where we need to be as a competitive nation. He noted that the report included the first use of the term knowledge capital as a concept for considering human capital and how we train future leaders in STEM.
The offshore outsourcing of technical R&D is cause for concern, according to Lemnios. General Electric (GE), for example, has moved most of its research overseas. Four of the top-10 patenting companies are overseas, and the United States has lost its position in test scores. Globalization of R&D, from basic to applied, amounts to roughly $1.2 trillion, of which about one-third resides in United States, with another third being in Asia. Of the $400 billion in the United States, he continued, half is accounted for by industry, and so DOD leverage is very small. He noted that DOD is the consumer and needs to leverage its suppliers. Noting that another trend is the shift in alliances and the shift in R&D funding leadership, he asked how DOD can put forward a strategy to maintain U.S. leadership.
Lemnios noted that across DOD there are laboratories, basic research, and independent research and development (IRAD, performed by the contractor base) comprising an enormous enterprise of innovators. There are areas in which it will be of great importance to develop new capabilities but also core competencies for enduring capabilities. The 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) identified S&T priorities that are vectoring DOD to where it needs these core competencies. The challenge will be to align these elements to build these disciplines, including those in the industrial base. Then, he noted, there is still the question of how to transition these ideas from a laboratory or a small business to one that allows DOD to develop these capabilities.
Lemnios then described the system of 62 DOD laboratories with 60,000 people employed and with operating budgets of about $2 billion; another $1 billion in research funding goes to academia. Further, there is a connection with industry’s IRAD that totals about $4 billion from DOD, but the connection is mainly through advanced development or pre-production. The federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs) and university affiliated research centers (UARCs) provide surge capacity in S&T areas where DOD does not have insight. The purpose of all of this, he said, is to build an S&T enterprise for DOD that operates across these lanes rather than in the traditional “pillars of excellence.”
Next, Lemnios turned to a discussion of what is referred to as the S&T priorities memorandum2 and of how these priorities were developed. DOD considered the architectures identified in the QDR and critical capabilities vis-à-vis the invented technology base and asked whether and how it could support these architectures and capabilities. Lemnios discussed force multipliers that could address these, including data-to-decisions capability, autonomy (i.e., autonomous systems that reliably and safely accomplish complex tasks), engineered resilient systems, and human systems—areas for which there are pockets of research in the industrial base but for which developing a technical discipline will take some time. He then discussed two of three listed complex threat areas:3 (1) Regarding electronic warfare, he noted that in the past this had been a hot-topic area. He described how he had gone to graduate school supported by Hewlett Packard (HP) in the then-emerging area of radio-frequency engineering. Noting the continued evolution in this field, he asked what electronic warfare might look like in 10 or 15 years and whether a new training ground would not be needed. (2) On cyber science and technology, Lemnios observed that this is talked about all the time in the Pentagon, but the way in which new concepts in cyber science and technology are built and the way in which cyber systems are validated are not well understood. He stressed the difficulty of building a technical discipline around secure networks and of handling massive amounts of data in unstructured environments.
Lemnios then discussed the high-interest basic science areas that are orthogonal to the priority S&T areas, and which include synthetic biology, engineered materials, quantum systems, modeling of human behavior, cognitive neuroscience, and nano-science and -engineering. He described the evolution of this list: Robin Staffin4 led a set of meetings at colleges to look at what the emerging fields are. Lemnios noted that part of the challenge to the NRC committee will be to identify those areas to which ASD(R&E) should pay attention over the next decade.
Lemnios then discussed the STEM-related programs underway in ASD(R&E). These encompass K-12 students, undergraduate and graduate students, and more than 23,000 teachers and 300 faculty. He said that ASD(R&E)
2Secretary of Defense William Gates. April 19, 2011. Memorandum for Secretaries of the Military Departments; Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics; Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering; Directors of the Defense Agencies: Science and Technology (S&T) Priorities for Fiscal Years 2013-2017 Planning. Washington, D.C.
3The third such area is counter weapons of mass destruction.
4Director of Basic Research, ASD(R&E).