Q&A: Institute for Defense and Homeland Security
In February, Virginia Gov. Mark Warner (D) announced the formation of the Institute for Defense and Homeland Security , a consortium that brings together university, industry and federal research and development efforts. Its first executive director is Hugh Montgomery , a 30-year veteran of military research and development programs.
Personal Background
I have six patents. I actually worked as an undergraduate at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It’s interesting to be able to have a liaison with them again. I started after graduation from college — I went to a little school called Mississippi College — I started at Dahlgren Naval Surface Warfare Center and my personal background was reactive materials and physical chemistry of reactive materials and weapons R&D. Some of my patents have to do with technologies that later became flame and incendiary weapons. You may have seen the thermobaric weapons that were used in Afghanistan. I have some of the early patents on the work in that area. We didn’t call it thermobarics then, we called it reactive fragmentation, but it’s some of the same basic technologies.
I went to graduate school at the University of Tennessee. And actually, I have a master’s degree. I have two doctoral dissertations, but they’re both classified. So I’ve done all the work for the doctorate, I actually graduated first in my class, but I’m a mister instead of a doctor because they can’t publish the dissertations. … I’ll probably die a mister instead of a doctor because of it though.
Initial Focus
It’s hard to focus on [the Department of Homeland Security] at this point because they are forming themselves as we speak. It’s very difficult to take 22 agencies, put them all in together and then have suddenly a well-oiled machine. It doesn’t work that way, particularly the size of that agency. Secretary Ridge has a huge challenge on his hands to be able to bring those disparate groups together in one set of objectives and common goals and common cultures. The cultures for each organization are different. … The Department of Defense is a long-established entity, one that I’ve grown up in and understand well. So my near-term goals will focus on known program opportunities within DOD — not at all ignoring opportunities within DHS.
Gaps in the Federal R&D Infrastructure
One of the things many people are not aware of is that we’ve lost a whole generation of scientific and technological help as people retire from the Vietnam era. … Back in the ’60s, we were in the space race and it was a very patriotic, romantic and any other adjectives you want to add thing to become part of the science and technology community — to put a man on the moon by 1970. After NASA succeeded in its moon race and after Vietnam began to wind down, the federal laboratory infrastructure tended to back off in hiring for about 10 or 15 years.
It wasn’t until Ronald Reagan became president that that began to turn around again. There was then a reset of the hiring practices. There was a large number of people that came in in the Reagan years. And then another change in the paradigm in the ’90s when they began the federal downsizing. That’s continued to this day. Because of that, you have a generation of people that are in their upper 50s that are ready to retire or already retired that are exceptionally talented. CLICK TO HEAR MORE
Filling the Gap
Universities tend to look at science and research far, far out — 10, 15, 20 years. They’re developing science. Businesses — and this could be a shipbuilder, or Intel, or Microsoft — have to satisfy their stockholders and the movement of business opportunities over a very short term, usually two years or less. So that leaves a huge gap between the two-year point where industry takes over things and the 15-year point where academia does science and technology. And traditionally, that’s been done by the federal government.
You have the federal government taking the risks of developing new technology and then handing it off to the private sector to produce. With those people leaving … the paradigm has to change. Because the people are not there. If we’re going to maintain our lead in science and technology internationally, it means that universities have to look in closer, to become more applied. And businesses, industry, will have to take a little bit more risk and look further out. But there will still be a gap. And that’s the role that I see IDHS stepping into to help. As the federal government is less capable of doing that because the people are not there, the institutes like IDHS can come in to help transition research into development and then ultimately into production. So that it becomes a win-win for us, for academia, for business and for the nation. CLICK TO HEAR MORE
The Federal Budget
One of the problems that is not well known with the federal government is that the science and technology portion of the budget, whether it be DOD or other agencies, has dropped steadily since the Vietnam/space race era. I know the budget I was responsible for — the Department of the Navy, which was in the $3+ billion range in the ’60s, in today’s dollars, is down to about $1.2 billion, I think, now. It’s dropped down by about two thirds. … The last budget I was responsible for, the science and technology budget of the Navy, as it came out of my office, dropped on the order of 40-48 percent. While the top line of the department of the Navy went up. So there was more money in the budget, but less money in science and technology.