Q&A: DNI Chief Scientist Eric Haseltine
It's not only pertinent to do the right things, you have to do them the right way, by which I mean fast! We are a lot of things in the intelligence community, but we are not known for our speed of innovation, and there are good reasons for that. Where you're fighting a war, to experiment with radical, new, fast stuff is somewhat difficult, so somebody has to have the ability, outside of the urgency of a war, to try new things and to speed things up. If we only do "ho-hum" stuff, in the aggregate are we really going to surprise anybody? Are we going to be surprised? Can we be as agile as some of our enemies?
What surprised you about the current job here? Was it pretty much as you imagined?
Well, what surprised me, in part, was the astonishing breadth and depth of the technology issues that we face as a community. When you think of the scope of the whole enterprise, it's broad and deep, and the dynamic range or bandwidth that one has to have to understand is jaw-dropping. You have to understand optics, radar, communications technology, nanotechnology, chemistry, biology…it's mind boggling. There's almost no technology out there that isn't hugely relevant to us. I knew conceptually that was the case, but when I started drilling down at each agency and what it was they actually did, that's the first thing that just hits you like a ton of bricks.
Everything is relevant?
Everything is relevant, everything is deep and complicated and moving fast. It's the sheer breathtaking scope of the enterprise and the technology. You know, it's kind of like when I was a kid at Boy Scout camp, they had us get our swimming merit badge in 39-degree water, and you're sitting there going "Uhhh," trying to catch your breath. That's how it kind of felt for the first few months.
Is there something that could illustrate the extraordinary depth and complexity?
Sure. We have a fellows program that we've instituted to identify the very best people and get them together to cooperate. Whenever I get a chance, I call them up and find out what they're doing, because these are the thought leaders. There is one of these individuals who has figured out how to come right up to the edge of what physics allows and do some things that just surprise the heck out of me. I didn't think they were possible. It astonished me that anyone would think to do it.
The one word that best describes it is "audacity." This person was a physicist who said, "You know, if I looked at this, not as an intelligence problem but as a physics problem–what is the absolute limit of what physics will let me do? I'm going to try to come as close to that limit as I possibly can." He has accomplished astonishing feats that are very relevant to the war on terror–relevant to finding terrorists in real time.
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