It was actually Benjamin Franklin, not (as frequently cited) Mark Twain, who penned the aphorism that the only certainties in life are death and taxes.
Modern life, however, offers two additions to Franklin’s list. The first is relentless technological change; the second is the inevitability that technology will lead to surprise.
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Our lives have unquestionably been enriched by a ceaseless stream of disruptive technologies — tablets, cell phones, the Internet. Unfortunately, our adversaries can innovate and exploit such innovations in unexpected, and often malicious, ways.
Cyberhackers who pioneered “identity theft” understand this — as do terrorists who fly aircraft into buildings.
I was born at a time marked by just such a disruptive surprise: the Soviet Sputnik. The message was profound: Our nuclear-armed adversary could now orbit anything it wanted over our nation and we were defenseless.
America responded by establishing NASA and racing to space. But even before NASA, we created an organization called the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and tasked it to peer into the future precisely to avoid jarring technical surprises like Sputnik.
The DARPA quickly recognized that the best strategy for the United States to avoid being caught flat-footed by others is to create technological surprises of our own.
So, since its creation, the DARPA has been an engine for game-changing innovation in this country, focused on defense and security but with enormous commercial impact, things like satellite navigation, self-guided vehicles, and nanotechnology.
With this record of accomplishment, you’d think America would redouble its public investment in the DARPA. But instead, the opposite is true, as Washington budget battles are putting this national treasure at risk.
The collapse of the debt supercommittee means a trillion dollars in automatic defense cuts will hit our military in less than a year. Even worse, these “trigger” cuts are mechanical and across-the-board.
As a result, all priorities are cut, including critical research and modernization, depriving Department of Defense leaders of the discretion to protect national priorities like the DARPA.
Although the DOD budget accounts for just 16 percent of federal spending — far below the 21 percent average since we withdrew from Vietnam — many assume a bloated Pentagon is ripe for cuts.
But after 10 years of expensive combat and nearly $500 billion in prior cuts and management “efficiencies” under former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, further reductions won’t be easy. Gates’ successor at DOD, Leon Panetta, says they’d be “catastrophic.”
Modernization and research, the DARPA’s focus, will be hit especially hard — absorbing more than half the total cuts, according to DOD — although it’s only about a quarter of overall defense spending (and just 1.3 percent of GDP).
That’s because savings from things like force restructuring and withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan won’t be realized for years, while the budget law requires immediate cuts and likely exempts personnel accounts.
Yet, as we cut, other countries are doubling down on research. China graduates 10 times as many engineers as the U.S. and doubled its research work force in 2010 alone.
In 2008 and 2009, more than half of U.S. patents were issued to companies based overseas. And America is only eighth in the world in research spending as a percentage of GDP, not nearly enough to preserve our leadership and ensure that the next Sputnik doesn’t catch us unaware.
America’s current greatness is the result of past leaders who took the long view, who understood both the inevitability of technological change and its dangers.
We need to ensure that short-term budget pressures do not undermine America’s capacity to create disruptive new technologies and anticipate the surprises that come along with them.
Mark Rosker is a principal engineering fellow at the Raytheon Co. and is former acting director of the DARPA Microsystems Technology Office. The views expressed here are his own.
