on a new context in today’s world … Technology may not always be a decisive differentiator for us, at least in the war on terrorist enemies.”
The Defense Department also has a responsibility to plan for the long term, said Kei Koizumi, director of the R&D budget and policy program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. As the government’s largest recipient of R&D dollars — accounting for more than half of the $142.7 billion federal R&D portfolio — the Pentagon should do a better job investing in technologies that can produce lasting benefits to the nation, Koizumi said in an interview.
“They are not swayed by national competitiveness and innovation,” he noted. “In the current environment, long-term S&T investments are a tough sell … Even as the Defense Department budget is increasing by leaps and bounds, the S&T is shrinking.”
The funding for S&T would fall to $12.6 billion in fiscal year 2008 — a dramatic drop of 9.7 percent. About $1.5 billion of that amount is allocated to “earmarks,” or congressionally mandated projects.
“For every year this decade, Congress has been far more supportive of S&T funding than the Pentagon,” Koizumi said. In what has now become an annual ritual, the Pentagon proposes sharp cuts each year and Congress adds billions of dollars in the appropriations process. Last year, the Pentagon requested a 19 percent cut in S&T, but Congress ended up appropriating just a 1 percent cut, primarily, but not entirely through the addition of earmarks, he noted. The 2008 appropriations season looks to be the same, though the Pentagon’s requested cut is so steep that Congress may not be able to bring S&T funding back to 2007 funding levels in its 2008 appropriations.
Advocates of defense S&T in the science and engineering community claim that the funding is essential for building the knowledge and technology base for future military needs, said Koizumi.
The largest increase among Defense Department basic research projects would go to the fledgling National Defense Education Program, more than doubling from $19 million this year to $44 million in 2008.
But the clear winners in the 2008 R&D budget are the Air Force’s weapons development programs. Weapons development (the non-S&T portion of defense R&D) would increase $722 million, entirely due to an enormous increase in Air Force R&D to an unprecedented $26.2 billion (up 6.7 percent) — a total likely to go even higher when 2008 war supplemental appropriations are added, said Koizumi. The Air Force increase would go to engineering, development, and testing work on specific weapons systems. By contrast, Navy R&D would fall sharply and Army R&D would increase slightly. The Joint Strike Fighter would receive $4.2 billion for continued development, which would be split between the Air Force and the Navy, to remain the largest single development project. The suite of Army programs known as the Future Combat Systems would receive $3.2 billion for development.
R&D in the defense agencies would fall $1.2 billion, or 5.7 percent, to $20.7 billion. The technology-focused Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency would see its budget fall 2.5 percent to $3 billion, partly as a result of congressional frustration that DARPA has been unable to spend all of its past budgets, Koizumi said. “There is growing congressional dissatisfaction with how DARPA manages its spending, and how it reports how it spends its money,” he said. “The process is broken. Money from previous years hasn’t been obligated. Congress says they don’t need new money.”
Congress plans to increase the budget of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency by 2.4 percent to $467 million. The Chemical and Biological Defense Program is another relatively research-oriented office with a $1.1 billion budget, which is gaining an increase of 17 percent.
Among the defense organizations, the Missile Defense Agency remains the largest, with a budget of $8.5 billion, down $883 million from 2007 because of congressional concerns about unrealistic missile defense deployment schedules. Koizumi said that MDA no longer funds research and is a development-oriented agency with almost all of its funding in the engineering and development category.
Tracking defense R&D expenditures has become increasingly more difficult, said Koizumi. That conclusion also was shared by the Government Accountability Office, in a September 2007 report, titled “Department of Defense Research and Development Budget Requests to Congress Do Not Provide Consistent, Complete, and Clear Information.”
This report, said Koizumi, “only confirms what a lot of us have noticed for years — the Defense Department R&D budget is hard to understand.” The Pentagon releases thousands of pages of information, but the information is coded in ways that make it hard to track categories of spending, he noted. There are questions, for example, as to how exactly the Defense Department classifies basic research. One reason for that is poor congressional oversight, Koizumi said.
GAO reviewed the Defense Department’s $73.2 billion R&D budget, which included more than 1,000 projects. The code structure and the budget exhibits failed to provide “accurate, clear, and complete information on the nature of the proposed research and development efforts,” concluded GAO. “We found that the Department of Defense budget exhibits were difficult to understand, frequently lacked information about the accomplishments and planned efforts of each project, lacked appropriate cross-references between efforts, and were frequently missing key schedule data.”
One major problem is that one-third of all R&D projects are associated with weapons systems that already have been fielded or approved for production, but the budget does not identify them as such. Defense regulations do not require the coding to be updated from one year to the next to ensure the correct stage of development has been accurately identified, said GAO. “Current reporting policies and practices for justifying R&D requests to Congress could be improved to provide more useful information to decision makers and to strengthen accountability for performance.”
Please email your comments to SErwin@ndia.org
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