I’m in Sante Fe, New Mexico, this week with the Stimson Center’s Task Force on Leveraging National Laboratory S&T Assets for 21st Century Security. Today we’re at Los Alamos National Lab, tomorrow at Sandia National Lab. Blogging will be sporadic until I return.
Comment by William R. Cumming
July 28, 2008 @ 8:48 am
Each of the DOE labs made a play to be the lead for HS after 9/11! An interesting post would be analysis of how this has played out. It is clear that the FFRD efforts of HS and academic centers have come a cropper. Perhaps the labs should have had a bigger role from the beginning. But not brains should be leveraged wherever they are, whatever the arrangement. Time for a brutal assessment of what the S&T Directorate in DHS has accomplished 7 years after 9/11, the Centers for Excellence (Academic), the DOE labs, and the FFRD’s especially the Homeland Security Institute. Leverageing the scientific and technical community of the US for national purposes have never been easy, frought with conflicts, and often awkward, but recently reading the 1997 biography of “Vannevar Bush-Engineer of the Century [20th]” makes me realize how sophisticated and difficult are governmental relationships with the research community. Of course just feeding the Military-Industrial-Academic complex and never getting usuable product seems the norm not the reality with respect to R&D!
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