Basic science and the transition to useful military products

Here is more from the Combat Capabilities Development Command’s commanding general Cedric Wins on the US Army CCDC In the Lab Podcast.

You have to have an appreciation for the length of time that it takes to discover things. You also have an appreciation that often times discover is exactly that, it isn’t something you plan for, it’s something that you kind of stumble upon. There are times when that discovery may come in a short period of time, but what I’ve learned from the scientists and engineers in this community is that those discoveries won’t come for years and years down the road.

I’m also a believer in the concept of discovery, as opposed to assuming all the information was already available up front for an analytical exercise. Over time, it would seem, with a growth of knowledge and decrease in uncertainty, analysis becomes more useful. If the weapon systems approach were taken, where we are developing unique components for a clean-sheet platform, then analytical knowledge probably isn’t available until mid-way through operational testing. Errors made in any given component need to be smoothed over, perhaps with costly production/sustainment procedures, to continue along the integration plan.

But if there were independent lines of effort across a range of components, subsystems, and systems, each analyzing the test information gained from lower-levels of effort, then I think we would find a better interaction between technology-push/discovery and requirements-pull/analysis. It would proceed incrementally.

However, when I hear scientists and engineers claiming that a research effort will take a long period of time to find applied development, I get nervous. At such an early stage, I don’t think you can say whether scientific research effort has military applications, and thus, it is probably something that, if fruitful, would already be pursued by the academic or industrial communities.

The bias, it should seem, is for applied development which will expose subproblems that will direct our efforts should any fundamental research be needed.