SPEAKERS       CONTENTS       INSERTS    
 Page 1       TOP OF DOC
??–???
2001
  
[H.A.S.C. No. 107–4]

HEARINGS

ON

NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT
FOR FISCAL YEAR 2002—H.R. 2586

AND

OVERSIGHT OF PREVIOUSLY AUTHORIZED PROGRAMS

BEFORE THE

COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH CONGRESS

FIRST SESSION

 Page 2       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC
MILITARY RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT SUBCOMMITTEE HEARINGS
ON
TITLE II—RESEARCH, DEVELOPMENT, TEST, AND EVALUATION

HEARING HELD
JUNE 26, 2001

  
  

For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office
Internet: bookstore.gpo.gov  Phone: (202) 512-1800  Fax: (202) 512-2250
Mail: Stop SSOP, Washington, DC 20402-0001

  

MILITARY RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT SUBCOMMITTEE

DUNCAN HUNTER, California, Chairman
VAN HILLEARY, Tennessee
W. TODD AKIN, Missouri
CURT WELDON, Pennsylvania
JIM SAXTON, New Jersey
ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, Maryland
JOHN N. HOSTETTLER, Indiana
 Page 3       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC
SAXBY CHAMBLISS, Georgia
JOE SCARBOROUGH, Florida
WALTER B. JONES, North Carolina
BOB RILEY, Alabama
ROBIN HAYES, North Carolina
KEN CALVERT, California
ANDER CRENSHAW, Florida
ED SCHROCK, Virginia

NEIL ABERCROMBIE, Hawaii
JOHN SPRATT, South Carolina
GENE TAYLOR, Mississippi
MARTY MEEHAN, Massachusetts
SILVESTRE REYES, Texas
THOMAS H. ALLEN, Maine
VIC SNYDER, Arkansas
JIM TURNER, Texas
ADAM SMITH, Washington
LORETTA SANCHEZ, California
ROBERT E. ANDREWS, New Jersey
JOHN B. LARSON, Connecticut
JAMES R. LANGEVIN, Rhode Island

Jean D. Reed, Professional Staff Member
Katherine Gordon, Staff Assistant
 Page 4       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

(ii)  

C O N T E N T S

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF HEARINGS
2001

HEARING:
    Tuesday, June 26, 2001, Fiscal Year 2002 National Defense Authorization Act—Defense Science and Technology Program

APPENDIX:
    Tuesday, June 26, 2001

TUESDAY, JUNE 26, 2001
FISCAL YEAR 2002 NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT—DEFENSE SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY PROGRAM

STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS

    Hunter, Hon. Duncan, a Representative from California, Chairman, Military Research and Development Subcommittee

    Meehan, Hon. Marty, a Representative from Massachusetts, Ranking Member, Military Research and Development Subcommittee
 Page 5       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

WITNESSES

    Aldridge, Hon. Edward C., Under Secretary of Defense, Acquisition, Technology and Logistics; Accompanied by Dr. Delores M. Etter, Deputy Director, Defense Research and Engineering

    Andrews, Dr. A. Michael, II, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Research and Technology and Chief Scientist

    Carroll, Richard W., Chairman of the Small Business Technology Coalition, and Chief Executive Officer, Digital System Resources, Inc.

    Coffey, Dr. Timothy P., Director of Research, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC

    Cohen, Rear Adm. Jay M., Chief of Naval Research, U.S. Navy

    Daniel, Dr. Donald C., Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force (Science, Technology and Engineering), U.S. Air Force

    Morrow, Walter E., Jr., Director Emeritus of MIT Lincoln Laboratory

    Tether, Dr. Anthony, Director, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

 Page 6       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC
APPENDIX

PREPARED STATEMENTS:
[The Prepared Statements submitted can be viewed in the hard copy.]

Aldridge, Hon. Edward C. and Dr. Delores M. Etter

Andrews, Dr. A. Michael, II

Carroll, Richard W.

Coffey, Dr. Timothy P.

Cohen, Rear Adm. Jay M.

Daniel, Dr. Donald C.

Morrow, Walter E., Jr.

Tether, Dr. Anthony

DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
[There were no Documents submitted for the Record.]

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
 Page 7       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC
[The Questions and Answers are pending.]

FISCAL YEAR 2002 NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT—DEFENSE SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY PROGRAM

House of Representatives,
Committee on Armed Services,
Military Research and Development Subcommittee,
Washington, DC, Tuesday, June 26, 2001.

    The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 9:32 a.m., in room 2118, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Duncan Hunter (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. DUNCAN HUNTER, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM CALIFORNIA, CHAIRMAN, MILITARY RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT SUBCOMMITTEE

    Mr. HUNTER. The hearing will come to order.

    Today the Research and Development (R&D) Subcommittee will hear testimony on the status of the Department of Defense science and technology program and the administration's research and development plans and priorities for the future. We are going to discuss with Secretary Aldridge and his team some of the issues faced by the DOD S&T program today and what needs to be done to accelerate the identification, development and transition of advanced technologies we will need to ensure the superiority of our armed forces on the 21st century battlefield.
 Page 8       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    In 1983 then Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger said, ''We face a danger of losing our edge because we have not adequately replenished the reservoir of scientific concepts and knowledge to nourish future technologies during subsequent years of fiscal neglect of defense research and development. Given these circumstances, we must systematically replenish that scientific reservoir using the unique and diverse strength of the United States scientific community. Given the relatively long lead time between fundamental discovery and applying such knowledge to defense systems, the true measure of our success may not be apparent for several decades.

    ''When the moment of truth arrives, we cannot afford to be found wanting. Thus, we must revitalize the productive partnership between the university community, industry and the DOD in-house laboratories.''

    Several issues have confronted previous administrations and the Congress since the end of the Cold War and they still confront this administration and the Congress today. To address these issues, we have called two distinguished panels from government, academia and industry.

    The first panel provides the opportunity for the first appearance between the subcommittee of undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, Pete Aldridge. And, Mr. Secretary, we have had a few discussions here. Thank you for being with us today. We really appreciate your service to the country and what you are going to do this year.

    And we also have today the final appearance of Dr. Delores Etter as deputy undersecretary of defense, science and technology.
 Page 9       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    And thank you for being with us today, Doctor. Dr. Mike Andrews, Rear Admiral Jay Cohen.

    Thank you, Admiral Cohen and Dr. Daniel, who happen to be the chief scientists of the military departments, and they are present to discuss the critical role and the importance of advances in science and technology to the service transformation strategies.

    Also, Dr. Anthony Tether, a newly named director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), will make his first appearance before the committee ably assisted by Dr. Xan Alexander, his deputy director.

    Thank you for being with us.

    Our second panel will include Dr. Tim Coffey, director of research at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), Professor Walter E. Morrow, director emeritus of the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, an imminent member of the Defense Science Board, and Mr. Richard Carroll, chief executive officer, Digital Systems Sources (DSR).

    Secretary Aldridge, we welcome you and your colleagues to today's hearing and look forward to working with you in your new role as undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics.

    Dr. Etter, we have thoroughly enjoyed working with you during your service as deputy undersecretary for science and technology. You have made a tremendous contribution to the defense science and technology program and to the department as a whole, and you will be missed, and we understand your husband, Jerry Etter, is here with us today, and we want to acknowledge his presence. So thank you both for being with us.
 Page 10       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    So, ladies and gentlemen, we welcome all of you. We look forward to your testimony. It is obviously very basic to having an effective national security apparatus, and Secretary Aldridge, before you begin, I would like to call on the ranking member of the Research and Development Subcommittee, Marty Meehan from Massachusetts, for any remarks he might want to make.

    Marty.

STATEMENT OF HON. MARTY MEEHAN, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM MASSACHUSETTS, RANKING MEMBER, MILITARY RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT SUBCOMMITTEE

    Mr. MEEHAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I join you in welcoming all of the witnesses. This is a great opportunity to review the department's science and technology or S&T program.

    Mr. Chairman, as you know, the Department of Defense, indeed, our nation, currently faces significant challenges. The development of new advanced technologies that occurs around the globe, we are ever more susceptible to technological surprise. To address the potential and potential threat and construct a credible deterrence, we must renew our support for, and smartly pursue, new investments or leap-ahead technologies.

    Our goal should be to field the lighter, leaner, stealthier, more mobile, more precise and more lethal capability, for such a capability enhances deterrence. Insightful investment is a must as the character of future conflicts may prove to be far different than much of our historical experience. But given our existing fiscal challenges, what we invest in represents only part of the problem. In the days ahead, we need to remain committed to how we invest.
 Page 11       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    For years we have short-changed our S&T investments. Since 1993 basic research, the very seed-corner of our future, is down nearly 18 percent in real purchasing power, even though modest improvement has occurred over the last few years. The upward S&T budget trend of the past two years should be continued, and I hope the forthcoming budget request will capitalize on this additional investment.

    I am intrigued with the possibility of some day fielding innovating capabilities, such as micro-satellites, micro-air vehicles, micro-robots and new chemical and bio-sensors. But I am equally interested in using S&T investments in a targeted manner to affect weapons' designs and operational concepts in order to reduce the total life cycle and overall ownership costs.

    Success in this area will reduce operations and support costs, free up budget authority and allow for additional S&T investments in the future.

    Mr. Chairman, I look forward to hearing more on these issues and from those who are testifying today. And, again, I look forward to hearing all of their testimony, having an opportunity to talk further on these issues during the question and answer period.

    Mr. HUNTER. I thank the gentleman.

    Secretary Aldridge, the floor is yours. Thank you for being with us, sir.

STATEMENT OF HON. EDWARD C. ALDRIDGE, UNDER SECRETARY OF DEFENSE, ACQUISITION, TECHNOLOGY AND LOGISTICS; ACCOMPANIED BY DR. DELORES M. ETTER, DEPUTY DIRECTOR, DEFENSE RESEARCH AND ENGINEERING
 Page 12       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    Secretary ALDRIDGE. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I am honored to appear today to speak to a very important part of our defense efforts, that is our science and technology program.

    With me today, as you have mentioned, is Dr. Delores Etter. She is the deputy directory of defense, research and engineering, and she oversees the science and technology program and budget.

    We have prepared a joint statement that we would like to enter for the record.

    I would like to summarize how our S&T efforts fit into a broader context of our acquisition efforts. Just after I entered the office, I established a new theme for how the acquisition function should operate. You have heard about acquisition reform, but I wanted to move to a new era. Many studies have given us ideas on how to improve acquisition, and we now need to implement these ideas. Therefore, the theme for the operation of my office will be ''Acquisition Excellence.''

    I also established five goals for myself and the office. Goal number one was to establish the credibility and effectiveness of the acquisition and logistics support process. Too many cost over-runs, schedule slippages and performance failures have deteriorated our credibility and effective management of sophisticated weapons systems. We need to reduce cycle times, introduce stability in our programs and apply good business practices to achieve efficiencies and effectiveness in the acquisition process.
 Page 13       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    Goal number two was to revitalize the quality and morale of the acquisition and logistics workforce. The government must be a smart buyer of our equipment, and we must have the internal talent to carry out the government's responsibility. The workforce is aging, and about 50 percent of them will be eligible for retirement in five years. We need to have a strategic plan for the workforce of the future, and we need to recruit the people with the more demanding skills that we will need.

    Goal number three was to improve the health of the industrial base. If we are to have the very best military capabilities of the world, we must have the very best industrial base to supply these capabilities. A healthy industrial base is good for the Department of Defense. It attracts technology investment. It is more competitive, and it attracts higher quality talent. We can do a lot to improve the business viability of the defense industrial base, both large and small businesses.

    Goal number four was to rationalize the weapons systems and infrastructure with a new defense strategy. When the defense strategy study is complete, we will need to ensure that our science and technology programs, weapons systems and acquisition plans, logistic support systems and basing structures support the revised defense strategy.

    Goal number five was to initiate the high leverage technologies for the war-fighting capabilities and strategies for the future. We will need to increase our science and technology funding across the military departments and defense agencies, stimulate the more innovative thinking for war-winning technologies and concepts.

 Page 14       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC
    As you can see, the efforts that I have in the S&T program directly contribute to my fifth goal. Because of that, the S&T program will receive my attention and commitment.

    Mr. Chairman, thank you.

    Mr. HUNTER. Thank you very much.

    [The prepared statement of Secretary Aldridge and Dr. Etter can be found in the Appendix.]

    Mr. HUNTER. And, Dr. Etter, did you want to add anything to the secretary's statement?

    Dr. ETTER. Yes, I would.

    First, I share Mr. Aldridge's appreciation for the opportunity to appear before you today.

    As the Department of Defense moves into the 21st century there are significant challenges confronting its science and technology program. The changing world environment includes asymmetric threats to our military and our country. These threats include chemical and biological warfare, nuclear proliferation and information warfare.

    Access to many new technologies is available globally, and thus, we must expect that our adversaries have access to much of the same technology that we have. This forces around faster strategy for many areas in which we cannot feasibly restrict access.
 Page 15       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    At the same time, the DOD must adapt to the new economic realities of using commercial systems and processes whenever possible, while continuing to maintain a robust range of capabilities. The environment that I have described requires an S&T program that is focused on providing superior and affordable technologies for the war-fighter, with a particular focus on revolutionary capabilities.

    I appreciate the opportunity to highlight recent accomplishments of the S&T program and to mention areas of special concern. My comments address these areas from a corporate perspective as opposed to that of a specific service or defense agency.

    First, I am very pleased with the progress that we have made in establishing a high-energy laser joint technology office. This effort began with the congressionally mandated study that asked DOD to determine how to coordinate a number of disjointed efforts in high-energy laser research.

    In response, we have created a joint technology office that has helped focus research efforts to build a much stronger S&T base that is helping revitalize the fragile industrial base and that is supporting graduate research and summer internships in laser research. The area of high-energy lasers has the potential to become one of those revolutionary capabilities that are critical to our technological superiority, and this joint technology office will help us demonstrate that sooner.

    Another area of importance to DOD is software. I believe that software is the soul of weapon systems of the future. There is great potential here as we continue to build smarter systems that interact with their environment and adapt to it. Many of our weapon platforms and systems contains software consisting of many millions of lines of code. Realistically, we need to know more in order to thoroughly test systems this large and this complex and we need to be able to answer questions about capabilities and vulnerabilities of these systems:
 Page 16       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    How do we design them so that they do only what is intended? How do we make sure that our software can determine if a virus has infected it or if subtle changes have modified its capabilities? How do we protect our critical software from being copied or being run on systems other than those intended?

    These questions require that we invest in basic research in computing that will allow us to think very differently about the ways we develop, test, use and protect large software systems. We have initiated research programs to look at many of these issues. We have also established a software intensive systems directorate to work software issues in the acquisition process.

    The strength of DOD's S&T program come from the unique characteristics and contributions of its partners.

    These partners include universities, which help push the limits of knowledge and building the pool of new scientists and engineers; DARPA, which takes on high-risk, high-payoff challenges; service laboratories that link the operators to science and technology; industry that brings innovation and helps this transition technology; other agencies that help us leverage efforts in common areas; in our international allies who help us address not only the global nature of technology, but also the need for interoperability.

    Of these six partners, I am most concerned about the role of our service laboratories and their ability to attract and keep outstanding scientists and engineers. These have been difficult issues to address. There are many reports with good recommendations and annual legislation to help us reduce perceived barriers.
 Page 17       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    However, I think one of the keys to solving these problems lies in rethinking the roles and missions of our labs. Do we want the labs to be smart buyers? Do we want them to focus on applied research or advanced technology? Do we want them to do basic research in department unique areas? Do we want them to transition technology from DOD research, from industry, from global investments?

    With clear missions for the labs, we must then be willing to refocus the infrastructure. Whatever the role for labs, we must insist on world-class results, just as we do from universities, from DARPA and from industry. This means we must ensure an environment with visionary leaders, outstanding scientists and engineers, challenging problems, state-of-the-art facilities and strong partnerships with the broader community. This environment must also give service laboratory directors the ability to shape and reward their workforce.

    In closing, I am convinced that technical superiority is critical to national defense. In peace, technological superiority is a key element of deterrence. In crisis, it provides a wide spectrum of options to the national command authorities and commanders in chief. In war, it provides an edge that enhances combat effectiveness and reduces causalities.

    It has been an honor and a privilege for me to spend the last three years working with the Department of Defense and with you to ensure that our military can count on technical superiority.

    Thank you.

 Page 18       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC
    Mr. HUNTER. Dr. Etter, I thank you, and thank you for your service to our country. We appreciate you very deeply.

    Dr. Andrews.

STATEMENT OF DR. A. MICHAEL ANDREWS, II, DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF THE ARMY FOR RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY AND CHIEF SCIENTIST

    Dr. ANDREWS. Thank you, Chairman Hunter, and members of the subcommittee for this opportunity to discuss how the Army's science and technology program is focused on accelerating the pace of the Army's transformation.

    I have previously submitted a written statement and request that it be accepted for the record.

    Since the Army's vision was announced in October 1999, we have significantly reshaped and sharpened the focus of our technology investments. We are pursuing the fullest range of technologies to provide material solutions that can blur the traditional distinctions between the Army's heavy and light forces, while at the same time increasing their strategic responsiveness and, very importantly, reducing the logistics demand of these forces. Our goal is to field this capability for the objective force by the end of this decade, a challenging task.

    It is my privilege to report to you that the Army's scientists and engineers and our government, industrial and academic partners have stepped out boldly to meet this commitment to the Army transformation.
 Page 19       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    Our most significant example of this commitment and our single largest S&T investment, yet over $500 million per year is the future combat systems program. Importantly, to achieve greater innovation and to bring this leap-ahead capability into reality, we have performed a strategic partnership with DARPA.

    Just in this concept phase of Future Combat Systems (FCS) program, DARPA and Army have nearly 40 industrial companies and academic partners helping us. FCS is a very clear example of spiral development, war-fighters, system developers, technologists working together to seize opportunities for continuous technology insurgence.

    We believe that the objective for soldiers on point for the nation in the 2010 time frame, equipped with the future combat systems will be capable of dominating across the full spectrum of operations and, as Army vision demands, persuasive in peace and invincible in war. Our war-fighters, the Army chief of staff and the rest of the Army leadership have established a design crew school for the future combat systems and all elements of the objective force. You must design to fly in the C–130. These systems then must be less than 20 tons.

    Today's legacy force includes the Abrams, and of course, it is a world class killer and survivor, as shown in Desert Storm, but it is nearly 70 tons. Our new design crew school demands then that our Future Combat Systems (FCS) capabilities be achieved in a systems-to-systems approach.

    Thus, FCS is not a platform, it is a system of battlefield capabilities in which the whole exceeds the sum of its parts, a systems-to-systems difference. Fielding FCS will represent a true paradigm shift for the Army in how it fights. As significant as the tank or the helicopter, that is the significance of this transformation to the Army.
 Page 20       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    Now, in my written testimony, I have described many important areas of innovation. This morning, I would like to show you two such examples. First, in the area of armaments, we are developing a multi-role cannon, that, for the very first time, can perform both a direct and an indirect fire on the move to provide two of the future combat systems battlefield functions in less than a 20 ton system.

    In a moment, I am going to show you on the screens one notional future combat system and a virtual world design environment. But first, I want to tell you just a bit about it.

    The multi-role cannon and its munitions suite will enable the Army to rapidly project firepower against all targets in both the close- and the long-range fight, out to 50 kilometers. Compared to the Abrams tank, this system would be more lethal, have more range, and will weigh one-third less. We will overcome these challenges of the light system with novel approaches to gun recoil as well as a propellant that allows us to get more energy out of the barrel.

    Now, what I am going to show you in the video is but one part of what we are after here. And it is a physics-based model that you are getting ready to see.

    We are designed, as I said, to fit in the C–130 Crucible for deployability. What you are seeing is one virtual prototype administrating one element of the future combat systems. The virtual prototyping of the cannon, the turret, the auto-loader are used to make relatively inexpensive design changes before committing precious resources to build a real world prototype. Smart cargo round is going to be able to be launched on the move, reach out to at least 50 kilometers, provide a multi-purpose warhead, being able to bring down the enemy in a variety of ways.
 Page 21       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    An advanced kinetic energy round for the direct-fire battle, provide greater lethality than Abrams. And finally, we must operate in a spectrum environment, the agility to work in tight and difficult urban environments.

    Now, what I would like to do is describe my second example of innovative technology. Now this is getting at developing a synergistic mix of manned and unmanned systems. The Army in collaboration with DARPA is exploring a range of unmanned ground systems.

    Now, in this second video, what you see now, this is the real world now, taking you from the virtual to the real world. And you are seeing an actual 3,300 pounds, unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). This vehicle can operate up to 30 miles on the road, miles per hour on the road, and 20 miles per hour off road.

    On board sensors allow the systems to make adjustments in speed and directions that navigate the terrain, as you can see it going over these logs. It would also be able to adjust itself to shallow depreciation such as puddles, a difficult challenge for robotic vehicles, recognizing a deep lake from a small puddle. But our long-term goal is to field UGVs that can operate with manned systems and perform the dirty and dangerous missions reducing the risks to our soldiers and putting the unmanned systems out front in harm's way.

    Now you have just seen two of our innovative technologies to enable the Army transformation. Because science and technology is so critical to the Army's transformation, we have established a corporate technology raise decision in April, 2003. That is when the secretary of the Army, the Army chief of staff, and the DARPA director will make a decision to launch the 2–1/2 years systems-to-systems demonstration effort.
 Page 22       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    Now, to assess the progress along this path and to provide guidance on war-fighter needs, last summer we established monthly science and technology reviews with the chief of staff of the Army and his four-star commanders and the DARPA director.

    Now, of course, coming back to the people side, we can't achieve these goals without top caliber scientists and engineers (S&Es) who develop the technologies for our soldiers. Recruiting and retaining these S&Es is a challenge across DOD, as you have heard.

    Last month, I convened an Army-wide science and technology leadership summit up at West Point. One of our tasks was identify innovative approaches to recruiting, retaining and refreshing these S&Es. I share these insights across the department. I want to assure this committee that I am committed to ensuring the quality of our S&E workforce; our soldiers depend on it.

    In closing, the Army S&T community has stepped up to the technical challenges to enable Army transformation. We have energized all of our resources and are committed to making objective force a reality. Your continued support is very welcomed, and it is critical to this Army transformation effort.

    Thank you.

    [The prepared statement of Dr. Andrews can be found in the Appendix.]

    Mr. HUNTER. Thank you, Dr. Andrews.
 Page 23       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    Admiral Cohen.

    Thank you for being with us today, sir.

STATEMENT OF REAR ADM. JAY M. COHEN, CHIEF OF NAVAL RESEARCH, U.S. NAVY

    Admiral COHEN. Good morning, Chairman Hunter and members of the House Armed Services Committee.

    It is a great personal honor for me to sit at this very distinguished panel and to share this opportunity with you all.

    I like to take this opportunity to recognize Dr. Etter's leadership. I have been in the job now about one year, and the people who are sitting to my left and right have helped me enormously learn about science and technology and its application to our fighting forces, but I especially appreciate Dr. Etter's leadership and tenacity in dealing with me during that period of time.

    And I must say that the Department of Defense's loss is the Navy's gain, because Dr. Etter has agreed to come to the naval research chair at the Naval Academy and mold those young midshipman in the ways of science and technology. And we are really, excited about that.

 Page 24       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC
    And I would also like to congratulate Dr. Tether on his appointment as the director of DARPA. When I came to the job, I was reminded that the Navy, hard to believe, was a little disingenuous in its involvement and support of DARPA.

    I didn't realize we were in California, sir. [Laughter.]

    Admiral COHEN. Sir, Jay Leno has prototyped that.

    But we had, really, only one naval officer, Captain John Camp, who is a wonderful naval officer.

    But Dr. Jane Alexander reminded me that to have a better working relationship, it was best to have a more top notch naval officers, and we are expanding that involvement with DARPA. And I am very pleased to have reinforced that very important working relationship.

    I have a statement for the record, and so my remarks will be brief.

    But I wanted to introduce my vice chief of naval research, who is seated immediately behind me, and that is, Brigadier General Bill Catto. It is the Office of Naval Research, and so we represent both the Navy and the Marine Corps, and it is a wonderful team.

    Shortly after the USS Cole tragic incident, where 17 of our sailors were killed and nearly three dozen were seriously injured, I received an e-mail in October, and I would like to share that e-mail with you. I have taken the young fellow's name off the e-mail just as a courtesy to him.
 Page 25       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    But it came to me at work, and it reads: ''Dear Sir, my name is John. My nickname is Jake. I am nine years old, and I live in Jacksonville, North Carolina, with my parents and sister. My dad is a first sergeant in the—'appropriate Marine division'—who has been on many ships.''

    ''When I saw the USS Cole on TV I thought it was really bad.

    ''I have an idea that you can probably try with your ships that you build. You can put one more layer of steel on the ship, but it has to have air in between it, because if one layer is blown up there is still one more layer that can still keep it floating, and less people will probably die or be injured.

    ''I came up with this idea when I heard about the USS Cole that had a hole in the ship. I hope you will try this just to see if it works. Sincerely, Jake.''

    Now, I don't know how he got my name. But this was a little bit like the letter 100 years ago to the editor of the Richmond Dispatch, ''Is There a Santa Claus?'' And I am sure that the editor had a hard time writing back, ''Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.''

    And how was I to write back immediately to young Jake, whose dad sails on Navy ships, sails in harm's way in defense of our country and say, ''You know, your idea is right, but we don't do it because of cost and weight considerations.'' The irony is the Cole is double-hull below the waterline, because we anticipated that that is where the greatest threat—mines and torpedoes—would come from and that we had other means of defense above the waterline.
 Page 26       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    And so, as a little bit of an epiphany for me, I finally did answer his e-mail about two months later. And the reason I share this with you—and I won't read you the response—but it was a wakeup call for me. And I asked myself, ''Had we used enough science and technology, applied it to the best benefit of our sailors and marines at sea?'' And regrettably my answer, as chief of naval research, was no.

    And so, what could we do to enhance the survivability of our ships? And I would like to share just a few of those things with you under the auspices of, ''Steel is cheap and flesh is dear.''

    Working with our Marine brethren, it occurred to us that it was pretty important for our skippers to have situational awareness before they entered a port. And what you are seeing here is a very rapid prototype. This is called Dragon Eye. It weighs four pounds.

    As you can see, Major, perhaps you could unclip one of the wings. It is designed to fit in a corporal's backpack, and it was intended by the Marine Corp to use to look over the next hill so that a Marine wouldn't have to stick his or her head up and get it shot off.

    It is electric powered, two little electric motors. It flies for about 30 minutes at about 30 knots. As you can see, the controller right here is just a hand-held controller. It is launched, literally, by throwing it just as you would a paper airplane. It is very robust. We designed it to last one or two missions. Several of them have flown nearly three dozen missions.

 Page 27       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC
    We have viewed them in battle experiments. And, as you see, it has a detachable head, and we can put either a video camera or an IR camera. We are looking at other sensors for other devices that terrorists might use against us.

    And so we thank our Marine brethren very much for their insight in this, and we are passing several of these to our forward-deployed numbered fleets so that the skipper can use those, and they are cheap enough that, if we lose them into the ocean, we can replace them.

    The second area is the use of what we call Lascor. Lascor is, we view it, as a corrugated steel. It is very thin. You can see it right there. If you fill that with syntactic foam or liquid aluminum and you try and shoot a 155 millimeter shell through it, will deform but it will not allow penetration.

    We use this on our Navy ships today. Where we are high in the ship and where we are concerned about weight, we need the strength, but we can't invest the thick metal plate.

    So we are looking very hard at a Venetian-blind kind of affair where this would sit on the gunnel, and the skipper could lower it very similar to what the great white fleet used 100 years ago with torpedo nets that they would swing out to intercept the torpedo before they hit the hull of the ship. I am not ready to build ships out of that, but I think we can use it as an enhancement.

    And, finally, I think you have all read about the good work that the Air Force has been doing for over a decade and that the Marine Corp has picked up on, and this deals with high-power microwaves, and it has been in the press. This is where, if you walk into this field, your skin starts to feel like it is burning.
 Page 28       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    One of the problems we have in the Navy as we go around the world is to try and differentiate between tourists and terrorists, and we do have a Gary Cooper mentality where, at high noon, we want to shoot first before the bad guy has exposed themselves. Occasionally, that is much to our detriment, regrettably.

    So we are looking, and we are building right now a high-power microwave, a hatch-shippable device, 360 degree, it would go high on the ship and we are going to have three lights on the top of it. I have a diagram.

    This captures, gentlemen, what we are talking about, but you can see, every country has traffic lights and so, just using geometry, as someone would be approaching one of our ships, they would see a green light. As they got closer, they would no longer see the green light, just a shield. You would see a yellow light.

    And, finally, as you approached the red light, that would mean that you are in this high-power microwave zone. Your skin would start to burn, and, at that point, if you are a tourist and you are a Boston whaler, you would probably turn around, but if you were a terrorist you might proceed. And, of course, at that point, it makes the rules of engagement a lot easier for our shooters.

    So I wanted to share these with you to let you know how a young boy like Jake can impact what we do in science and technology, and I appreciate the time, and I look forward to your questions.

 Page 29       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC
    [The prepared statement of Admiral Cohen can be found in the Appendix.]

    Mr. HUNTER. Admiral Cohen, thank you very much. Very, very interesting.

    Dr. Daniel.

STATEMENT OF DR. DONALD C. DANIEL, DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF THE AIR FORCE (SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND ENGINEERING), U.S. AIR FORCE

    Dr. DANIEL. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and I very much appreciate the opportunity to be here today. Sir, I have submitted a longer written statement for the record, and with your approval, I will just summarize a few key points from that statement.

    In 1944 General Hap Arnold, who is the founding father of the United States Air Force, said the first essential of air power is preeminence and research. That statement was true in 1944, and it is just as true today. By continuing our investment in a broad and a balanced selection of technologies, the Air Force will retain its dominance of air and space in future conflicts.

    I am pleased today to give you an update on the science and technology planning review that we have undertaken in response to Section 252 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2001. We have approached this review enthusiastically and have received outstanding participation from not only the Air Force science and technology community, but the requirements, the planning, the logistics and the user communities as well.
 Page 30       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    Currently, we have about 300 people involved in this review; about 150 of these are from the S&T community, about 100 are from the requirements, the plans, the logistics communities and about an additional 50 are from the user community.

    As you required us to do, our S&T planning review will define the short-term objectives and the long-term challenges for the Air Force S&T program.

    The review has been divided into three distinct phases: Phase one focused on identify the top level objectives and challenges. This work was largely done in the January through April timeframe and was completed last month when the Air Force Council, which is chaired by the Air Force vice chief of staff, approved the results of that phase.

    Phase two, which we are in now, concentrates are in depth investigations and analyses of specific programs that are needed to accomplish the objectives and the challenges that we have laid out.

    Phase three then completes the review with an outreach of the secretary of the Air Force and subsequent communication of the results to the secretary of defense and the comptroller general.

    I am confident that we will complete our review by November 1, as required by law.

    I am also pleased to report that there has been a significant increase in the involvement of the war-fighting commands in senior Air Force leadership and science and technology planning, programming and budgeting. We have established semiannual S&T summits where the secretary of the Air Force, the Air Force chief of staff, all of our four-star generals and other senior leaders review the S&T portfolio.
 Page 31       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    The first two reviews resulted in increased emphasis for research to advance our ability to find and attack targets under trees; an accelerated materials development for improved laser eye protection; an accelerating development of the joint battle space infrasphere and for completing important beam control demonstrates associated with our directed energy program.

    We also work hard to maximize the payoff of our S&T funding by not only developing revolutionary technologies, but also by timely transition of these technologies to our war-fighters. One way we are doing this is through our applied technology councils and advanced technology demonstrations.

    The applied technology councils are composed of senior general officer representatives of the Air Force Research Laboratory, typically the lab commander; our acquisition product centers, again, typically, the product center commander; and our major user commands, typically, the vice commander of the major user commands.

    Their focus is on assessing the quality, utility and time phasing of our ATDs or Advanced Technology Demonstrators. These councils are assuring that up front, documented planning by all stakeholders takes place to improve the transition timeliness, of demonstrated technology from the laboratory to the customer.

    There are many technology areas that deserve special mention that I could talk about, but if you would, let me highlight just a few examples.

 Page 32       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC
    Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles or UCAVs are generating increased excitement. Our current joint major technology demonstration program with DARPA has entered its fourth year. Flight vehicle checkout and ground testing are the first demonstrator, designated the X–45A, is underway and with projected first flight in the fall of this year. We also recently completed fabrication of the second X–45A, and it is also out at the Edwards Air Force Base Trident Flight Resource Center area in California.

    I have brought along a one-tenth scale model of a UCAV, and it is on display here, so this is about a ten percent scale. The full-size X–45A has a wingspan that is roughly the size of an F–16, and I believe you have a folder at your place with a man in the picture, which also gives you some idea of the scale.

    The length of the fuselage is about half that of an F–16. The wingspan, again, is about equivalent of that of an F–16. The vehicle also has a payload capability of approximately 3,000 pounds and all of this is carried in two internal weapons bays that open up underneath the aircraft.

    Our S&T program is also providing the technology base for microsatellites that offer new options in space applications, such as satellite servicing or launch on demand. In addition, clusters or formations of microsatellites cooperating to perform the job of current large satellites, may ultimately allow some space missions to be performed more cheaply and effectively, with higher survivability and flexibility.

    Hypersonics is another area of high interest to Air Force science and technology. Our high-tech program achieved major successes in fiscal year 2001 with the ground test demonstration of a conventional jet-fueled SCRAM jet or supersonic combustion ram jet, which produced predicted thrust levels over the mock 4.5 to mock 6.5 speed range. This research was recently featured on the cover of Aviation Week. In addition, the Air Force is leading a DOD-directed activity to formulate a national hypersonic science and technology plan.
 Page 33       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    I would also like to comment briefly on our workforce. We are working hard to recruit and retain talented science and engineers at the Air Force Research Laboratory and we welcome the direct higher authority you granted us last year. We also continue to be very pleased with our lab demo project, which you provided in fiscal year 1995 in the Defense Authorization Act, and we subsequently implemented in 1997, and I would judge that to be an overwhelming success.

    In conclusion, Mr. Chairman, let me say that the Air Force is fully committed to providing this nation the advanced aerospace technologies required to meet America's national security interest around the world. The technological advantage we enjoy today is a legacy of decades of investment in science and technology.

    Likewise, our future war-fighting capabilities will be substantially determined by today's investment in S&T. I am confident that we can lead the discovery, development and timely transition of affordable integrated technologies that keep our Air Force the best in the world.

    Mr. Chairman, thank you again for the opportunity to appear before you today and thank you very much for your continuing support in science and technology.

    [The prepared statement of Dr. Daniel can be found in the Appendix.]

    Mr. HUNTER. Dr. Daniel, thank you.

 Page 34       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC
    And I might mention, we have, I think, a vote in which we are going to be introducing a new member of Congress who was recently elected, so we will break here. I tell you what, I think we have enough time to take the last two statements, and then we will break, and we will come back, and we will start with questions.

STATEMENT OF DR. ANTHONY TETHER, DIRECTOR, DEFENSE ADVANCED RESEARCH PROJECTS AGENCY

    Dr. TETHER. Okay.

    Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee, for inviting me to testify today. I have prepared a detailed written statement that I will submit for the record, if you please.

    I have been the director of DARPA for just over a week. I have asked my Deputy, Dr. Xan Alexander, to be with me today to help answer questions that may arise. Xan, however, assured me that having my first congressional appearance be before the House R&D Committee was good. She told me that this committee truly understood and valued the role of DARPA in the ES&T process. Nevertheless, I asked her to be with me today anyway.

    As you know, DARPA has a key role to play in the department's transformation efforts, and I look forward to taking on this role. DARPA is charged with avoiding technological surprise, as you know. This enables us to invest in revolutionary technologies that may not immediately fit into the current way of doing business.

 Page 35       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC
    Sometimes, you will hear S&T categorized into 6.1 basic, 6.2 applied, and 6.3 advanced development. These are the budget categories. An idea's progress, through this somewhat linear process, can take considerable time. Many ideas, really, just die on the vine, as they try to fight their way from 6.1 up to the 6.3 categories.

    DARPA does not follow this linear progression. We respect the budget categories, but we don't allow them to tell us what to do. What DARPA really has always excelled in is taking an idea, just coming out of either basic research, and applying money to that idea and accelerating the maturity of it to the point where it can and must be considered for operational use. That is what we, in the past, have always done and have always excelled with it.

    The heart of DARPA are its program managers. We hire program managers for their ideas, not to come in and manage programs. The first criteria is, do they have ideas? We give the program managers the resources to execute that idea in order to mature it as quickly as possible. These resources take the form of dollars but also the form of management oversight to assure that the program manager's program has been constructed to maximize both its technical and transitional success.

    Basically, DARPA doesn't have an organization. I mean, our closest organization is our phone book, and what we do is we take our program managers, and we aggregate them into areas, areas of like interests. And I have found, over the years, that if you take people and put them together, if they have the same interests, they tend to, after a while, like each other, they tend to, after a while, even trust each other, and when you have that kind of a chemistry together with a body of people, miraculous things can happen. I mean, ideas just flow.

 Page 36       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC
    We then take these areas and we have office directors who run these areas. These office directors are chosen for the fact that they have been around the block a few times, that they can listen to a program manager and say, ''Yes, that is a good idea. No, that is a bad idea. This has been tried before. Why don't you look at that?''

    What the DARPA director and deputy director does is try to figure out the areas. Now, we don't do this by ourselves. We do this in collaboration with the department, Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Aldridge and the service secretaries, as examples. We do it in collaboration with the service operational and S&T communities. We do it with industry, we do it with universities and even the Congress.

    I have found that no one has an exclusive on good ideas, and Xan and I turn over every rock in trying to come up with good ideas.

    The way we hire our program managers is different, so let me just highlight that for you since I now that the ES&T workforce is a concern. We have approximately 120 program managers on staff. They are recruited from government, military, academia and private industry. Each stays at DARPA for about four years.

    This relatively short tenure gives DARPA a constant source of new ideas and state-of-the-art expertise. We use the Intergovernmental Personnel act to bring in experts from academia and the experimental personnel management program's, or Section 1101, hiring authority provided by Congress to hire from private industry. This latter authority has proved exceptionally invaluable and I, again, thank the community for providing it.

 Page 37       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC
    In order to better communicate what we do, we organize our thoughts and efforts into three main mission areas: Our first is to find technical solutions to national level problems. Our second mission is technical innovation for operational dominance. And our third is to develop and exploit high-risk core technologies reflecting DARPA's traditional strengths.

    The written testimony has great details on all of this and I won't bother to go into an of them here. What I would like to do, one point I do want to make is that you will find in the written testimony that we provide such a percentage of our budget to each of these areas, but I want you to understand that we don't do this bottom-up.

    We don't decide a priority that we are going to spend 20 percent in national level problems. It really is what happens after the fact, after we have rolled-up ideas. It turns out to be that way as opposed to a bottom-down allocation.

    I wanted to have an example of our research. And as you can imagine, being from DARPA, there was an array of toys that I could have brought here, and I had to choose just one. And the one I choose, I want to kind of put it in a little bit of context.

    As the heart of DARPA is the program manager; the heart of the Army is the soldier. I mean, it really is the soldier. Everything we do, with respect to the Army, is really on that soldier, trying to make that soldier's job easier, less lethal, so forth and so on.

    So the worst, most chilling mission that a soldier or private can have is, you know, ''Private Jones, go look into that, see what is in that building. Private Jones, go over to that wooden line and see if there is anything there.'' In the movies, this is where the music starts up that indicates something bad is about to happen.
 Page 38       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    What Colonel Kurjanowi is showing you is Private Jones. This is Private Jones of the future. Now that is real. I mean, that is a nine-inch vehicle.

    The difference between it and the vehicle that Admiral Cohen showed you, is that that vehicle can hover, that will actually take off, hover. It does a maneuver which technically, I think, is called the dipsy-doodle in order to fly in a horizontal line. And it can go 50 miles an hour to a location and then stop and hover. It has sensors on it to look into buildings, sensors on it to look into a wood line. This is really the Private Jones of the future.

    And this is a technology which is on the verge of being transitioned; very hard technology in there. That is an unstable vehicle. The technology to have this thing fly is it requires very fast computers, very fast actuators. This is really the integration of many, many technologies that DARPA has developed over the years.

    Well, I guess I have finished in time. I was trying to make sure I did that. I hope that this has given you really a flavor for how DARPA operates and what our unique role is in DOD.

    I thank you, really, for giving me the opportunity to speak with you today. And I do look forward, I think, to your questions.

    [The prepared statement of Dr. Tether can be found in the Appendix.]

    Mr. HUNTER. Well, thank you, Dr. Tether.
 Page 39       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    And I think we have about four minutes left for this vote. We are going to run off and take the vote.

    So take a break folks. We will be back shortly.

    Thank you very much.

    [Recess.]

    Mr. HUNTER. Okay, folks, let's fire up again. And I want to thank everybody for their opening statements. You know, it looks to me like we have this challenge in S&T and that is to focus on important technologies, produce those technologies and field the technologies.

    And against the backdrop of all of the statements and all of the readings that I have gone through on technology and its transition into the service, you always have kind of in your mind's eye, the image of the Little Big Horn where we had the American Cavalry using single-shot weapons and the Sioux were using lever-action weapons.

    And I know that back there, there was somebody back at Springfield Armory, I am sure, assuring the Congress that, by God, they were going to get those old multi-shot weapons out just as fast as they could. But those good old single-shot Springfields were still working well. And the Sioux liked the idea you could load a weapon with 10 or 12 rounds and keep firing them until your weapon was empty.
 Page 40       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    And so, you had the Sioux implementing or fielding American military technology before the American services were. And the other image that I had, as we were going through this, Private Jones here, this little fellow that flies around in the tree lines and looks at stuff is when we got our last fairly extensive hearing on mine fields in Bosnia.

    When you got right down to it, what we had basically after all these years have transpired since our experience with mine fields in World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, were basically little metal detectors that folks in the platoons would put out in front of them, and just hope that you got everything.

    And so, with all the king's horses and all the king's men, we have had what I consider to be some basic failures along with spectacular successes. But basic failures to get technology focused on, produced and fielded quickly. I know you all share that concern. And obviously, in private enterprise today, companies are constantly surprised, especially bigger companies with the fact that a smaller company or somebody else was able to get from A to B much quicker than they thought was possible. Thereby, rendering their product obsolete.

    In our business, the national security business, you don't have a determination that your product is obsolete until you have a conflict. And then, you discover that, or your adversary reveals that fact to you.

    So Secretary Aldridge, I know this is a very general question, but I thought we would just kind of start with this. You have this huge apparatus which hopefully pulls together the best, the smartest guys in private enterprise, the best in-service, the labs, the best in academia, and hopefully, is able to focus on security technology. And ultimately, transition that technology into the services, hopefully, having willing recipients on the other end of that transition, in the services, wiling to take it and field it quickly.
 Page 41       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    And so, that is a huge problem to get your arms around. What do you think? Do you think that we have a semi-efficient system at this point, or one that can be rendered more efficient? And what is your plan for getting from A to B?

    Secretary ALDRIDGE. Mr. Chairman, we could always be more efficient, I concur. I think one of the first priorities I would put on our program for the future is, we need to get our science and technology budget up to the point where we can stimulate innovative thinking.

    I think as you have pointed out in your statement and others, that our science and technology budget has declined over the period of the last ten years. In fact, it has been a billpayer for many of the other problems that we have. And I think we have to stop that process and get our science and technology budget up to a sustaining level that will stimulate this innovative thinking across not only the defense agencies but the military services and laboratories.

    So that is, kind of, my number one, as you noted in my five goals, that was one of the fifth goal that I am looking for. Other than that, I think we have some very, very smart innovative people within the science and technology community. They know generally what needs to be done. I think if we have a plan laid out for where we are going to go, we have a strategy we want to accomplish for the Department of Defense.

    And we have a science and technology budget that is funded properly, I think we will get to where we want to go, and we can always improve the management style of how we approach this problem. But I think we do pretty well.
 Page 42       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    Mr. HUNTER. Does anybody else have any comments on that in terms of how we get from concepts stage to fielded stage rapidly and whether there is any other inefficiencies that they think can be developed in their particular system?

    Dr. Daniel.

    Dr. DANIEL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

    I would argue that this is certainly a push-pull situation where those of us who work S&T are on the push side, and our users and war fighters are on the pull side. One of the things that we are doing, and I mentioned in my oral statement is using what we call applied technology councils where typically twice a year we are having a lab commander sit down with his general officer counterparts in both the acquisition arena, that is the SPO or system project office is actually going to produce the system.

    And they are looking at activities that are in science and technology. And the three of them are prioritizing our advanced technology demonstrators. So we are getting the pull as well as the push coming from the S&T community. But getting those three folks together, I think is a real key to making progress here.

    Mr. HUNTER. Okay.

    Mr. Meehan.

 Page 43       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC
    Mr. MEEHAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

    This is for all of you. I am intrigued with the potential benefits of nano-technology investments. And I was wondering if you could briefly discuss the relative priority of nano-technology investments in your particular program? And it is a follow up to that, after looking at what the relative priority is within your particular programs. If you could discuss in greater detail the potential value of the capability?

    Dr. ETTER. I would like to maybe start the discussion. I know that each of the people here has some efforts in that. But I think nano-technology is going to be something that is going to give us some very revolutionary new capabilities. It is one of those areas that has a lot of basic research that still needs to be done in it.

    So it is not something with results that will be just around the corner. But a lot of the programs people have talked about are programs that are going to get us to systems that are smaller and smarter. And one of the keys to that is nano-technology. Whether we are looking at trying to get to smaller power sources, things that require lower power, or we are talking about materials that we design from the atomic level.

    There are lots and lots of new capabilities that are going to come from this. And I would mention that this is an area where we have worked closely with other agencies within the government. Because it is an area that for example NSF and NIH is interested in. And so, DOD has taken a lead in identifying some of the areas of application of nano-science that we are particularly working in.

 Page 44       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC
    And at the corporate level, we have a large basic research program that is looking at nano-science. And this is funding multi-disciplinary university research programs. That is at the basic research level and fairly broad application. But as I said, I know the others will want to mention some of the things in there.

    Mr. MEEHAN. Can I ask you, while you are speaking—

    Dr. ETTER. Yes.

    Mr. MEEHAN. —what are the challenges and obstacles that might hinder its eventual success?

    Dr. ETTER. Well, when you are working down at the nano-scale level or the atomic level, the physics, for example, is different. So one of the things we have to do is really go back to very fundamental principles and understand how this new physics works.

    We are also working with trying to design materials that have new capabilities. So a tremendous amount of just very basic research will require a lot of modeling and simulation to try to be able to predict and understand the capabilities.

    So there are great benefits, but very difficult problems. This is in the area of large investments of time and money in order to get to the benefits that we see 10, 15 years down the road.

    Mr. MEEHAN. I see.
 Page 45       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    Dr. ANDREWS. Representative Meehan, I would like to address that question, but let me reference you to a Netscape News article today, and it quotes Doug Brown, Interactive Week, June 25, 2001: ''Army Goes to Battle With Wired Fatigues.'' This is a discussion of a new institute. It will be called Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies that we will be forming this year. When you see our budget finally, you will see the number in it.

    But our thrust on that is to go after the material side of the problem. There are lot of efforts in nano-science and nanotechnology for devices and supercomputing approaches; different ways to get at it. But for the soldier point of view, it is what that soldier wears. And can we turn that material into something that provides them additional ballistic protection or give them a stealth capability? I have seen some results.

    Today if you pick up a piece of material that weighs about 10 to 20 pounds per square foot, that will stop a 45-caliber. Can we put up a piece of paper that can do the same thing? That is what the potential of nanotechnology is all about.

    And so, our thrust in this new institute at a university, but with partnership with the labs and with industry, will be the way to get at that for us.

    Thank you.

    Mr. HUNTER. Dr. Daniel.

    Dr. DANIEL. Sir, I might inform you, we have just issued a grant to the National Research Council to help us think through this a little bit more. It will be about a 12-month activity.
 Page 46       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    Typically, nanotechnology and the application of nanotechnology starts with materials. My friends in materials research always remind me, without materials you don't have anything.

    Where you go from there, I think we are still learning our way. A lot of people think first of structural materials. That may, in fact, be where a lot of this goes.

    Mr. MEEHAN. Dr. Daniel, you might explain to our subcommittee what nanotechnology is, and for our listeners here, so they understand that.

    Dr. DANIEL. Typically, we are talking on a scale of ten to the minus nine meters. It is a very, very small linear measure. Very small. Not visible to the human eye. One is typically doing modeling of this in a first principles basis at the atomic or sub-atomic level and then building your models up from there.

    Today's modern computer technology and particularly computer graphics in the materials research community is where we made the first breakthrough in this and starting convincing ourselves we can make some progress here.

    But I am seeing propulsion also. I was talking to some folks at MIT last month. They are starting to think about some very exciting rocket propulsion and ultimately even turbine engine propulsion applications, as well for nanotechnology. Energetic materials, rocket materials; we are starting to see some completely new thinking there.

 Page 47       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC
    And we recently have formulated in our rocket lab out at Edwards, a new so-called polynitrogen molecule, an N5 molecule that has never been formulated before. We have only been able to make a few grams of it so far, and we blew up a small portion of the lab in the process of doing that, so we know it is an energetic material. But we are starting to see that come out of this technology as well.

    So we see a lot coming. In about 12 months or so, we will have this report from the National Research Council, and I very much look forward to that. And we would be happy to share that with you, sir.

    Mr. MEEHAN. Thank you, Doctor.

    Dr. TETHER. I haven't had a chance to really review the nanotechnology program at DARPA, and there is a considerable amount of effort in the area. Mostly in things like electronics, beyond Sea Moss, going down to molecular electronics, using spin in electronics as a way for new memories. In meta-materials, actually one of my fellows, if he was here, he would tell you that we invented the first new material in 4,000 years. Very modest person, actually.

    It is a material that is known as liquid metal. And it is a new material that is an invention. Right now they are using it in golf clubs.

    Mr. HUNTER. Ken Calvert has a driver that—

    [Laughter.]
 Page 48       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    Dr. TETHER. But to answer the question of what will hinder the development of nanotechnology, the transition, what we are doing right now is figuring out what we can do at the molecular level in coming up with devices, but eventually someone will have to produce it in quantity. And it is that step of going from making a device or two here or there to making a lot of them that will require a lot of research, a lot of new ways of tooling that will really hinder the transition of these devices. We need to know how to scale that up.

    And right now, we are probably not doing anything more than thinking about scaling it up, because we are finding out all the neat things that you can do with it at this level, but that will have to come. And that will cost a lot of money to learn how to scale it up.

    Mr. MEEHAN. And what kind of a relative priority is it at this point with DARPA?

    Dr. TETHER. In a relative sense it is a very high priority, because there are a lot of neat breakthroughs that can occur at this level if we really know how to do it. Again, at DARPA we are emphasizing the things that you can do with it. We are not really starting to emphasize the scale-up because we don't quite know where to go. But that will be, at the end of the day, what will prevent it from really transitioning.

    Mr. MEEHAN. Thank you.

    Mr. HUNTER. Thank you, Mr. Meehan.

 Page 49       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC
    Mr. Schrock? Ed, you don't have any questions?

    Mr. Bartlett.

    Mr. BARTLETT. Thank you very much.

    In a former life I had the privilege of working in defense R&T. I worked there for a number of years. I ended up being awarded 19 military patents for R&T work.

    I just wanted to make two comments and ask one question. We obviously, as several of you have noted, are spending too small a percentage of our defense dollars on R&T. And our defense dollars represent a far too small percentage of our GDP. We are now less than three percent. During the Eisenhower years, we were at 16 percent. In terms of GDP, we are now less than a fifth of our commitment to the military than we were during the Eisenhower years. That has got to increase.

    I forget who it was that first said that, ''The most certain path to peace is to prepare for war.'' If you are big enough and strong enough, you are not going to have that next war.

    And we just came through a Memorial Day and I went to a lot of memorial services. I don't want to go to any other memorial services where we have another memorial for our young men and women who have died in yet another war that could be averted if we are big enough and strong enough.

 Page 50       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC
    So thank you for your voices helping us to convey to the American people the need for more dollars for defense and particularly more dollars for R&T.

    Dr. Andrews, the second video clip that you showed is a device produced by a very small company that is in my district. I have been privileged to go there. I know the other primary people in this small company. And I just wanted to note that the great entrepreneurial spirit in this country is vested largely in small and very small businesses. And I appreciate your reaching out to these small businesses.

    My question is, I was in that world at one time; not only did I work for the military, but I was out there as a very small contractor getting Commerce Business daily and pouring through that every day. Now, I guess you do that on the Net, you don't have to subscribe to it; I did.

    But my question has to do with our effectiveness in reaching out to these small and very small companies to individual entrepreneurs in our universities. I suspect that there is yet a very large untapped reservoir of talent there that we are not connecting with. And in today's world, how are we reaching out to those people so that they know that they have opportunities to participate in defense R&T?

    Dr. ANDREWS. That is always a very challenging problem as to are you reaching out far enough to people to throw your loop out far enough. But we just recently, in the area of robotics, which one of these companies are part of, created something called the Collaborative Technology Alliances. It requires industry, and both small businesses, small university people. So it reaches out in terms of the area of both basic and applied research.
 Page 51       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    The other tool we have is our Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Program. There we try to reach out as far as we can and we struggle with how to improve that process to minimize the barriers people have of going through the process paperwork. And we focused this coming year's small business innovative research on our objective force needs, so that when the small businesses do play, in this case, they will really have an opportunity to make an impact.

    So if they do manage to make that hurdle, they find out about the opportunity and they get into it, at least they are on the right track that we are going to use those technologies into the next steps.

    Mr. BARTLETT. Many of them are still intimidated by the red tape. I am on the Small Business Committee, very familiar with the programs there. And I am familiar with the defense part of our government reaching out to these people.

    We recently had two examples of this. One, was an interesting example. The Navy and Marine Corps are now procuring a function where they used to procure equipment that is for data acquisition and management. And the problem in the government, anywhere in the government, by the time you have bought this new equipment, when you take it out of the package it is already obsolete because our procurement cycles are longer than the cycle of change in this industry.

    So they were letting a single contract which is very threatening to our small-business people. And we worked with the Navy and Marine Corps. They reissued their RFP assuring 35 percent of the contract dollars would go to small business, and ten percent of it would be direct pay.
 Page 52       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    A very similar thing happened with NSA, and they were going out for exactly the same reason: There is no way you can keep current today if you are buying through our long procurement cycle. So they are buying function rather than equipment.

    This is a challenge that we face. I came from that world. I appreciate anything that you can do to reach out further because I suspect that they are a lot of people still intimidated by the red tape of dealing with the government. We need to somehow cut through that so that we can make them members of the team.

    Thank you.

    Dr. ANDREWS. As Secretary Aldridge said acquisition excellence is a challenge.

    Mr. HUNTER. I thank the gentleman.

    Mr. Reyes.

    Mr. REYES. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

    I have a couple of different areas that I would like for the panel to comment on. The first one deals with, when DOD invest in technology development, and this is in the realm of commercial firms, what controls do you have to prevent critical technology from being marketed outside the realm of what it was intended by you, both nationally and internationally?
 Page 53       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    Secretary ALDRIDGE. Let me see if I can address that. First of all, for the technology to be transported externally or internationally it has to have an export license, and we have, some would argue, a very long list of the technologies that do require the license process. Some people claim it is too long, but that is another issue. So there is a very distinct way that we control the transport of technology outside the borders.

    Internally, of course, we have classification rules. If the technology is classified secret it cannot be distributed under commercial practices.

    So the security rules protect the internal distribution of technology, and the export license controls the external distribution.

    Mr. REYES. And those are done on a contract basis?

    Secretary ALDRIDGE. Well, for the international, they are done on a case-by-case basis where a company applies for a license to export a technology, and in order for that technology to be exported it has to be approved by the Department of Defense, and, of course, the State Department has the ultimate authority in many of these cases.

    Mr. REYES. In working—this is a along the same lines as my colleague Mr. Bartlett was talking about—in working not just in the realm of the small business area, but also minority-serving institutions, in particular Hispanic-serving institutions, historically black colleges and universities, how much work, how much research do you give those kinds of institutions?
 Page 54       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    Secretary ALDRIDGE. I am not sure I can get to the specifics. I just recall that the amount of money on an annual basis that is given out of the Department of Defense to small, disadvantaged businesses is about $48 billion a year, a significant part of our industrial base.

    Mr. REYES. And what about educational institutions?

    Secretary ALDRIDGE. I don't recall the exact number?

    Does anybody?

    Dr. ETTER. We do have a program that does particularly deal, at the 6.1 level, basic research level. I don't recall the numbers either, but I will get that for the record for you.

    Mr. REYES. And just to be clear, the amount of funding that goes to Hispanic-serving institutions and historically black colleges and universities.

    Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

    Mr. HUNTER. Thank the gentleman.

    Mr. Saxton.

 Page 55       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC
    Mr. SAXTON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

    Mr. Chairman, I have two questions. One is actually a follow-up, I think, to the chairman's question, when he was talking about development of technologies and the implementation and fielding of technology, and the implementation and fielding is obviously where we get the most involved.

    Let me just cite two examples of implementation and fielding of technologies that are and were very frustrating to us as members of this committee.

    The first involves the fielding of the new lift bird, namely the C–17. When I was a freshman in Congress, 1984, a guy who ended up being a great friend of mine, a fellow by the name of General Donald O'Shea from the Air Force, who was commander of the 21st Air Force Battalion, invited me to come out for lunch at McGuire Air Force Base, and he showed me an artist's rendering on the wall of a C–17, and he said, ''If you don't do anything else while you are in Congress, you need to make sure that bird gets built, because the C–141s are going to go away and the C–5s have some weaknesses, and we need to get this done.''

    So I came down and at the time talked to the chairman, and we took part in a process of developing and implementing technologies into a new airplane that would reduce the size of the crew from five to three; that would permit pilots to have heads-up displays, which means they don't have to look down at the panel in order to fly the airplane; that would carry twice or three times as much, I forget now, as the C–141s, with about the same, although wider, airframe; great new technologies that we spent 12 or 13 years trying to integrate in the system that we now have to develop and implement new technologies.
 Page 56       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    And it was excruciating the whole time. We had to push and pull, we had to lay out more money, we had to do, over that 12- or 13-year period, all kinds of things to try to keep that program alive. And I would bet that if we hadn't been able to convince people that the C–17 couldn't fly forever, which obviously it is going away now, I am not sure that airplane would have ever been successful, because there were so many reasons to sidetrack it and not to build it.

    Today we have a great airplane that can fly with three crew members, it can do things that nobody thought it could do, with all the technologies that your folks, the people that you work with, developed and integrated and now we are producing. Great success story.

    The second frustrating story is one that is ongoing. We have been successful in building Aegis technology and other technologies into the DDG–51 for quite a few years now, and by the time our current procurement line is finished, between the cruisers and the destroyers we will have built something like 68 or 69.

    Is that the right number we heard the other day?

    Now we are trying to transfer that technology into a new platform. Originally—I know Admiral Cohen will be interested to maybe talk about this—originally we were going to do kind of a mid-step and call it the Arsenal Ship, and then we decided, well, that is not a good idea, for whatever reason, we will just go directly to the DD–21.

    And one of the team members for the DD–21 competition happens to be located in my district, so I am very much involved in this procurement as well. And again, we seem to take fits and starts, and we stop and we start. And in this case the two teams have both put together sub-teams. In my case, the state of New Jersey committed $62 million for a new high-tech center. And now we are involved in a debate about whether we are going to go forward with it.
 Page 57       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    And this system of bringing technology from ideas to theories to actual proven technologies to implementing them together to put them forward so that we can go fight wars effectively is a very difficult situation. And you work with this every day.

    And I guess my question is, are there some things that we ought to be looking at doing to change how we do business, Mr. Secretary, to not have to take 13 years to develop a C–17, or to move forward in a straight line in development of ships and other weapon systems to get to where we need to be with less cost and more dispatch?

    Secretary ALDRIDGE. Let me start, and I pass it to any of the other panel members. Yes, sir, we can. We have just signed out a new DOD directive, a regulation on the new approach to acquisition to cut down the cycle times. What you are focusing on is the time between the decision to build something and the time we get it in the field, and it has taken us 12, 15 or more years to do that.

    One of the approaches we are looking at is a concept called spiral development or evolutionary development, in which let's not try to build the ultimate configuration on the first try; let's recognize that an airplane, we are going to have an A model and a B model and a C model and put that into our acquisition system so that we can get the unit out in the field quicker, realizing we are going to continue to upgrade it.

    But we get it in the field quicker, it takes less cost, it takes less risk, we get rid of the older equipment that is operating at a high cost because it is out of date. And I believe if we take the approach of evolutionary spiral development, it is a way to start breaking down this long cycle time that we have for our programs.
 Page 58       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    The other problem is these long cycle times where you have to predict what the threat is sometime in the future, and we are usually wrong.

    And so the time that we get to the point where we are ready to deploy something, the threat we have to deal with is different. If we can get the cycle times down to where we can go from decision to deployment in five years, we are much better off of understanding what the threat is and we can decrease the risk. So I would say step number one is to get the cycle time down by this evolutionary development.

    The other way to do this is be realistic in what we price programs, what we tell you they are going to cost, and put in the funding necessary to bring that program in, rather than trying to be too optimistic about what the cost is going to be. When we do that, by being too optimistic, we tend to find we underestimated the cost and we have to come back and ask for more money, or we are going to have to rob another program to pay for the cost overrun, and it just makes all of these programs thick.

    We have to be better in our estimating procedures of what we say a program is going to cost, and I would even put the thought in we have to put reserve into the program, because we are going to experience some uncertainties. We are pushing the state of the art, and we need to do that.

    So realistic pricing, spiral development is the way I think to solving the problem you outlined.

 Page 59       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC
    Dr. ETTER. I would add to that another way that I think we will be able to not only do things faster but continually upgrade them as new capabilities come along is to focus more on using open system architectures and standards.

    I think there are some examples that we can point to, both in hardware and software, which by using open system standards we are able to take advantages of new capabilities as they come along. And it also allows us to do things with more interoperability, not only among our own services, but also with our allies.

    Dr. ANDREWS. Let me add, we in the science and technology community have a special burden to bear, and that is an ability to communicate well. And it is in two ways in the Army world that the science and technology is. We have a requirement to communicate to the acquisition people that we are ready to transition a technology. And what we have now established across DOD-wide is something called technology readiness levels. And the GAO, back in July of 1999, published a report that recommended that we use those readiness levels.

    They don't solve problems. They communicate the status of your technology and what level it is at, so that when people are ready to take it to the next step, you all understand the risks or the degree of maturity of it.

    So communication from our side is very important.

    Admiral COHEN. Congressman, since you mentioned Aegis, it would be disingenuous for me not to make a comment, and we certainly appreciate the contribution that New Jersey has made. You are probably the only state with a destroyer in a cornfield. [Laughter.]
 Page 60       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    The good news is, we will have Aegis in the inventory for the next 40 years. Because of the technology that you all designed into it, working with us, the Aegis, as you know, has progressed really from an anti-air warfare phased array radar, into having the potential for theater ballistic missile defense, communications and many, many, many other enhancements.

    I am just research man. I am not acquisition man. But I can say that there will be son of Aegis, that is part of the DD–21 competition. We are looking at wide band gap electronics, which is terribly, terribly exciting.

    The Navy has taken a slightly different approach to the other services in the transition of mature technology to acquisition.

    We found that we were involved in the 6.3 line with literally hundreds of projects and associated advance technology demonstrators, ATDs. The problem that we found was that the ATDs frequently were quite successful. We demonstrated to the fleet, to the resource sponsors. They were quite enthralled with them. But when they racked and stacked based on their financial assets what they had to pay for in acquisition and war-fighting, that these ATDs fell off the table.

    And so we put them on a shelf and they would age. We call it the technology valley of death.

    Generally, sometime later a young lieutenant would come back now as a lieutenant commander or commander to resource sponsor, and a threat or requirement—real world—would have risen in priorities and he would say, ''You know, I remember we had something that did that, and I am going to go find it.'' And he would go ahead and find it, or she would find it.
 Page 61       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    But the technology had aged. The team that had worked on it had broken up. They were on to other things. And now it really was a new start with a significant reinvestment of dollars we had already spent.

    So what the Navy did last year, and 2002 will be our first budget year for this, is established what we call future naval capabilities. Working with the fleets, looking at the threats, we established 12 primary areas, and some of them aren't very glamorous: expeditionary logistics, organic mine countermeasures, littoral anti-submarine warfare. We have just stood up electric warship.

    And what we do here is, since these represent real world both current and future threats to our war-fighters and to our nation, I do not invest my precious 6.3 dollars in the science and technology for transition until I have a memorandum of understanding and I have a budget plan from both the program executive officer or program manager, as well as the resource sponsor who provides the dollars. So instead of having this valley of death, we have a crossover.

    And as I wind down and it is consistent with the technology readiness level concept, the 6.4 and higher acquisition dollars are being spent to transition this either in a spiral way or an A versus B versus C-mod way.

    Next year is our first year. I don't think in today's budgetary environment we have any choice but to make it work. Other than discovery and invention, making sure that we are not subjected to technological surprise, there is nothing higher on my plate than ensuring we get the biggest bang for our transition dollars. And I hope that DD–21 or some variant thereof will be a premier example of that methodology.
 Page 62       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    Dr. DANIEL. Mr. Chairman, maybe just a quick remark on that as well?

    Mr. Saxton, we certainly appreciate this problem, and as Admiral Cohen just alluded to this valley of death and this bridge that we need to transition over, the Air Force in the coming year is going to be advocating the establishment of developmental planning monies again to help us bridge these gaps. And we find ourselves in a situation sometime where we finish our job in science and technology, and because of the budgetary cycle or the POMing cycle, it may, in fact, be one or two cycles before we have a SPO stood up and are ready to move out in that program.

    In the meantime, it occurs to us if we could go back to something that we tried a number of years ago, and that is establish a small amount of monies to do what we call developmental planning, which will begin the initiation of the SPO cadre and that initial work, we think that will cut out some of the frustration certainly on our part, and allow us we hope to more expeditiously get the systems into the field.

    General Les Lyles is the commander of Air Force Materiel Command and is championing that cause for us right now, and it is something I am hopeful will get started in 2002. Thank you.

    Dr. TETHER. There really are two parts, I think, to your question. One is, after the decision has been made, why does it take so long? And I think Mr. Aldridge really answered that perfectly, that we wait too long to get to the ultimate, and then, in fact, if we had planned block changes, so it is a spiral development type of thing, we would get something into the force quicker and then evolve it.
 Page 63       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    What we at DARPA deals, we deal before that decision. Our job is how do we get somebody to have the technology ready so that a decision can be made, not after it?

    In my experience, 30 years of transitioning technology in one form or another either within the government, with small companies, with large companies, there is one condition that has to exist in order for technology to transition. And that is a contractor has to finally be brave enough to bid that technology in a competitive bid to somebody other than the technology developer. And when that happens, technology transitions.

    Now, it is an interesting thing to note that that is always the case. And now what has to be true for a contractor to be brave enough to do that? Well, if you go into the contractor base, you find that the first thing in a company is that they want to make sure they can estimate the cost of providing that technology. So the technology has to be mature enough so that they can estimate the cost to give a credible bid. And really what we at DARPA do, we provide the funds that get the technology to a point where you can actually make a cost estimate from a contractor's viewpoint.

    By having program managers who cycle in and out very quickly, some of these program managers go back to industry and they really are our agents in industry in providing the word about the technology and getting to that point.

    But now, when the second part of a company, even if they understand the causes, will the customer to whom they are bidding it to accept it? And they are not going to bid it, even if they can estimate the cost if the customer is going to reject it.
 Page 64       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    So this is back on the government side. How do you get the people in acquisition to be comfortable with accepting the technology as an alternative? And again, the people in the government, they go through the same cost business: You know, can they estimate the cost of that technology? Will this bid from the contractor actually give us a cost that they can count on to a certain percentage?

    Also, they typically have to be familiar with the technology. Now we at DARPA try to do that by, again, having military people as part of DARPA And we rotate them in and out, so that this is really the long view. I mean, it is not a quick fix, but as time goes on, the military people that come into DARPA go back into the services do rise through the ranks and they will be in a position to understand the technology. And I think that is the only way that technology, in general, really does transition and we constantly are trying to do that.

    On the military side, we have experiments, we have demonstrations, all oriented toward giving the military people confidence that this technology really has meaning to them. But it really comes down to the bottom line: A company still has to bid it; if the company won't bid it, we can't accept it in the DOD.

    And in order for a company to bid it, they have to know the cost of making it and they have to be comfortable that the DOD will accept it, and then so you have to work both sides of the equation.

    Mr. HUNTER. All set? Thank you, Mr. Saxton, for a very good question.
 Page 65       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    And Mr. Langevin is next, but let me offer just one follow-up question here. Obviously, all this is based on making sure that you are responding to a real requirement, that the issue is one that is critical to a certain area of security.

    We are now moving into a period of emphasis on missile defense; whether it is theater missile defense or national missile defense. This is a new era. It is an era of offensive missiles, some of which we can't handle right now. And we have this great apparatus, including our education institutions, our in-service laboratories, private enterprise, all with great expertise and capability of doing great things and we have this major national challenge.

    And so, I guess my question—and Mr. Langevin, thank you for letting me interpose this, before we get to you here—but do you think we have the ability to harness and coordinate the different elements that you represent in a way that fields missile defense technology and capability quickly?

    Secretary ALDRIDGE. I will start off and maybe they can fill in as well.

    Yes, sir, we do. I think we are going to approach the ballistic missile defense and we are a little premature at this point in time, because I am sure Secretary Rumsfeld is going to give you a much more detailed explanation of the plan.

    But ballistic missile defense is going to go through its evolutionary process as well. Things we can field, as early as we can, we will. The technologies that we need to develop to improve the capability, we will continue to pursue. The ideas looking at the various ability to intercept ballistic missiles at various states of its flight, from boost phase through the terminal phase, and the program technologies have to address all of those.
 Page 66       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    And I believe, as go through the process of finding a capability that is effective and can be deployed, we will do so and we will continue on looking for technologies that improve it over time.

    Mr. HUNTER. Anybody else want to comment on that?

    Mr. Langevin? And we will pursue that when we get finished with the panel.

    Mr. LANGEVIN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and welcome to the members of the committee this morning and the panel.

    I guess my question would revolve around what we are doing to enhance our rapid deployment capability, particularly by sea; probably Admiral Cohen would be best to address the question.

    I have heard it stated in this committee, as well as in various publications that I have read that it is unlikely that we are going to have the kind of lead time to build up a force overseas, as we saw in Desert Shield and in Desert Storm.

    And I guess I ask the question, in particular, because I am aware of a product being developed in my home state of Rhode Island, is still in the R&D phase, that is part ship, part airplane and travels at great speeds, I am told. It has, obviously, lift capability and also can potentially travel up to speeds approaching that of a 747, and that extrapolating out what it took to get forces and equipment overseas during Desert Storm, which took three to six months, this could have been cut down to a matter of hours for this type of capability.
 Page 67       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    So I don't know if you can get into that in an unclassified way, but I would love to hear what you are working on.

    Admiral COHEN. This is a very difficult area and it is something that, really, all countries and all military have been looking at, as well as commercial industry, for a long time; bridging that gap between the slow, large-bulk carriers that operate less than 30 knots in the trans-ocean regime, but do it quite efficiently, and the 747-type aircraft or C–17, which is able to fly across the ocean in a matter of hours, but is space and somewhat weight limited and has other cost offsets.

    We have not cracked the nut yet on the physics of high-speed large-bulk transport in, really, a quite challenging seaway, sea states 6, 7, 8, 9. And, Congressman, I don't have to tell you about how the winds and the seas blow up in Newport Harbor.

    But we are looking and we welcome all good ideas. We have seen wing and ground effect aircraft, which may be similar to some of the technologies that you have been exposed to. We have worked for a long time with non-Newtonian fluid, drag reduction fluids, thanks to some information that has become available after the Cold War ended. We have even greater insight and we are looking to pursue that.

    You know we work with hydrofoils. We have worked with air-cushioned vehicles. There are trimarans, pentamarans. There are a wide variety of ideas, but I will say that—and I don't want to speak for Dr. Andrews—but with the mobility and the speed of deployment that the Army is looking for with their future combat system, as well as our sister service, the Marines, we are all looking for ways of doing this in an effective and efficient way and perhaps moving away from the prepositioned forces that both the Navy, Marine Corps and the Army have positioned around the world.
 Page 68       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    There are other members of this committee that have constituents that are offering some really cutting-edge technologies that are helping us.

    There is a model here in front of you. We call it the Sea SLICE. It will make a West Coast tour, then a Gulf Coast tour and in 2003 an East Coast tour. But we are looking at unique hull forms. That is not necessarily the hull form for the Army or transport.

    But the reason I brought the Sea SLICE is to show you that the stodgy old Navy, you know, is prepared to think, you know, out of the box and take risks on a small level. This is only a 200-ton prototype vessel, but it actually operates and it operates very well in sea states up to 6.0.

    Congressman, I welcome a meeting with your constituent and working with them.

    This is probably the toughest challenge we have in the Navy, is high speed at sea in large displacement.

    Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Would the gentleman yield to me for a brief moment?

    Mr. LANGEVIN. Of course.

    Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Thank you.
 Page 69       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    Admiral, I want to point out that the SLICE is built in Hawaii, not just because of the parochial interest, because it has to do with the whole question coming up in the second panel and also from my good friend from Rhode Island.

    This is a result of innovative small business entrepreneurship. The big shipbuilders had no idea what to do. This is being done by an individual in an individual shipyard in Hawaii, who is taking advanced technology ideas and thinking and acting outside the box, right?

    Admiral COHEN. Absolutely, sir. The facts of life are that, many of you have been to Hawaii. It is an island chain, and there is a very valid need for high-speed, non-seasick-causing transport between the islands. And so, Pacific Marina, which I have called probably the only pure R&D shipyard in the country, is located on Oahu. And this is a result of many of the shipyards and designers putting into it.

    But there was a need. They made the high-speed ferries and we saw a need for an advanced military vessel.

    So it is the small business. We encourage that very, very much. We can't mandate all the good ideas. That is why I have said we have an open ear and we have established, I believe, processes to make it easier for the small contractors, as Congressman Bartlett indicated, to come to our door and we are open for business.

    Dr. ANDREWS. If I could just add to that, since both the Air Force and the Navy take the Army where it needs to go. And so, our job is to get smaller, lighter, take up less space. And so, a larger part of our program, especially in the future combat systems, is that design crucible, I mentioned earlier, fit us within a C–130 constraint, therefore, more of us can be taken on fewer flights and larger aircraft or on ships.
 Page 70       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    Dr. DANIEL. Sir, if I could, just a couple of quick examples.

    I think information technology is maybe a game changer in deployment. I think we are discovering that through IT and through the web we have far greater reach-back capability now, back to the United States and, in fact, may not deploy as many things as we have had to do in the past.

    Another just quick example. I would point out is this little UCAV model that I brought along. From the very beginning, the idea of moving that from one place to another has been part of the program. And, in fact, the wings come off of this and a key part of the overall design is the crate that we used to load these in a C–17 and carry multiple versions of it to different places that we may need around the world.

    So the thinking is very much coming to the floor now, I think, throughout the services on deployment, as all of us become, especially the Air Force, more and more expeditionary in nature.

    Mr. LANGEVIN. Thank you.

    And, Admiral, I look forward to talking to you further about that subject.

    Thank the gentlemen.

    Mr. HUNTER. Thank you, sir.
 Page 71       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    And, Mr. Abercrombie, you are up next. Just keep on flying if you want.

    Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Thank you.

    Mr. HUNTER. And then we will to Mr. Taylor.

    Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Thanks very much, Mr. Chairman.

    Admiral Cohen, on your statement on page one, I just want to read a portion to you because the question I want to ask, Mr. Chairman, actually involves Mr. Carroll on the second panel, and I am going to put that together. I don't know if you have had a chance to look at the statement from Mr. Carroll. But I am going to quote something to you and then something from him and ask your view, especially in the light of the previous commentary.

    ''Our science and technology strategy balances long-term interests with short-term needs. The health of our science and technology base, our ability to discharge our national defense responsibilities to remain a smart buyer of science and technology and to get capabilities into the hands of the operating forces, ultimately depends upon a balanced portfolio from basic research through advanced technology development and manufacturing technology.''

    And then concludes by saying, ''I especially look forward to incorporating Secretary Gordon England's industry perspectives on maximizing the Department of the Navy's precious technology investments.'' I think that is an excellent summary of the philosophy, if you will, which you have been enunciating.
 Page 72       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    And in that context then, Mr. Carroll who will testify in the next panel and was the chairman of the Small Business Technology Coalition, which Chairman Hunter has encouraged says in a part of his testimony, with respect to following through on your philosophy. I am just going to read a couple of quick points. And my point of all this, Admiral Cohen, is to ask if you think that this is a good idea.

    Mr. Carroll says at one point, ''Taking into consideration the limited ability the DOD will have to foster competing alternatives, I have the following recommendations for enabling'' what he calls creative destruction in the department.

    It is an interesting concept. It sounds on the surface to be ironic, but what he is really talking about is how do you take apart the conventional wisdom to reconstitute something which will create progress?

    The recommendations: ''Create a domestic comparative test program similar in nature to the foreign comparative test program that would allow uncommon providers to be challenged by competitors with alternative systems.''

    And then, he says, ''Fund the rapid transition of small business innovation research, SBIR, technologies, into the Defense Acquisition Program and institutionalize it in an effective way of creating competitive alternatives. Accelerate the challenge program acquisition doctrine designed as a result of the DOD Authorization Act of 2002.'' And then finally, ''Institute conflict of interests provisions to be used by program managers in the selection of alternatives.''
 Page 73       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    Now I grant you, you may not have had a chance to actually look at his testimony, and I have given you a very superficial summary of his recommendations. But is it sufficient for you to be able to at least comment on the philosophy embodied in those suggestions that he made with regard to your own philosophy as I have read it from your testimony?

    Admiral COHEN. Yes, sir, Congressman. Again, my comments will be made as research man, not amateur acquisition man.

    I am a big believer in competition. I think it is one of the basis for the greatness of this country and, in fact, I think the greatness of our military. Shame on us if we ever get down to just one airframe, one ship design and one vehicle that a potential enemy can game us. You know, there is a famous saying after World War II when they interviewed the Nazi generals, and tried to find out how the battles went, and the German General said, you know, ''If you knew your doctrine, why didn't you follow it?''

    So I am very proud of how we conduct warfare. And I tell people if we can best the United States Air Force any foreign enemy is easy. Of course, that is just joking.

    Mr. ABERCROMBIE. I understand, I do the same thing up here all the time.

    Admiral COHEN. Sir, what I have done at O&R is to establish two different individuals. And we can come out with a lot of rules and regulations, but it finally comes down to two people: leadership, interpersonal skills. And I have established what I call the Naval Technology Transition Officer (NTTO), that is the person that I hold responsible for the naval technologies, 70 percent of which those dollars were invested in academia, in industry, not in Navy labs.
 Page 74       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    And the commercial technology transition officer. Both of these are SES individuals, they are quite experienced. And the Commercial Technology Transition Officer (CTTO) interfaces with Ford, 3M, Xerox, small business, one-stop shopping.

    Because industry came to me and they said, ''Listen, you are prejudiced toward systems that you have already invested in.''

    And so I said, ''No, I am not acquisition man, I am research man. And I hate not invented here.''

    And so, what I have established now is the future naval capability, as we are doing through an integrated process team where we have the resource sponsors, as well as the science providers, as well as the fleet. The fleet is represented on this five-member group for each of these future naval capabilities. And what I will provide, starting on the 1st of October, and we are getting ready, we have been working on it all year, and I call it the Judge Judy effect.

    The NTTO and the CTTO will appear before the integrated process team, and both of them will explain for that desired capability what the naval technology we have been working on, or are working on, or will work on, has with reference to cost, risk, schedule, and their evaluation, the NTTO's evaluation.

    Meanwhile, the commercial technology transition officer—and I welcome the small business representative, or the Ford representative, as they bring us technologies that they have put on the shelf. I have ten a lot smarter this year. I didn't realize that the first thing industry does with a lot of these technologies, including the car industry, is give it to the comptrollers and see if there is sufficient return on investment before they put it in a car. And if there isn't, they put it on the shelf.
 Page 75       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    Well, they have a lot of technology on the shelf. And so, what I am looking forward to is the CTTO making the same presentation with his or her analysis of risk, cost, schedule, et cetera, and then, let the IPT decide where they want to spend their money to get the best return on investment. But I will hold both commercial and naval offers to the same standards.

    Mr. ABERCROMBIE. So that access is there and known. It is institutionalized in your shop.

    Admiral COHEN. It will be web-based and in use no later than 1 October, sir.

    Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Very good.

    Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

    Mr. HUNTER. Thank you, Mr. Abercrombie.

    Mr. Taylor, I thank you for being with us today.

    Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Mr. Chairman, just before you go on, could I submit one more question for the record rather than take the time? It has to do with the frequency spectrum, the questions I asked the other day.

 Page 76       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC
    Mr. HUNTER. Without objection.

    Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Thank you.

    Mr. TAYLOR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

    I want to thank the gentlemen for sticking around.

    I have read almost everyone's statements, so I will stand corrected if I have not gotten to the last one. What I don't see is that, in a nation that is admittedly the largest fuel consumer on Earth, and a Department of Defense that is the largest single consumer of fuel in America, I don't see much effort to reduce our vulnerability to foreign sources of oil by reducing the amount of fuel that we use. I don't see a single project down through page 29 of the second to last testimony. But I don't see a single project that is emphasizing our need to reduce the amount of fuel that we use.

    The military is a fuel guzzler. And one of the things that I have noticed as I go around the world, and as we do programs to modernize some of our allies' ways of getting around the fleet is, we are also turning them into fuel guzzlers as a rule. We are taking them from smaller boats that don't use much fuel to bigger boats that use a heck of a lot of fuel; smaller vehicles that don't use much to bigger vehicles that do.

    And I do see that as the vulnerability when 60 percent of all the fuel we use comes from overseas, when the major source of fuel now comes from Venezuela; President Chavez on a regular basis saying things that are less than kind to America.
 Page 77       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    Dr. ETTER. Mr. Taylor, if I could offer one response here. On page seven of our joint response, we mention three areas of particular importance to the department that we call enabling capabilities. And these are things that are important across many different fields, and one of those is propulsion.

    And within the propulsion area, we have a program that is a joint program with the services and agencies. And one portion of this program is looking at turbine engine propulsion. And the focus of this program is called IHPTET, it has kind of a long acronym, but it is integrated high performance engine program.

    One of the key goals of this program is to improve efficiency in our engines, because you are exactly right that fuel is a very large part of our costs for operations and maintenance. And by being able to just improve our engines a small percentage, we are able to greatly reduce our costs that are required for that.

    So there is a program—there are others, but this is one that I think is a particularly important program. It is a program that has been around for about ten years, it has really been very successful in addressing the turbine engine program.

    And the Air Force is one of the key players in that. So I would ask Don Daniels to please add to that.

    Dr. DANIEL. Thank you, sir.

 Page 78       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC
    First of all, let me apologize for not having this in my statement. The IHPTET program that Dr. Etter referred to is one of our flagship programs. It has a specific goal of reducing fuel consumption in the 30 to 40 percent range over roughly a 10-year time period.

    The key to doing this is increasing combustion temperature. And the key to doing this is materials, and typically trying to get to materials in the turbine part of the engine that can stand up under these increased and very, very high temperatures.

    We have made tremendous progress on that. I think roughly by 2003, 2004, at least in the S&T base, we may see as much as a 40 percent reduction over roughly a 10-year time period that S&T has brought us to. The hydrocarbon fuels, that is where we are there.

    Earlier I mentioned a new molecule, if you will, that we formulated. It is called polynitrogen. It is an N5 molecule. It is not a hydrocarbon fuel. We are still at a very, very fundamental stage of understanding how to put this together. Again, we have only made a few grams of this. It is still at a basic research stage. Materials like this, though, could be fundamental game changers away from our dependence on hydrocarbon fuels.

    We also continue to do research and, at first, sometimes it just doesn't pass the giggle test with people, but literally making fuel out of water. Water, of course, is hydrogen and oxygen and hydrogen is very appealing to us as a fuel. It is also a clean burner.

    So let me assure you at both the exploratory and the advanced development level, we are working hydrocarbon fuels in the specific fuel consumption issue. And at the basic research area, we are looking for alternatives and, although the quantities are small, we are making progress.
 Page 79       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    Dr. ANDREWS. If I could add from the Army, on page six of our written testimony, we talked about power generation and management and electric propulsion. Very simply, we are after fuel reduction. We are a very big consumer when we get on the battlefield with the inefficiency of our Abrams tank, obviously.

    So we are after hybrid-electrics, borrowing from the commercial industry, but our challenge here is, since we use diesel fuel out there, and that is probably not likely to change for some time, is to be able to use the next generation of electric conversion fuel cells requires us to go after diesel reforming. So we reform the diesel to get the hydrogen to convert it into fuel and to energy for us.

    Another key area we just launched is in something called the Collaborative Technology Alliance for power and energy. There, we are after something called a micro-turbine engine. And to give you an example, relative to a battery, this micro-turbine engine is going to be one-tenth the weight of today's Army standard battery and yet give you four times the power density. So we do have some key efforts under way to address that significant problem.

    Admiral COHEN. Congressman, as you know, the Navy is going electric this decade and with potted propulsion and optimum design, the possibility is there of fuel efficiencies for our large ships of 20, possibly 30 percent. But in the near term, I think your concerns are absolutely right on the mark. If we could just, by a series of means, come up with five percent energy savings, California would be relieved this summer of a potential crisis and the fuel savings would be enormous as all of my counterparts here have indicated.

 Page 80       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC
    Just to give you an example of one simple thing they can do, and this is something that I have from Bath Ironworks, this is just white LEDs, light emitting diodes. The Navy is working right now with the Defense Logistics Agency to look at contracting to replace all of our fluorescent and incandescent lights on our ships and our stations with these LEDs. When you buy them in a sufficient number, the energy savings outright are more than 50 percent. As you know, it is hard to destroy an LED. They last forever and it gives a fairly pleasant light.

    So we are really excited about these technologies, but it is a lot of little things as well as the big things that I think will go into the energy conservation.

    Mr. TAYLOR. If I could, Mr. Chairman.

    However, one thing that immediately comes to mind is I keep hearing talk on the DDG–21, the need to reduce crew size and I am in agreement with that, but I really never hear the Navy saying, ''We have to have a more fuel-efficient ship.''

    And you get back to little things, I remember visiting David Taylor Research Station not that long ago and the Navy very proudly pointing out that they no longer throw plastics overboard, which created a problem. So then they had to melt the plastics; makes sense.

    And I said, ''Well, how do you melt the plastics?'' ''Well, in effect, we use electricity.'' With all the heat that is generated on a ship, the idea of coming up with an electric heater to melt the plastic, doesn't sound like somebody is using a—and this is at David Taylor; this isn't a fleet guy talking to me.
 Page 81       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    You know, you talk about you would try to do some little things. I don't see too many of them. And, again, we all, as a nation, got spoiled at $11 a barrel of oil. But I would think that the fattest part of that logistics tail is fuel and so, therefore, it is a vulnerability that would be exploited by any potential foe; they would be crazy not to.

    Admiral COHEN. There is no many ways to answer this question but I will just say, let me give you a vision, and we have already heard about the use of fuel cells. Envision a ship that has sulfur-free diesel fuel marine, DFM; the sulfur-free is because the sulfur, as you know, doesn't agree very well with some of the current technology fuel cells.

    A fuel cell produces basically four things from DFM. It produces electric energy; it produces some waste heat, but we are in a sea water environment, or we can use it to melt the plastics; it produces some carbon dioxide; and it produces water. It doesn't make any noise, it doesn't rotate. It either works or it doesn't work.

    So think about a future ship that is taking sulfur-free, just like we have lead-free gasoline today, turning it directly into electric energy for use in electric potted or shrouded propulsors and some of the advanced technologies. And I know Halter Marine and Ingalls are working with American Superconducting and other offerers in this very important area.

    Think about what we have done to the thermal scar, because we don't have the high temperature exhaust gases coming out of this. It is a win, win, win. But it is all based on the technology investments that we are making today.

 Page 82       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC
    So I look forward at next year's testimony to telling you the progress we have made in the Navy in the near term saving energy, all forms of energy, because it is a dollar issue to us and come out of our readiness. And as well as telling you what progress we have made on the longer-term future ship designs.

    Mr. TAYLOR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

    Mr. HUNTER. Thank you very much, Mr. Taylor.

    And I want to thank the panel for sketching very effectively a good picture of where we stand and in answering an array of questions from our members. We look forward to working with you here over the next year or so.

    And once again, I think we have a number of areas we have to focus on. One of them is being able to identify what we need with participation, obviously, from the folks that are going to fight the war. Being able to draw that up through the system effectively. And in the end, have some smart guys with good judgment with dollars in their hands to make the transition from ideas to fielded technology and sometimes that is where we, kind of, get in the way as members of Congress.

    Maybe we will try to figure out a way for us to stay out of your way a little bit better in the next year or so. Because we have a number of areas where we have to, I think, where we have to move stuff to the field fairly quickly, and maybe break a pattern that has developed over the last 20 years or so of moving stuff fairly slowly to the field in a number of areas.
 Page 83       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    So thank you very much. Thanks for your great work and your service to our country.

    And again, Dr. Etter, thank you for all of your great service, particularly.

    And we have now our second panel, and we will take a couple of minutes and let them get into place. We have Dr. Tim Coffey, director of research, at the Naval Research Laboratory; Professor Walter Morrow, director emeritus at the MIT/Lincoln Laboratory, an eminent member of the Defense Science Board; and Mr. Richard Carroll, chief executive officer of Digital Systems Resources, is going to give us a little perspective from the private sector.

    Okay, folks, we will fire up again.

    Dr. Coffey, thank you for being with us.

    And gentlemen, I know—Rich, you came in and had a chance to listen to the previous panel, too. And I know all three of you had a chance to listen to him to some degree. Obviously, you have a ton of ground to cover and we have a limited amount of time, and there are other things we would have ten into if we had more time. But I am glad you had a little chance to, kind of, background that.

    And so, Dr. Coffey, why don't you give us your perspectives and we will move right down the line here?
 Page 84       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

STATEMENT OF DR. TIMOTHY P. COFFEY, DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH, NAVAL RESEARCH LABORATORY, WASHINGTON, DC

    Dr. COFFEY. All right, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Saxton, Mr. Taylor, appreciate the opportunity to participate in these hearings.

    With your permission, I will submit the full text and try to make my oral statement brief to the extent I can without losing train of thought.

    I have been director of research at NRL for 19 years now, about a quarter of the history of that laboratory. I think I know the place pretty well. It has a distinguished record of contributions to military science and technology and, as importantly, to the transition of that technology to practice.

    Contributions run from solving the HF problem for the Navy, to invention of radar in this country, to the first intelligence satellite, the key ingredients for the global positioning system, introduction of inverse synthetic aperture to the Navy, introduction of specific emitter identification to the Navy.

    Along the way, the lab has produced tens of thousands of publications, thousands of patents, and a Nobel prize in chemistry. There are a few establishments, public or private, that can claim such a distinguished record.

    Mr. HUNTER. How many folks in the naval lab?
 Page 85       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    Dr. COFFEY. Well, the NRL is about 3,000 feds and probably that many private sector folks. About half the program is public, half the program is private. All of the things I mentioned were done in collaboration with private industry and with academia; a point I would like to come back to.

    I think the lab has dealt pretty effectively with the role of S&T in maintaining military superiority throughout the 20th century. In some way, we see our job as ensuring that the naval forces are never defeated in battle because of technological surprise. And I think that situation will prevail into the 21st century.

    I don't think there is any simple formula for this. There are some rules of thumb. You have heard some of it earlier. You need to recognize who the players are in the development of S&T for defense. They are industry. They are academia. And they are the government laboratories. You have to recognize the interplay amongst the players is critical and you have to be concerned about the health and well-being of all members of that trio.

    I am going to focus the remaining comments on the government piece of this. Personally, I think that is the one that is in most jeopardy, and therefore will make a few comments on that.

    I guess if I could offer you but one piece of advice it would be to do whatever is necessary to maintain the government's technical competence in the field of defense. National defense really isn't a matter that you can leave to the commercial marketplace. National defense is the business of government, and in the final analysis the government will decide defense issues.
 Page 86       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    With that thought in mind, you could consider the fact that the complexity of the technologies which confront us today and what those will become as you look into the 21st century, and you ought to imagine the government which doesn't have the organic confidence to even understand these technologies, let alone decide amongst them. That strikes me as the recipe for disaster.

    Now there are those today who say that the world has changed such that the role envisioned by Edison for a place like NRL is no longer necessary. That is an assertion that, in fact, is impossible to disprove. My view is history is the best judge of that. I would like to offer you a little story here that relates to NRL that necessitates a couple of quotes, and if you will bear with me on those.

    Let's start with a quotation: ''In confirmation of our discussion yesterday on the subject of Bellevue, my feeling is that if the laboratory is to be retained by the Navy, it must be administered directly under the bureau. The part research plays in assisting our Navy to be a place superior to other navies must be attained through the use of our great commercial laboratories in which this nation surpasses and the Navy can never hope to own a laboratory commensurate with these.

    ''I would favor abolishing the laboratory except that I would keep a few high-class research technicists, perhaps six, to act as a liaison between the bureau and the commercial laboratories for the sole purpose of keeping in touch with specific research problems with which the commercial laboratories are working on.''

 Page 87       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC
    This quotation is extracted from a memorandum from Captain S.C. Hooper, director of naval communications, to Admiral S.M. Robinson, commander of the Bureau of Engineering, and is dated 10 October, 1931. This initiative to close the lab led to a great flail of activity, including congressional hearings, and was finally resolved by the General Board of the Navy.

    Another quote—this is Admiral Bristol of the General Board to Captain Hooper—''I want to get down to whether you believe in a research laboratory or not.'' Hooper responded, ''Not a research laboratory for the Navy. I don't believe that the men who originally recommended this had the slightest idea of how our work was organized.''

    For the subcommittee's information, the men to whom Hooper referred were the likes of Thomas Edison, Willis Whitney, Robert Woodward and Leo Baekeland, the inventor of the first practical plastic. Frankly, all of this sounds very much like the discussions which have been ongoing in the past few years.

    Mr. HUNTER. Now what was Edison's position here?

    Dr. COFFEY. Edison is the individual who recommended the establishment of what became the Naval Research Laboratory.

    Mr. HUNTER. Another anecdote about Edison: As I understood, he offered his services about six times to the Navy in the early 1920s with a number of technologies and was turned down.

 Page 88       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC
    Dr. COFFEY. Yes, well, this is true also.

    Mr. HUNTER. Is that right?

    Dr. COFFEY. One achievement he did accomplish was the creation of NRL.

    Let me finish the story with a quote from how the General Board decided. ''The Navy requires a research organization capable of maintaining active liaison with the research activities of the nation and of prosecuting research along certain lines not paralleled in American industry. Both of these requirements can be met by a naval research organization based upon the Naval Research Laboratory.

    ''The board believes that the sole purpose of the establishment of the laboratory was to conduct such activities. A research laboratory under naval control will also more assuredly preserve the secrecy of certain developments, the publication of which could be prejudicial to national defense.''

    I would submit that that is actually not bad guidance for what you would want these places to do today. The board's decision is certainly vindicated by history. It also confirms one's confidence in the wisdom of senior naval officers when given truly difficult problems to decide.

    A point of interest here is to note that at the same time Hooper was recommending the disestablishment of the Navy, Taylor and Young at NRL were filing their invention disclosure for the invention of radar. It is also interesting to note that when Hooper wrote his memoirs many years later, he notes his own prescience for having the wisdom to support the innovative research at the Naval Research Lab that led to the development of radar.
 Page 89       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    The point of this review of history is to point out the arguments with respect to the retention of serious technical competence within the defense establishment are not new. The rhetoric of today is very similar to the rhetoric of 70 years ago. The technologies that were being introduced at that time were certainly less sophisticated than those being introduced today, however they were no less revolutionary at the time.

    The arguments which prevailed 70 years ago regarding retention of the NRL are as valid today as they were then. In some sense, we have here proof of the axiom that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

    Let me jump to the conclusion of these comments. There are many studies that have been done regarding the difficulties confronting these labs. I am not going to review those. In some sense, they deal fundamentally with the governance of the laboratories.

    There is a new development, however, which I do want to put on the table that is of some concern to me. We find increasing reluctance on the part of the program managers now to accept the introduction into the development cycle of government-furnished equipment.

    I am very worried about this because if you look back over the great accomplishments of the NRL—HF comms, radar, intelligence satellites, GPS, specific emitter identification and a bunch we can't even talk about—every single one of them involved the introduction of government-furnished equipment at some point in the evolution of that technology.

    So this is of great concern to us, and I guess one of the things I would most worry about and represent to you is that I can assure you that world-class scientists and engineers are not going to come into the Naval Research Laboratory once they become convinced that the product of their labors will be precluded from practical application. That is a guarantee.
 Page 90       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    So my thoughts have focused principally on NRL. I expect, however, that many of them would apply more broadly to other R&D laboratories and even to headquarters activities such as O&R and the systems commands.

    I offer these thoughts for your consideration, and thank you for the opportunity to address you.

    [The prepared statement of Dr. Coffey can be found in the Appendix.]

    Mr. HUNTER. Dr. Coffey, thank you very much for your presentation and for your historic notes.

    Mr. Morrow.

STATEMENT OF WALTER E. MORROW, JR., DIRECTOR EMERITUS OF MIT LINCOLN LABORATORY

    Mr. MORROW. Thank you for inviting me here today to speak to the committee. Just a word or two about my background. I have been in defense research for over 50 years, and 20 of those was directing MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, which is pretty much totally devoted to defense research.

    I want to talk about only three topics today, and that briefly. The first of these has to do with the financial level of the S&T funding. The second has to do with the focus of that program in general terms. And the third has to do with a problem that I perceive in the DOD laboratories, the service laboratories, having to do with their personnel, the acquisition of really bright people.
 Page 91       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    Referring to the first topic, these views that I have come from a series of Defense Science Board studies that I have been involved with either as leading or a member of. And in one of these, we examined the percentage of sales that were devoted to research on the part of leading high-technology companies. The average there was a little more than three percent. It was about 3.3 percent.

    And the bottom line on this observation is that if the DOD wants to be a high-technology force in the world, I believe that there is a very, very strong reason to maintain a S&T program which is about three percent and not less; three percent of the total funding for the Department of Defense.

    I understand the new administration, and I talked to the new undersecretary on this matter, is thinking seriously about this three percent target. And I want to urge the committee to follow up on that.

    Mr. HUNTER. Now you are talking about something in excess of $10 billion devoted to which function?

    Mr. MORROW. To the S&T programs 6.1 through the 6.3.

    Mr. HUNTER. Totally to 6.1 through 6.3?

    Mr. MORROW. Right.

 Page 92       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC
    And it would be, as you say, $9 billion or $10 billion.

    Mr. HUNTER. It is $9.3 billion right now.

    Mr. MORROW. Yes. In recent years, of course, the funding had decreased substantially, down to a little more than $7 billion. And I want to thank the Congress for putting extra money in for a couple of years, on the order of $1 billion or so, to bring us up toward this three percent value. I think it is a very, very important matter to sustain that funding at that level.

    Now let me turn to the second topic, and that is the focus of the program. It is my observation that the current program, at least something like 90 percent of it, is primarily devoted to incremental improvements on our current systems; that is, technology which will get you a little more efficiency in the engines and a little more range on the radars and so forth.

    I would strongly urge that about a third of this program, or about $3 billion of the $9 billion, say, be devoted to revolutionary innovations in science and technology, of significance and importance to, of course, the military forces of the United States. Now I have in the deposition noted three areas, but these are only three among many areas, but these three give you a kind of a hint of what I am talking about.

    The first of these would be the development of electrically powered lasers for defensive purposes for bombers, for ships and for combat vehicles. We are now at a point in the development of high-energy lasers where it looks like it is possible to build not only chemically powered lasers, but electrically powered lasers at quite high power levels.
 Page 93       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    It is conceivable that these could be used for these defensive purposes and they, in that application, I think would dramatically change the situation so far as vulnerability to surface-to-air missiles are concerned and cruise missiles against ships and high-energy rounds against combat vehicles.

    This is a change in the weapons of warfare. This is a fundamental change from the past. It is not quite equivalent to the change from bows and arrows to guns, but it is of that magnitude, I believe, in the long run. And, of course, there are other applications for high-energy lasers as well; in ballistic missile defense, for instance.

    The second has to do with the serious problem facing our military forces today, and that is that they do not have a really good way of finding targets that are under cover. By under cover I mean under foliage, in buildings and in underground facilities.

    The recent experience in Kosovo indicates that our capability to find these targets, other than sending men in to dig them out, is sufficiently lacking as to be a real problem. In the case of Kosovo, we never successfully managed to put down the air defenses because of concealment of the equipment and the rapid movement of the equipment.

    So I would urge a very large, strong program in the department aimed at solving this problem. The solutions are going to be high technology and they are going to have to be discovered by very bright people, but I believe that it can be done. We already know how to detect targets under foliage. We don't know how to identify them as yet. And the other two are more difficult problems, but very important.
 Page 94       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    The third area is one that we have discussed a little here on the floor before, and that is the development of high-energy density fuels and high-efficiency converters for those fuels. As an example, the use of hydrogen with fuel cells in the limit could extend the range of our current military platforms by a factor of six. All the investments we might make in improving gas turbine efficiencies and the use of diesel fuels or light distillate fuels will never get us a factor of six, but hydrogen in fuel cells could get us a factor of six in the limit.

    Even a factor of three would completely change warfare. The range of bombers could be increased. The range of ships could be increased. We wouldn't have to refuel them, as the Cole was doing when it was attacked.

    It is a dramatic change. And we are now at the point in the history of the gas turbine and the internal combustion engine of seeing these systems around for now 75 to 100 years, and similarly the use of the petroleum for that length of time. If you look back on the history of fuels and engines, you find that every hundred years or so there is a complete turnover in what we are doing. We shift from wood to coal to, you know, steam engines and so forth.

    I think that this is the time for a change in this area, and it would completely change our military forces.

    Those are just three of the areas that I want to mention in these revolutionary areas. There are, of course, many more. There isn't time to talk about those today.

 Page 95       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC
    The third area has to do with the professional staffs of the DOD and service laboratories. In World War II many very, very capable people went to work in these laboratories because of the national emergency, and some of them are still working in those laboratories it turns out and they are still very capable.

    But for the younger people today coming out of school, especially those with graduate degrees, this career in these service laboratories is very unappealing.

    The salaries that are offered under the civil service rules tend to be between $10,000 and $20,000 below that which the private sector offers. The opportunities for promotion to the higher levels in the civil service are limited because of constraints on the total numbers of those higher levels. There are a number of other problems with the current system, which essentially cause these bright young people to turn elsewhere to the private sector or to university teaching.

    And, I, as director of Lincoln Laboratory, could see this happening in our recruiting, because we recruit people from the universities with advanced degrees. We could see this happening in the sense that the government laboratories were not even trying to hire. They knew they were not competitive. We would not see them at the colleges recruiting. It is a very serious problem.

    As someone mentioned earlier, about half of the current government civil service force is within five years of retiring. There will be a major problem if those people leave on time. Those laboratories' capabilities will decrease enormously.

 Page 96       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC
    And I believe, as Tim here believes and others, government laboratories are very, very important to the future capabilities of our military forces. We cannot depend upon the civil community, the private sector laboratories to do it. They have their interested, therefore, industrial products, but they are not working on serious military problems.

    In some cases we can use that technology, such as the computer technology and the chips and so forth. But in most cases, they do not contribute to the important, serious military problems facing the country.

    So we need government laboratories and we need very capable people in those laboratories. And in the work of the Defense Science Board in this area, two possible solutions to this problem were suggested. One was to convert these laboratories to government-owned contractor-operated laboratories, such as the Department of Energy uses pretty much universally across their spectrum of activities. I am speaking here of Los Alamos and Sandia and Livermore and other parts of the organization.

    There are serious problems in making such a change, though, because of the current civil servants that are in the government DOD laboratories. Their careers, their pensions, their job security would be threatened by such a move. And, in fact, when this was suggested, and it has been suggested repeatedly over the last decade, there have been serious push-backs from the civil service sector with government employees in particular.

    A second suggestion, which I think is more practical, and is being done actually at NRL, as I hear, because half of the population comes from the private sector, is to turn to the private sector, the universities and the technology industry, and to recruit the people for these laboratories from that sector under their personnel practices—not civil service, but under the private sector practices.
 Page 97       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    These people would not necessarily make up the entirety of these laboratories; there would still be civil servants to ensure that the government functions are being carried out by government employees. But they would provide the intellectual horsepower needed by these organizations.

    Moreover, that horsepower could be turned over, through rotation, back to the original organizations, the private sector organizations, so a continual flow of new ideas will be coming into the government laboratories. This is an arrangement which could be worked so that, over time, we could really rebirth, you might say, the government laboratory, putting them on a higher standard.

    Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Morrow, that is, these folks from industry, you would give them a little bit of a sabbatical from industry and let them go over and work in the government lab.

    Mr. MORROW. Yes, exactly. Now we already have arrangements for doing that and DARPA uses that, of course. The IPAs for all of the universities and those people are in present in some numbers in those government labs now from universities.

    What is missing is an ability to get people from the non-university population, from the industrial sector. DARPA has special legislation, which this committee had a role in getting through, which allows a limited number of people from the industrial sector to come in under a similar sabbatical arrangement. I think that should be extended and encouraged for the other laboratories, not just DARPA.
 Page 98       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    DARPA is, in some sense, the model for what these laboratories should be in the future.

    Well, with those three topics then, I would like to wind up by saying that I think that the future of the country's national security depends very strongly on the S&T program and on the size of that program, its focus, and in particular on very capable people in these government laboratories to pursue the research needed to keep the country in a strong military position.

    Thank you very much.

    Mr. HUNTER. Thank you, Mr. Morrow.

    Mr. Morrow, how long have you been a member of the Defense Science Board?

    Mr. MORROW. Over 20 years, back into the 1970s. When I became director, which was around 1976, I was made a member of the Defense Science Board.

    Mr. HUNTER. Thank you for your service to our country, sir. We appreciate it.

    Mr. MORROW. Thank you.

    [The prepared statement of Mr. Morrow can be found in the Appendix.]
 Page 99       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Rich Carroll, you have been I think a real good stimulator for this subcommittee and for the full committee in terms of bringing in some ideas from the private sector. And as a small business that sometimes has to wage war against the incumbent larger contractors, but also who have come up with some major breakthroughs on important areas for us. We always appreciate your insight. And so, give it to us.

STATEMENT OF RICHARD W. CARROLL, CHAIRMAN OF THE SMALL BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY COALITION, AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, DIGITAL SYSTEM RESOURCES, INC.

    Mr. CARROLL. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, Congressman Saxton and other members of the distinguished committee.

    Let me first compliment the great ideas of the panelists up here with me. I thought that some of those were fabulous ideas. And I want to commend the subcommittee for taking up this issue, which I believe to be one of the most important national security issues for our country.

    My name is Richard Carroll. I am chairman of the Small Business Technology Coalition. SBTC represents hundreds of small high-technology companies across the country that have an interest in providing innovative and affordable high-tech solutions to our nation and the world.

    I am also the chief executive officer of a small high-tech company called Digital System Resources, Incorporated. And DSR offers information technology and complex software solutions to the DOD. I started DSR in 1985 and today I am very fortunate to work for nearly 500 very talented people. We have been widely recognized in the Navy for our role in providing rapid insertion of advanced technology for our nation's submarines.
 Page 100       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    By delivering drastically new and powerful capabilities to our submarine force, thus expanding our acoustic advantage over our adversaries, we have transformed our customers' expectations and we now deliver annual technology improvements where previous experience was closer to a decade.

    It is with this experience that I am able to bring forth recommendations and discuss the obstacles and lessons learned with this committee.

    I am also appearing before the committee to report the results of my consultations with other small business colleagues from the March 22 hearing that you had on defense innovation. During that hearing, I was encouraged to organize the panel's recommendations for bringing innovation affordability to the Department of Defense. And to the best of my ability, I have incorporated these into my recommendations.

    When I use the term ''small high-technology companies,'' I refer to companies engaged in the use of or the development of high-technology products with fewer than 500 employees, which is not tiny; it is a significant company. These companies are commonly referred to as the innovation sector of our economy, and for good reason.

    This small high-technology business sector is the fastest growing segment of the commercial economy and it has created the vast majority of new jobs in this nation during the preceding decade. In various studies on innovation, this sector consistently outranks all the others.

 Page 101       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC
    Consider the information technology revolution that has changed virtually everything we do in this country. The overwhelming majority of the innovative companies that fueled this revolution started as small high-tech businesses like Microsoft, Intel, America Online, Dell, Compaq, Netscape, eBay and on and on. These companies built their unique innovations causing significant transformation in their respective business sectors, resulting in both a benefit to the consumer and a new paradigm for their competitors.

    Their successful competitors quickly remade themselves in order to adapt and compete. Their unsuccessful competitors could not adapt and are therefore no longer around. This process of creative destruction is the phenomenon that enables rapid change in our market-driven society and would be the most powerful tool to accelerate the identification, maturation and transition of advanced technology to our military forces.

    The simple use of innovative products that result from this process of creative destruction in the commercial sector, such as COTS technology, by defense incumbents will not transform the DOD nearly as effectively as would inspired entrepreneurs launching a direct challenge with ongoing competitive alternatives.

    I know the committee is well aware of the enormous challenge of rapidly transitioning innovative technology into the current defense environment. The defense market that most businesses currently face is as follows. It is a very highly consolidated marketplace that is risk-averse, and is not structured to encourage the competition of ideas as a marketplace priority, a highly institutionalized marketplace that is committed to the traditional and is slow to change. And it is a marketplace where the increased trend toward government contract bundling is further reducing competition.
 Page 102       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    I think it is very important here to say that this does not refer to the science and technology community. It refers to the defense marketplace. And the frustrations that businesses have in facing this marketplace is the same frustrations as the science and technology faces in transitioning those technologies to the defense marketplace.

    Creating an ongoing competitive defense marketplace is not met by simply holding a competition. The Department of Defense holds many competitions for defense systems and services, but this does not ensure a continual competition for more innovative solutions, new ideas and technologies. In fact, I believe that most people would agree that once the competition to decide who will build a system or provide a service ends, so does the competitive pressures to innovate.

    I know that there are some who view the success of our company's products with the Navy submarine fleet as an aberration, a unique set of circumstances where a small business developed a very successful military system.

    And let me state emphatically that I do not believe this to be true. DSR took technology and techniques that were readily available and demonstrated in the commercial sector and adapted them to a defense application in an innovative way.

    Mr. HUNTER. And, Rich, so that our panelists know what they are talking about, this is our inability to process signal information because of some rather antique processing capability that was in all of our boats.

 Page 103       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC
    And you folks basically put together a system that allows us to flow upgrades and processing capability through those boats. And at least, according to the Navy, helped to re-establish the margin that we had over Russian submarines, which shrank markedly in the 1980s, early 1990s, in which you folks helped to re-expand.

    Mr. CARROLL. Yes. And let me comment on that. Is that what we are saying here is that we took technologies and techniques that were readily available and demonstrated them and transitioned them into the military marketplace. Many of these were in the science and technology community at places like NRL and other places.

    These capabilities exist. It is transitioning them into our military systems that is the hurdle that most businesses and laboratories find in their way.

    And I applaud the comment Dr. Coffey made about government-furnished equipment. I think that if we are going to transition technologies coming from small businesses, medium-size businesses or big businesses, government laboratories, we have to be willing in the acquisition system to find the best of the best and provide those to the providers of the system, provide those as government-furnished equipment to the builders of those systems.

    I was saying that I felt as though the fact that DSR being an aberration is not true. In fact, what was extraordinary in our case was having the benefit of Navy leadership on the program that was willing to embrace change and break from the status quo. The submarine force took a chance on change. They created ongoing competitive environment with the threat of competing alternatives. Creative destruction occurred as successful incumbents transformed themselves and unsuccessful ones were left behind.
 Page 104       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    Conflicts of interest in the selection process were neutralized. Innovation flourished, and the result was a system with 200 times the processing capability of a system that was there that cost 1/10 in development and 1/30 in production.

    In addition, a rapid technology insertion process that keeps competitive alternatives available and updates capabilities each year was put in place so that the system became virtually ageless. And the ability to incorporate new technologies into these operational systems would allow organizations like NRL to put their capabilities into fleet much faster than to have to wait for an acquisition cycle of the military marketplace to occur.

    This success would not have been possible without a submarine force leadership that was willing to engage creative destruction, by taking technological risks or aggressively pursuing ways to rapidly transition technology, encouraging ongoing competitive alternatives and removing conflicts of interest. And institutionalizing these tactics is the foundation for the recommendations I have to offer for this committee.

    Taking into consideration the limited ability of the DOD will have to foster competing alternatives, I have the following recommendations for enabling creative destruction in the department.

    And my recommendations are as follows: Create a domestic comparative test program similar in nature to the foreign comparative test program that would allow incumbent providers to be challenged by competitors with alternate systems. And this would require an impartial panel to assess the merit of the challenge. And if it turns out that the challenging technological solution is more desirable, it can displace the current solution.
 Page 105       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    Fund the rapid transition of SBIR technologies into defense acquisition programs and institutionalize it as an effective way of creating competing alternatives. The SBIR program is very effective in its first two phases of the program. Transitioning it to defense systems is a difficult task.

    Provide matching funds as incentive for program managers to initiate these alternatives. Until program managers have personal experience with the benefits of competing alternatives, they may need incentives to do this.

    Accelerate the challenge program acquisition doctrine designed as a result of the DOD Authorization Act of 2000. This acquisition approach is designed to foster competition among alternative technological approaches through competitive outsourcing from DOD prime contractors.

    And finally, balance the government's interest as the impartial evaluator of new technologies and as a researcher, developer or provider of new technologies. It is not fair to burden our world-class government research institutions with the impossible tasks of evaluating their competition.

    In closing, I want to commend the committee for holding this hearing. Given our aging military systems constrained budgets and changing war-fighting environment, the question of how to accelerate the identification, maturation and transition of advanced technologies to our military forces is absolutely critical.

 Page 106       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC
    I would like to close by reflecting on a part of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee on June 21, ''The new threats are on the horizon. And with the speed of change today, where technology is advancing not in decades, but in months and years, we cannot afford to wait until they have emerged before we prepare to meet them. After the new threats emerge, this opportunity may not be available. The risks of transformation could be much greater then; perhaps unacceptably so.''

    Again, thank you for the opportunity to testify. I look forward to answering any question you may have.

    [The prepared statement of Mr. Carroll can be found in the Appendix.]

    Mr. HUNTER. Thank you very much, Mr. Carroll.

    And thanks to all three of our panelists here.

    And I want to say to my good colleague, Mr. Saxton, too—Jim, just jump in anytime here in this conversation.

    But as we look at kind of the phenomena of this age, which is—I think you have all kind of touched on it—the fact that technologies change so quickly. We all, I think, acknowledge that DOD has not been able to implement that change quickly. In some cases, the private sector has implemented it very quickly, to the point where incumbent companies that had a certain comfort element suddenly find themselves challenged, and ultimately eliminated in a fairly short period of time by somebody else that got from A to B quicker.
 Page 107       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    And we are going to be faced in the next—as manifested in a number of programs like missile defense, survivability of our naval forces against increasingly high-speed missiles and lots of other areas maybe that are posed by the littoral challenge now, with respect to the Navy. And similar challenges that attend now all of the analyses being done by the services—we are going to have to be able to move technology quickly and field it quickly, and that seems to be a problem.

    And so, Dr. Coffey, what Mr. Carroll has laid out is, kind of, a formula for competition, if you will. It sounds to me like his formula for competition doesn't necessarily exclude the labs, but would embrace the labs because you guys can leap out with your answer to the challenge of the moment.

    And I know that one complaint that we have had from private industry in some cases has been, ''Wait a minute, the government lab that has its own system is going to be also the judge in the contest as to whether or not ours is any good.'' And that usually evokes squeals of pain from these guys, and I think sometimes justifiably so.

    Could you comment, basically, on what Mr. Carroll has laid out in terms of an attempt to what I would call unsettle a system?

    That is, rather than gaining a position with a certain system, as often contractors do, and maybe to some degree the labs, where once you have a position, you have a certain incumbency that attends that position and you are guaranteed a certain flow of product over a certain period of time, you now have a more unsettled system where another company could come in, either on the full product or a component, and say, ''I challenge that and I think I can make it cheaper and get it to you quicker, and perhaps it will be a better war-fighting element than what exists now,'' and have that uncertainty in the entire equipment procurement system.
 Page 108       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    What do you think? Do you think that, first, that is a valid idea? Second, do you think the labs could participate effectively in such a concept?

    Dr. COFFEY. Well, with respect to the second point, there is no exclusion between what a place like NRL does and what small business does. Much of what we do actually draws very heavily upon small business. We find them to be much more agile than the big companies. So I don't see any problem there.

    Our role at NRL, at least one of our roles, is actually to deal with upsetting technologies. Historically, we have done that a number of times. Of course, you become cursed with Machiavelli's concerns about those who dare to upset the established order. That is part of the problem on technology transfer, frankly.

    I think this is generally a great idea. We love to deal with small companies. Ultimately, however, you have to resolve the issue of getting it to large companies, because in the final analysis, the large companies are going to really be the major suppliers of major weapons systems. When the small companies start supplying those, they will quickly become big companies or bought by big companies.

    So I don't think it is one or the other. You have to live with a ponderous defense system because at any instant of time you have to be prepared to fight. You also have to be agile enough to be introducing new technologies so that you don't get this problem of suddenly being surprised by something you didn't expect. So I think you have to do this calculus such that you deal with his issue of the entrepreneurial company and the issue of dealing with the more, let me say, stodgy companies.
 Page 109       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    I see places like the NRL and Lincoln as, frankly, having critical linchpin roles in actually making that happen. Because, you now, we are dedicated totally to the issue of national defense and how science and technology impacts that. Our job is searching the universe for what is going on out there and then sorting out which of them are worth anything. That is the key role we play. Lincoln, I believe, plays a very similar role.

    So I don't see any incompatibility at all, but I don't think you can do this at the exclusion of the fact that there are much larger enterprises; that major weapons systems are big things that take a lot of time, can't be changed capriciously. So it is a complex calculus. But having said that, I think it is a great idea.

    Mr. HUNTER. Okay. And Mr. Reed, if you have any questions, too, we have a small crew here taking your testimony. So I want to let staff jump in any time you want to.

    Mr. Morrow, you addressed this people problem we have. And I think Dr. Coffey mentioned it to some degree also. And that is that it is hard to get young folks to come into the laboratories.

    And, you know, we can all, kind of, understand it, maybe more than it really occurred in the days of World War II when we had the national effort and the national spirit. And I can just see now academia really, you know, ''Where are you going?'' ''Well, I am going into the Naval Laboratory.'' ''Well, God bless you, son,'' says your professor.

 Page 110       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC
    And today, it is difficult to get a sitting president of the United States who is pro-defense to speak before graduating classes at our major universities without being hissed and booed. And maybe there is not the sentiment that occurred during the Vietnam War. It was manifested then with respect to national security. But there is certainly not a feeling of embracement of that area.

    And so I don't see a change. I don't see a movement in terms of our colleges producing folks who can't wait to go to work for a laboratory.

    But your idea that you could have folks leaving industry, taking sabbaticals, if you will, and working for the laboratories, I think that is a great idea in the sense you would get good talent. You would also do a lot of pollination with outside ideas.

    But I want to go to Dr. Coffey and ask him what do you think about that? Do you think that could be accommodated?

    Dr. COFFEY. Well, I think Walter and I agree at the 60 percent level on this issue. The NRL has, on-site at any instant of time, a substantial number of private sector employees, post-doctoral employees, academics. Very valuable, very valuable.

    Mr. HUNTER. But how about taking a fairly large segment of your personnel force through this plan from private industry?

    Dr. COFFEY. Not from private industry. They usually go through a post-doctoral arrangement for the most part. The problem, I think, where Walter and I would disagree—
 Page 111       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    Mr. HUNTER. No, but I think Mr. Morrow intended that you would bring people out of industry—

    Dr. COFFEY. Well, where Walter and I will come apart, I think, is there has to be an NRL. It has to be staffed by employees who can go toe-to-toe with their cohorts in private industry and academia. They have to have the respect of those people. They have to be employees of the NRL, not part-time assignments from other organizations. There is an issue of institutional pride of who do you actually work for.

    So the government has to figure out a way to keep employees of the Naval Research Laboratory of a stature of those that would reside in the best of industrial companies or in academia. Having done that, and the ability to do what Walter is suggesting, I think, becomes an essential ingredient to sustaining it.

    But I don't see how you can turn and run the Naval Research Laboratory, where all your employees now, except for a bunch of bureaucrats, work for somebody else. It just doesn't compute. So I have some issues with that.

    Mr. HUNTER. What do you say, Mr. Morrow?

    Mr. MORROW. I cite the case of DARPA, where—

    Dr. COFFEY. DARPA is not a research lab.

 Page 112       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC
    Mr. MORROW. No, it is not a research lab, but it does do a lot of innovation. And it is drawing very heavily on the outside sources of supply. They rotate the people through; they stay four years, some stay six years, some less. They are very, very successful. And I think that model is translatable to other labs.

    By the way, in my view, NRL is probably the best of the service laboratories. And as you look at other service laboratories, you do not find even NRL's level of dependency on the outside sector. Those other laboratories could stand a lot of people from the outside. They are in very bad shape compared with NRL.

    NRL is still, undoubtedly in my view and the view of the people that have worked with me, the best of the government laboratories. No question about it. And we have carefully calibrated their output in some of these committees compared to the other labs, and output in terms of papers and members of professional societies, Nobel prize winners, all the rest. They win by a huge lead, a huge majority.

    It is the other laboratories that concern me. They are important too. The Air Force labs, the Army labs, they need good people and they don't have them at this point. And so a mechanism has to be put in place to help those other laboratories and services.

    Mr. HUNTER. Okay. I tell you what I liked to do. I have to leave right now. I want to ask Mr. Saxton to take the chair because we have a few more questions here. Mr. Reed has a couple of questions.

    I would like to have, if you could, Mr. Morrow, to have a brief description, which looks like it is manifested in your statement, about this idea with Dr. Coffey's comments and with Mr. Carroll's comments on this.
 Page 113       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    So gentlemen if you could get for Mr. Morrow, and maybe our staff could effect this, will you agree where you disagree and how you think we might be able to utilize this resource in a way that would leave the core of the labs solidly within the professionals at the Naval Research Laboratory and the other laboratories, but nonetheless draw on this capability.

    And I would also like Mr. Carroll's challenge program that he has laid out in some depth, I would like you to take a look at that Mr. Morrow and Dr. Coffey and comment on that, if you could, as to whether you think that is something that is doable and any common ground that you see. Because I think we are inclined to do something along that area in this session, and we very much value your comments on that. So if you could do that, we would greatly appreciate that.

    And, Rich, thank you for being with us also.

    I am going to leave. I want Mr. Saxton to take the wheel here. And I know we have a few more questions.

    Thank you very much. Thanks for what you do for our country.

    Mr. CARROLL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

    Mr. SAXTON. [Presiding.] Let me just follow up on the chairman's last comment. I agree with all of you that this is extremely important.

 Page 114       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC
    And, Dr. Coffey, I wasn't in the room when you gave your testimony or at least this part of it, but you say in your written testimony, ''It is my opinion that the government component is currently in the greatest jeopardy. If I could offer you one single piece of advice, it would be to do whatever is necessary to maintain the technical competence of government, as it relates to the defense enterprise.'' And I think we all agree on that.

    So as the chairman has suggested, if we can—let me just say what I think we are up against in this regard. This is probably a different way of saying what the chairman said, but let me say it anyway.

    The American people have not been excited about spending large amounts of resources on defense in recent years, and there are some pretty good reasons for that. We heard about the peace dividend after Desert Shield and Desert Storm. As a matter of fact, we all were able to sit on our living room sofa every morning at 8 o'clock and watch CNN show great video of what our high-tech capabilities were and are.

    And so, there is not a whole lot of excitement in the public when I go out to walk on Main Street, USA. People come up to me and say a lot of things, but I never hear, ''When are you guys going to start putting some real money into defense technology?'' So that is one thing we are up against.

    The other thing we are up against, I experience personally, my son graduated from a little college up in Pennsylvania. He went to undergraduate school, took a degree in psychology. I said, ''Marty, when you graduate from college what are you going to do with that degree?'' He said, ''I don't know. I will think about it then.''
 Page 115       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    He graduated from college. He came home. He said, ''Dad, what am I going to do with this degree?'' I said, ''I have no idea.'' He said, ''Well, how about if I go back to school and get a degree in computer science?'' I said, ''I think that would be a great idea.''

    So a couple years later, he graduate with a master's degree in computer science. And I said, ''What are you going go do? There are lots of good places for you to work in private industry and so on.'' He says, ''I don't know.''

    So he went to work for a little company up in Pennsylvania. He developed some software on his own. Somebody from Texas saw the software. Paid him more money than I ever thought they would pay a young guy like that. Moved him to Texas. Gave him a great benefit package, with the promise that someday they are going to public and the IPO would be something that he could look forward to.

    And I don't know how we compete with that. No matter what we do in the public sector to get you the folks that you need in government, I don't know how we compete with that kind of thing. And so, I have a great deal of interest, as the chairman does, with Mr. Morrow's idea of somehow marrying government structure with smart young folks, like Marty, who can do the technological advances that we so desperately have needed in the past and still do today. So anyway, that is my point of view on that.

    Now, Mr. Reed has some questions.

    As you can tell by the noisy bells on the wall, we have a vote on a rule in apparently five or ten minutes. And so, what we are going to do at this point is to thank you for being here.
 Page 116       PREV PAGE       TOP OF DOC

    Mr. Reed has some questions, which he is going to submit in writing for the record.

    And we will just thank you very much for being here with us.

    And as the chairman always says, thank you very much for what you are doing for our country. Thank you.

    And the hearing is adjourned.

    [Whereupon, at 12:59 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]

A P P E N D I X

June 26, 2001

[The Appendix is pending.]