4
Leveraging Expertise from the Full U.S. S&T Ecosystem
As pointed out in Chapter 1, the U.S. government is only one piece of the domestic science and technology (S&T) environment. For decades, the academic sector has dominated basic research, but recent years have also seen a resurgence of industry-funded research and development (R&D), mostly in development. Many commercial enterprises now are rooted in cutting-edge S&T, such as Internet communication and commerce, artificial intelligence (AI)-based software, and the growing bio-based economy. There are now many areas in which the private sector leads the government, and in many cases the government’s access is no better than that of private consumers and even international adversaries. In order for the Intelligence Community (IC) to take advantage of the deep understanding of S&T that resides in academe and industry, this chapter explores how the IC can leverage the full S&T capabilities of the United States that exist beyond the federal government and its partners.
This chapter explores several issues, including the IC’s ability to track and evaluate the implications of progress in multiple, rapidly developing S&T fields. The IC needs to become a more active part of the nation’s S&T community to maintain situational awareness, while at the same time protecting its own information, particularly its own technical goals and interests. One partial answer to this dilemma might be for the IC to engage academia and the private sector even more broadly than it now does in work on unclassified R&D problems. The goal is to increase IC involvement with the national S&T community in productive efforts, because such involvement (primarily through R&D) creates the channels through which S&T awareness is strengthened and opportunities are created to implement new S&T advances. The relationships, personal and institutional, that develop from such collaborations could eventually lead to closer cooperation between the IC and other S&T sectors, eventually enabling later collaborative, classified development work that integrates knowledge earlier obtained into products of use to the IC. Examples of successes and deficiencies of IC collaboration with academia and the private sector were explored in some detail at the first of two workshops held to support this study (see Appendix A).
The efforts of the Department of Defense (DoD) to expand working relationships with academia and the private sector1 have been fairly successful in this regard over the past few decades and might serve as a model for IC to engage more in S&T collaborations outside its own confines or, indeed, outside the government itself.
DYNAMIC NATURE OF TODAY’S S&T ECOSYSTEM
Before delving into the broader issues outlined in the above paragraphs, the committee provides an example of the dynamism of today’s S&T. Such dynamism poses serious challenges to IC efforts to remain current in rapid developments at the forefront of scientific progress. If not actually actively participating in a field, the IC must remain extremely familiar with latest developments, including organizational developments, at the frontiers of knowledge.
As one example, of the rapid evolution of a field, including of its social aspects, the committee discusses recent changes that affect life sciences research in major ways. These kinds of changes, which to some extent are mirrored in other disciplines as researchers seek better ways of expanding knowledge, inevitably offer new paths of advancement for S&T. The IC’s S&T capabilities must be strong enough to recognize the potential opportunities afforded by advances in S&T, infer the ramifications for national security, and facilitate communications among its scientists and engineers. But that challenge is heightened when basic tools and approaches to research are themselves evolving.
Over recent decades, the life sciences have undergone a major transformation from what was largely a descriptive science to what is increasingly an informational and quantitative science. This convergence in the life sciences has been widely discussed.2 For one thing collaboration is becoming much more the norm. For another, “big data” is having and will continue to have an important role in driving discovery in the life sciences, given the digital nature of biological information, such as genome sequences and the amino acid composition and structure of proteins. How to gather, analyze, and store such data is a pressing need. Convergence between biosciences and information science will blend their cultures, but it will take time because the cultures are quite different. Mismatched expectations and norms can influence interactions negatively, although this disconnect is beginning to fall away.
At the same time, other major changes in the conduct of life sciences research are occurring. For example, the global reach of research teams is becoming more the rule than the exception. Another is that scientific publishing in the life sciences is moving strongly toward posting of pre-print papers prior to journal review, much as has been the case in physics and mathematics.3
Meanwhile, life sciences research and technology development are increasingly interwoven. For example, biomanufacturing technology advancement is being heavily supported by federal funding with participation from both industry and academia. In the future, biomanufacturing of nonmedical products such as chemical feedstocks, fuels, and materials is projected to play a very strong role in economic development and countering climate change. In particular, the increasing penetration of biotechnical processes in a wide range of technological and economic applications makes this field of greater significance to the IC that it would have been 10 or 20 years ago. Related to this aspect of convergence, it is becoming increasingly common for scientists and engineers to move back and forth between industry and academia. Not only is industrial experience becoming acceptable, it is also starting to be valued by academia, and increasing percentages of both undergraduate and graduate students are targeting
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1 The Basic Research Office of the Department of Defense (DoD) has been active in its outreach to academia, industry, and components of DoD itself, to enhance collaborations outside of DoD, to coordinate research programs and to enhance the science and engineering workforce. International partners are included as well (see the DoD Basic Research Office website at http://basicresearch.defense.gov, accessed July 19, 2021). The Services’ research laboratories also have significant research and development (R&D) outreach activities to academia, including fellowships, scholarship programs, and collaborations. Notable among such programs and activities are AFWERX, under which the U.S. Air Force organizes partnerships with innovating elements from the private sector, the 14 university affiliated research centers (UARCs) sponsored by DoD research agencies, and DoD’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), which partners with academia, industry, and foreign allies to develop artificial intelligence with mission impact.
2 See, for example, National Research Council, 2014, Convergence: Facilitating Transdisciplinary Integration of Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, Engineering, and Beyond, Washington DC: The National Academies Press.
3 Additional observations about ongoing changes in the science and technology enterprise are included in Appendixes A and B, which document two workshops held in the course of this study.
industry jobs instead of remaining in academia. All of these trends affect the way the IC can and should interact with this scientific community.
STEPS FOR LEVERAGING DOMESTIC S&T
Improving situational awareness of S&T developments hinges in large part on intensive and regular interactions between IC experts and S&T experts in academia and industry. When such relationships are established, the IC has greatly improved expertise on call, both for routine updates and also in case of urgent mission requirements. The IC workforce, recognized universally as excellent in key aspects of operational and analytical missions, is limited in budget and personnel regarding S&T expertise needed to monitor all of the technical niches relevant to IC concerns in near-real time.
Of course, a major challenge exists in trying to balance security and free discussion of S&T. There are security-generated barriers to scientific collaborations and other interactions (e.g., conferences, lectures, technical visits, work exchanges) between IC scientists and their counterparts working outside the IC. Security barriers between the most sensitive agencies of the U.S. government and others are obviously necessary and have been vital to the protection of the nation since before the days of the Manhattan Project. But these measures have evolved, and their current manifestation is a proliferation of levels of classification, bureaucracy, extreme delays, and concomitant paperwork that rarely can be challenged, even as these impediments threaten the efficient and effective operations of agencies on which the nation relies to protect itself from serious threats.
This does not mean that IC S&T experts do not go to government S&T meetings, and even occasionally to international S&T conferences. But in the experience of the study committee members, IC experts generally sit on the sidelines, even at government meetings, presumably taking in useful information but rarely interacting with their non-IC colleagues, let alone sharing their own knowledge with their non-IC colleagues. In fact, IC scientists have been actively encouraged to communicate minimally with scientists external to the IC, even with U.S. government scientists, still less with scientists who are outside the government or worse, non-U.S. citizens. At open, professional scientific and technical meetings, which do as a matter of course include foreign citizens, the IC participants frequently have to wear nametags identifying themselves as working for the “U.S. Government,” rather than for a particular department or office within the government. This practice quickly becomes a clear revelation to the rest of the world: the bearer of this type of identification is an employee of an intelligence agency, trying to remain “under cover.” This approach of passive observation does not encourage engagement between IC S&T experts and their counterparts external to the community.4
When IC scientists are so constrained in their activities that they are often not able to attend open conferences or participate in research discussions, the IC is deprived of direct, near-real-time knowledge of new, vital developments in S&T knowledge and discovery that could affect its ability to accomplish its missions.
RECOMMENDATION 4.1: The Intelligence Community (IC) should encourage its technical experts to engage more extensively on a professional level with their peers outside the relatively small IC environment. This would involve attending conferences in their respective fields of expertise, making presentations, and giving talks at other institutions, all with home agency support regarding travel, leave, and expenses. In addition, IC agency experts should be rewarded for inviting outside scientists and engineers to give talks at their home IC agencies. If the proposal to establish a chief technology and innovation officer within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is accepted, that office would be an ideal place to encourage and oversee these practices.
All of this should be done at an unclassified level, although obvious exceptions could be made in the case of interactions with “outsiders” who possess the required level of clearances to engage on topics at classified levels.
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4 A relevant observation from in the commercial sector is found in E. von Hippel, 2005, Democratizing Innovation, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chapter 6 of that book which provides a discussion on how the informal sharing of information among technical experts, whose companies may be in fierce competition with each other, results in a positive outcome for all companies.
Such efforts would allow the IC’s in-house S&T staff to better discover new advances in fast-developing fields, furnishing the IC with improved situational awareness of current S&T activities and progress.
A related challenge is the time required for an individual to be granted a security clearance—typically 18 months or more at present. Excellent S&T candidates can face lengthy hiring delays, which can cause top candidates to give up on IC careers. This is a problem for national security experts in many fields, but especially in S&T, where the competition for talent is very high. And it is especially acute for the IC because of the general requirement for a TS/SCI level clearance, whereas much other government (notably DoD) work can be done at levels that do not require as lengthy a clearance process.
A third challenge is trust, or rather, the lack of it, between the IC and the non-government sectors. This lack of trust goes in both directions. The IC is wary of scientists and engineers, and, indeed, all non-IC institutions, if they are outside the orbit of U.S. government security review and restrictions. However, outside technical experts have knowledge, experience, and capabilities that could be useful to the IC. This knowledge includes the latest developments in S&T. On the other hand, not only elements of academia, but also some scientists and technologists working for private corporations, tend to regard our national security apparatus warily because of disagreement with some past activities and thus to be avoided.
As noted earlier, a valuable and time-tested mechanism to facilitate communications between the IC technical community and the rest of the country’s S&T enterprise is to institute job rotations (in both directions) between the IC technical community and other government agencies, the private sector, or academia. Rotations foster the two-way transmission of knowledge, allowing IC scientists to be better informed of cutting-edge S&T and for non-IC experts to become better informed of the IC’s culture, interests, and mission-oriented approaches. Multiple, intricate levels of classification and clearance procedures hamper the efficient rotation of individual experts in either direction—both from the IC to outside positions, and from the broader enterprise into an IC agency. A number of IC agencies are, in fact, proceeding to overcome these obstacles in well-defined cases—one example is the new Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Technology Fellows Program, announced by Director William Burns in October 2021.
RECOMMENDATION 4.2: To institutionalize increased professional interactions between Intelligence Community (IC) science and technology experts and the rest of the technical world, IC agencies should consider establishing more rotational positions for leading researchers from academia and the private sector, including start-up and venture capital communities. Because SCI level clearances often require a long approval time and impose lifelong prepublication restrictions, some of the rotational positions should be established at both the unclassified and SECRET levels. The lower security level is often subject to a quicker security clearance process than is now practical for the higher level clearances more typical of IC staff. That said, because TS/SCI clearances are usually standard for IC staff, they should be expedited when possible for rotational positions.
As mentioned earlier in this chapter, DoD has built a strong toolkit of mechanisms for R&D partnering. The successes of DoD in broadening its interface with the wider S&T enterprise might provide potential models for the IC going forward.
To help decide on actions by the IC that could improve its leverage of the S&T landscape, it is instructive to examine past exemplars of cooperative R&D activities between the IC and external sectors. This examination may help determine what types of arrangements can be productive. We consider examples of collaboration with academia, federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs), and industry. In the following paragraphs, the committee presents examples of programs that have engaged a significant number of researchers outside the defense and intelligence communities in work to benefit national security. Mostly originating in DoD or the IC, these efforts have often endured for many years and have resulted in ongoing connections and valuable work between the government’s national security community and outside scientists and technologists, which is the measure of success.
An example of a fruitful interaction between the IC and academia is the National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) longstanding practice of providing grants to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, for completely
unclassified research. (Berkeley does not engage in classified work.) This has produced advantages for both sides.5 NSA and Berkeley also collaborated through RISELab,6 which developed SPARK, a state-of-the-art open software for big data analysis. A substantial commercial entity emerged, NSA gained early insights in the technology, and faculty earned recognition for moving technology into engineering practice.7 Another approach is the university affiliated research center (UARC), such as the Virginia Tech Applied Research Corporation, which brings together academic researchers at Virginia Tech with government sponsors of research, including some from the IC. The recently inaugurated UARC at the University of Maryland, the Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security, is thus far the only UARC devoted principally to intelligence issues.
Other successful interactions between the IC and academia have been developed by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), which invests in research programs that tackle real challenges facing the IC. Two of its offices, the Office of Analysis and the Office of Collection, sponsor long-term research across many fields, such as natural language processing, machine translation, biometrics, genomics, machine vision, quantum computing, and power technologies. Results of these programs are published in the open literature and made available through arxiv.org. In addition to broad agency announcements inviting proposals, IARPA runs occasional contests that spur achievement in critical areas, such as open cross-lingual information retrieval or uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV)-captured imagery.
NSA supports four laboratories that bring together academia and industry to advance science relevant to NSA. Its in-house Laboratory for Advanced Cybersecurity Research conducts mission-focused research to automate network defense, create trusted hardware and software solutions, advance the use of formal methods, and develop tools to enhance cyber threat intelligence. Its work complements work by other NSA in-house researchers by connecting staff with industry, government, academia, and colleagues around the globe. NSA’s Laboratory for Physical Sciences combines expertise in the physical sciences and engineering to tackle issues such as quantum and high-performance computing systems or advanced manufacturing and sensing. It carries out a mix of basic and applied research in partnership with the University of Maryland and is situated close to the university. The Laboratory for Telecommunication Sciences, also operating in partnership with the University of Maryland, is another example of collaboration across academia, industry, other government laboratories and IC mission organizations, with a focus on advanced networking, computing, and telecommunications research. Finally, the Laboratory for Analytic Sciences, at North Carolina State University’s innovation campus, is a mission-oriented translational research laboratory focused on the development of new analytic technology and analysis tradecraft. It should be noted that these laboratories are able to do classified work.
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) has an Academic Research Program connecting NGA with academic S&T experts through academic grants to faculty, hiring visiting scientists to perform research on or off site, and supporting undergraduate research in the geospatial sciences at the four military service academies. The academic grants are awarded in three categories, generally for a 2-year base period with up to three 1-year renewals, and are solicited via an Academic Grant Broad Agency Announcement. The three types of grants awarded are for research initiatives, new investigators, and to create collaboration forums in the United States, of course around research areas of interest to NGA.
The study committee believes that IC S&T agencies should more widely involve external partners in performing unclassified research. R&D often does not need to be classified until the technologies or scientific principles are sufficiently developed to be integrated into applications or operations. R&D cooperation in unclassified research has the possibility of building trust between the IC and its partners, enhancing IC access to cutting-edge S&T, and, importantly, building a foundation for future cooperation in classified research. Collaboration in open areas of research would also make such arrangements far more attractive for researchers, who wish to publish their work in the open literature.
Regarding cooperative work between the IC and FFRDCs, there is an extensive history of collaborations between national laboratories and IC agencies, and also, for example, between NSA and its FFRDC, the Center
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5 See Randy Katz remarks in Appendix A of this report.
6 For more information, see RISELab website at https://rise.cs.berkeley.edu/?s=spark, accessed August 7, 2022.
7 See Randy Katz remarks in Appendix A of this report.
for Communications and Computing of the Institute for Defense Analyses. These collaborations generally work on classified problems.
A Challenge for the IC: Working with Foreign Nationals Within the United States
One of the tremendous strengths of the U.S. university system is that it draws talent from around the world. A large part of the S&T workforce is either foreign-born or the children of immigrants. Immigrants have been awarded 40 of the 104 Nobel Prizes won by Americans in chemistry, medicine, and physics since 2000. Undergraduate students, graduate students, postdoctoral associates, and senior scholars all come to U.S. universities to study and to develop their research careers, and the vast majority of them stay to build their careers, many becoming U.S. citizens. Universities benefit from engagement with international researchers and students in innumerable ways, and specifically in improving both the quality and diversity of its research and research community. This welcoming environment attracts some of the most talented innovators in the world.
The openness of the U.S. educational system to foreign nationals does not just facilitate gaining access to the world’s best technical talent. It also permits communication and interaction to take place within the academic community without the need to ascertain or verify citizenship status—which at best would introduce bureaucracy and delay, foreclosing the serendipitous interactions that have been the source of many promising research approaches. Openness also avoids the risk that researchers will provide or withhold information on the basis of characteristics that they may believe to correlate with nationality, such as race, ethnicity, or accent. Discriminating on these bases could violate the law. Even discrimination on the basis of citizenship, if legally allowable for the purpose of participating in government-funded work, would create a two-tiered status among university students and faculty that most universities consider antithetical to the spirit of open communication and collaboration that they seek to foster. Our best universities will not tolerate segmentation of their unclassified research activities into “U.S.-only” and “possible foreign involvement.”
Academia does not pursue openness as a gift to foreign countries or their citizens, although they may well benefit from it. Rather, openness is a necessary condition for research excellence. It is not an absolute right, and there may be situations—such as compliance with deemed export control regulations—in which universities or other research institutions will need to restrict participation.8 However, any such restrictions will impose a cost on research excellence.
Foreign nationals constitute a significant fraction of U.S. academic researchers, as well as collaborators with U.S. researchers on multi-institutional research teams. U.S. S&T benefits from their participation. Some note that U.S. success at attracting the world’s best researchers is a major reason why it produces S&T far out of proportion to its population size. Moreover, a large fraction of talented foreign nationals who are educated at U.S. research universities seek to stay in the United States and become contributing U.S. citizens. On the other hand, there is risk associated with foreign access to sensitive R&D in the United States, which has raised concerns in some government agencies. This can put some research universities in a difficult position: their research programs depend on U.S. government funding and on attracting the best talent from the entire world.
When the IC partners with academic researchers, it should generally be able to accommodate the involvement of non-U.S. citizens. Moreover, when the IC partners with the private sector, it should be able to take advantage of the abilities of high-quality scientists and engineers who may not be U.S. citizens.
At the same time, some research projects must be limited to U.S. citizens because they are classified or restricted in some other way, such as through the International Traffic in Arms Regulations. In addition, there have been recent concerns about foreign government interference in research, including instances in which members of foreign military services came to the United States in order to take knowledge and information back to their government. These considerations necessarily impede the IC from taking full advantage of the university system. Several avenues might be pursued by the IC to help it enjoy robust interactions with universities and the private sector without adding to security risks: one would be to encourage the participation of foreign citizens at
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8 Fundamental research intended for open publication is typically exempt from export controls, which address the communication of export-controlled information to foreign national independent of their physical location.
universities or in the private sector in research of interest to the IC, if the work unclassified and, in the case of the private domain, is of a speculative, pre-competitive nature.
Building Trust Between the IC and the Academic Community
The IC traditionally, and for good reason, keeps a low public profile. As a result, a large fraction of relevant academics may not be aware of how their expertise intersects with interests of the IC. In addition, many relevant researchers might be reluctant to engage with the IC because of perceived barriers associated with security. The IC could address these issues in a number of ways. The IC could fund unclassified grant programs that are advertised widely to the academic communities of interest. These would be gateways for academics to become more engaged with, and learn about, the sponsoring agency’s interests. Researchers on such grants might later join in classified programs. Because the time scales for academic research projects are determined by the career cycles for graduate students and postdocs, it is critical that grants or research contracts last for 3 to 5 years. In addition, it is important that principal investigators and other performers be recognized and brought together in regular meetings to form a standing community, and that funding be sufficient to support such a community with regular additions of new investigators. This is the approach adopted successfully by IARPA, for example.
The IC could also build student scholarship programs analogous to the National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) Scholarship for Service program to support individuals who will work in fields of ongoing concern to the IC.9 That NSF program, run in coordination with the Office of Personnel Management and the Department of Homeland Security, offers scholarships to recruit and train the next generation of cybersecurity professionals. Scholarship recipients must work after graduation for a federal, state, local, or tribal government organization in a position related to cybersecurity for a period equal to the length of the scholarship. Similar programs do exist in the IC, for example funded by the CIA.
A complementary program might be one modeled after NSF’s Industry-University Cooperative Research Centers program, which brings academic institutions together with corporations and government agencies to collaborate in long-standing teams on open and pre-competitive research. The students trained in such programs would be natural recruits for both industry and the IC, and the communities built by such programs could be extremely valuable. The IC may not be able to outbid industry in terms of the salaries it could offer such students, but it can still attract those who are motivated to support national security directly, or who want to work on problems and with systems that only the IC can provide.
Another successful DoD model that might be adapted to the IC environment is the early-career grant programs managed by ONR, AFOSR, the Army Research Organization, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). These are extremely competitive programs; they recruit some of the strongest academic researchers at the stage in which they are shaping their research careers. Some number of past grant recipients have gone on to develop long-term research relationships with the sponsoring agency. The programs are designed to recruit researchers who are citizens or permanent residents and whose research is of relevance to the military; because of the focus on early-career researchers, these programs tend to give special emphasis on emerging areas of S&T. While IARPA and NGA already have grant programs analogous to these DoD ones, other IC agencies could create similar early-career programs, focused on S&T areas that are not well enough covered by the existing IC research enterprise. Such programs are needed because it has become increasingly difficult for U.S. citizens to engage in S&T postdoctoral work, owing to increased inducements from industry.
The Defense Enterprise Science Initiative (DESI) is a less developed pilot program by which DoD supports university-industry research collaborations focusing on accelerating the pace at which basic research is brought to the point of impact on defense capabilities.10 The first round of topics include power beaming, autonomous UAVs,
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9 There would need to be an exception carved out if the student cannot obtain a required clearance: the IC agency would not be able to hire the person. Possibly service in an uncleared position in a non-IC agency could be an alternative in such a case.
10 See Department of Defense, 2018, “DOD Announces Defense Enterprise Science Initiative to Support University-Industry Basic Research,” updated January 3, https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/1407566/dod-announces-defense-enterprise-science-initiative-to-support-university-indus.
soft active composites, metamaterial-based antennas, and remote sensing. If some of these projects are successful, this model would appear to be applicable to accelerating the impact of new technologies of interest to the IC.
Also of note, DARPA runs the Defense Science Study Group through the Institute for Defense Analyses.11 This program systematically exposes young U.S. academics in science, technology, engineering, and medicine to national security challenges and encourages them to think and apply their insights to these issues. Over the 35 years this program has been in operation, it has involved over 200 technical professionals, and it has contributed significantly to building relationships between DoD and the academic community.
RECOMMENDATION 4.3: The Intelligence Community (IC) should consider emulating some of the Department of Defense’s outreach efforts to scientists and engineers in research and development in order to establish trusted collaborations with academia and the private sector. Some of this is being accomplished in the IC, for example, in programs such as IC Scholarships and IC Centers for Academic Excellence. Such efforts should be expanded significantly to develop a trusted community of external researchers. This would be especially useful for engaging researchers without a long history of working with the IC.
Outreach to build academic partnerships via IC-sponsored centers and grant programs can also help academic researchers navigate the significant bureaucratic obstacles (as reported to the committee) that exist when they try to apply for funding from IC agencies. For new investigators, communications with funders are sometimes difficult to establish, which disadvantages them, frequently even to the point of being unaware of IC agency solicitations.
Finally, it could be helpful for the IC to establish a structure that links it more strongly with academic researchers. A possible mechanism would be an academic liaison network for the IC, modeled after the highly successful Special Operations Liaison Network (SLN or, previously, the Special Operations Support Team [SOST]) program, sponsored by SOCOM, which is global and reaches every element and component of the interagency, intergovernmental, multi-national, and commercial sectors. Such a network would be run under the auspices of the chief technology and innovation officer (CTIO), the position recommended in Chapter 2. It could generate tangible benefits to the IC through shared R&D. It might also directly enhance a university’s standing and ability to develop its own competitive research portfolios.
The committee envisions that researchers recruited for such a network would be tenured as a network member for a specified period and cleared at the desired level so they can serve a rotational assignment within an IC agency. While at that agency, the network members could work with IC officials, training and mentoring them to better understand S&T issues and trends. In addition, the members could provide situational awareness and analyses of current S&T developments. Such a program would offer those academics an opportunity to experience the intelligence community firsthand, learning about the IC’s culture, challenges, and operational constraints, while broadening the IC’s contacts among leading S&T researchers.
If designed properly, such a network could enhance the IC’s ability to achieve five key goals:
- Ensure timely tracking of cutting-edge and emerging concepts, technologies, and research activities to help establish fruitful collaborations across diverse academic partners and the IC.
- Educate both academia and the IC with the aim of establishing and/or improving relationships between both sectors. This would be the result of increased mutual trust and more open communications.
- Improve the design and implementation of products and processes for both academia and the intelligence community in the course of S&T collaborations; further, efforts should include participation from small business innovation and university-affiliated, private-sector start-ups.
- Increase academia’s national security awareness by informing decision-makers with the goal of improving information exchange between the academic and intelligence community.
- Expand IC efforts to recruit students and senior scientists and engineers, whose presence could also help provide continuing education to include S&T updates for IC professionals.
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11 See the Institute for Defense Analyses website for the Defense Science Study Group at https://dssg.ida.org, accessed November 14, 2022.
Success for such a network requires that it be built with the principles of engagement and embeddedness in mind. Engagement refers to the person-to-person interactions through discourse, collaboration, dissent, and idea-sharing in a trust environment. Because such relationships are generally ad hoc in nature, and personality dependent, a successful network should include an internal mentoring program to socialize the elements of engagement as well as establish standards for them and their dissemination.
Embeddedness refers to the full-time role of being completely immersed in both academia and the IC for a period of time (perhaps 2 years). This might build on the Intergovernmental Personnel Assignment (IPA) process—a mechanism to allow state and local government, academic, or federally funded laboratory employees to work for the government while “holding their place” at their home institutions—on a non- reimbursed or partially reimbursed basis.12 The IC’s Chief Learning Officers Council (CLOC), Intelligence Learning Network, and the IC Training Council (all of which have roles in training IC officers) could enable or assist in the operation of such a liaison network.
The CTIO recommended in Chapter 2 would be the natural office for spearheading these sorts of efforts to strengthen the IC’s connections with the broader domestic S&T enterprise.
IC INTERACTIONS WITH S&T INDUSTRY
The IC is far from a stranger to the R&D sector of U.S. industry. For decades, it has contracted with private corporations for technical equipment and other support for its diverse missions. Most prominently since the rapid rise of Earth observation systems in the early 1960s, the IC and other national security entities of the government, as well as civilian research agencies such as NASA, have worked with the aerospace and other industries to advance their missions. Such collaborative work, essential to both national security and many branches of basic scientific research, has led to strong and long-term relationships between many parts of government and the private sector. The IC has been part of this trend; in great part it has worked with its long-term traditional partners, often large corporations with engineering skills that have been nearly unparalleled in the world.
However, the leading role of the IC in some relevant niche areas of S&T is over. Many of the best technologists now work in commercial industry, particularly in the most game-changing areas for the IC such as AI and autonomy. The national security contracting industry is in similar straits. Contractors like Lockheed Martin or Northrup Grumman face increased challenges in recruitment. Moreover, the monopoly that the IC once held in technologies such as earth observation is over; academic researchers and private-sector firms are now producing visual and multi-spectral imagery and radioemitter geolocation of the sort that only IC systems used to provide.13 Given this change in the landscape, the IC must now acquire the vast majority of its technology from outside vendors, for whom it may be only a small or medium-sized customer.
It is not easy for large bureaucracies of any sort to move as quickly as successful high-tech firms, and unsurprisingly the IC has not always been able to keep abreast of the explosively fast technical progress of the past two or three decades. But the IC has long been aware of this trend and has instituted programs to introduce new technology. In-Q-Tel invests in dozens of new tech start-ups every year, and those technologies are introduced to at least some intelligence officers. In its short existence, the Air Force’s technology innovator AFWERX has brought 1,400 companies into DoD as part of its Small Business Innovation Research program, many of which have been introduced to the IC. Dozens, if not hundreds, of other companies and technologies enter the program via other approaches, such as R&D contracts with IARPA or through other transactional authorities.
Ideally, the IC could also go further to support R&D in the private sector and thereby help to bring new externally developed technology into the IC agencies. Support could include funding or the provision of data. A precedent for such actions lies in the joint partnership among NGA, In-Q-Tel, and several commercial companies
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12 Another possibility would be a mechanism such as the Department of State’s Jefferson Science Fellow program, which is described at National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “JSF Opportunities at State,” https://sites.nationalacademies.org/PGA/Jefferson/PGA_172323, accessed August 7, 2022. Related information on a necessary memorandum of understanding that provides for the home institution to keep paying the fellows’ salaries may be found at National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “Memorandum of Understanding Guidelines,” https://sites.nationalacademies.org/PGA/Jefferson/PGA_061588, accessed August 7, 2022.
13 See, for example, the Hawkeye 360 website at https://www.he360.com, accessed August 7, 2022, and other private-sector Earth observation firms and platforms.
called SpaceNet.14 More recently, the Biden administration has formed a task force to look into opening up government data for AI development.15 The IC could explore options for becoming better connected with the equity capital sector, which is now the largest contributor of innovation capital to the U.S. economy. In-Q-Tel plays a role there, but it addresses only a narrow slice of the venture capital market, so more could be done. It may be worthwhile for the IC to examine the way the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (NIH)16 helps NIH interact with and influence private industry, and adapt those insights as options by which the IC could do something analogous. Additional thoughts about how collaboration with the private sector abroad is useful for S&T awareness are given in the Chapter 5 section on “Ways for the IC to Enhance Its Access to, and Awareness of, International S&T.”
Beyond data, the IC might be able to provide other intellectual property (IP) in a more strategic fashion, possibly under the aegis of a CTIO recommended in Chapter 2. The technology transfer process set up under the Bayh-Dole Act is, in the view of many, less than ideal. Most of the mandated technology transfer offices employ a “catalogue” approach in which they passively await companies to come and ask for IP to license, without any consideration of what technology should be commercialized for strategic reasons; these offices then provide little in that transfer process other than a patent license. Few of the most innovative start-ups have the time, resources, or inclination to do such searches and to take big risks on unproven technology. The IC could improve this process by identifying which technologies are strategically important to commercialize, then supporting declassification of certain of those technologies and communicating that to government IP owners. The IC can also help by improving the transfer process, potentially by providing its own inventors and technicians (or those from FFRDCs with which the IC collaborates) to support licensees as they commercialize newly licensed technologies. The IC could also help by covering some of the often significant costs of patenting new technologies for small start-ups. Improving technology transfer would support IC relationships with commercial companies, help grow the technology innovation and industrial base, and support bigger national level strategic needs to compete with, for example, China’s own innovation base.
One way that the IC can support technology transition is to adopt a bridge funding approach. This path would involve funds specifically set aside for in-between contracts and directed at preparing technologies for wider-scale use. The funds would be available for evaluated and tested technologies, following the R&D phase, that need to be used in operations at a relatively small scale. A mechanism would exist for increasing the scale of that funding as they go, until they can get to a full-scale program of record.
A different approach to overcoming the technology transition barrier would be to ask Congress for multi-use funds that can be used to pay for whatever activity (research, procurement, or sustainment) is needed to meet program requirements. DoD has received authority from Congress for multi-use funds for several pilot software development programs. This provides much greater agility during development and implementation of new initiatives. The concept is particularly useful for software and AI development, which in commercial industry are almost always pursued through an agile approach. If granted this authority, ODNI could play a significant role in pushing forward approaches like this to better transition technology into operations across the IC.
RECOMMENDATION 4.4: The Intelligence Community (IC) should adopt more forward leaning policies for working with commercial industry to support joint IC–commercial technology development, such as data sharing, as well as acquisition approaches targeted at more effective scaling and implementation of commercial technologies, such as bridge funding. Note that data sharing should go both ways: from the industry partner to the IC agency as well. In both cases, the IC should, by working directly with industry, become part of the technology development process. Additionally, a benefit to the IC of collaboration with the private sector would be increased science and technology awareness. The IC should adopt more active policies for working with commercial industry to support joint IC–commercial technology development, such as data sharing, as well as acquisition approaches such as bridge funding targeted at more effective scaling and implementation of commercial technologies.
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14 See the SpaceNet website at https://spacenet.ai, accessed August 7, 2022.
15 R. Tracey, 2021, “U.S. Launches Task Force to Open Government Data for AI Research,” The Wall Street Journal, June 10, https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-launches-task-force-to-open-government-data-for-ai-research-11623344400.
16 See the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health website at https://www.fnih.org, accessed August 7, 2022.
