Q&A: DNI Chief Scientist Eric Haseltine
And we've gone out to the science and technology labs and we said, "Hey, can we do some experimental new things against real mission problems today?" And, of course, we've had some successes in the IED front, in the war on terror
Do you have enough resources to do the job? Are we playing catch-up?
Well, we have pointed out that there could be a lot of "bang for the buck" at the margin for new investments in S&T, but you're not going to get me to complain about resources at this point. I think the first year has really been about, "Let's make the most of what we've already got." The fact of the matter is, I came from private industry–the Walt Disney Co.–and I know how much money I had there, versus how much money I can influence here. … [Laughter] I think that we can make a tremendous amount of headway just being more intelligent and using what we've already got.
You talked about criticism that the intelligence community lacks imagination. Do you still encounter that as a problem? Are we on the cusp where we need to make some paradigm shifts in how we even conceive of intelligence, how we think about collection?
I think we have a lot of room for improvement in that arena. The way I imagine the historical record of the intelligence community–back in the early '60s, we were very fast, we put the U-2 together in under a year, Corona went up very quickly, the Glomar Explorer. … these programs were measured in months rather than in decades. I do believe that we've become somewhat addicted to those big-ticket, decade-long, acquisition programs. What worries me most is the lack of agility in the system. I wouldn't say "imagination" as much as I would say "novelty," because some of the big-ticket items that take a decade and many billions of dollars are quite ingenious.
But we don't get points for being ingenious. We get points for finding terrorists and keeping America safe. And here is my vision, unfortunately, of what is more the rule than the exception, that we have this big rusty gear of innovation that creaks along, where we have a much faster gear winding it a zillion RPM next to it, and the teeth of the gears are not meshing. We are very slow, cumbersome, and take a long time to get stuff out there, which ultimately doesn't necessarily surprise anybody. So, the main transformation I would like to see is for us to get as agile or more agile than our adversaries. You know, when we do things to counter IEDs, they react very quickly. We've got to get out of that cycle. You know, we are not anymore faced only with big nation-states that are big bureaucracies like we are. We're faced with people who, if they want to go out and get technology, they just go buy it.
Let me give you an example of something that we're toying with–it's the idea of disposable technology. One of the reasons things take so long is we have to plan for their supportability: Who's going to operate it, who's going to maintain it, what about spares, what about upgrades, how are we going to get things fixed out in the field…? And what happens is that creates a lot of inertia in the system.
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