U.S. Priorities

Strengthening National, Homeland, and Economic Security

National security, homeland security, and economic security - the three interconnected Administration priorities set forth by President Bush in his January 29 State of the Union address - have turned an unprecedented spotlight on the critical significance of advanced information technologies in safeguarding American citizens and institutions in the 21st century. In the war on terrorism, capabilities conceived through Federal investment in fundamental IT R&D are being deployed in advanced weaponry, battlefield econnaissance, and information operations environments; bioterrorism countermeasures; intelligence gathering and analysis; increased security for critical U.S. infrastructure, including digital communications systems; and surveillance of our national borders and visitor access processes. And in its plan for the 2003 fiscal year, Dr. Marburger said at a recent scientific gathering, "the President's Budget acknowledges that the Nation's highest priorities are all served by investments in science, engineering, and education."

In the computing field, Moore's Law has for three decades reliably predicted the doubling of transistors per silicon chip - and thus computing speeds and IT advances - every 18 months. Today's IT components must be rapidly and continuously improved to sustain U.S. technological leadership for both national security and economic development.

The NITRD agencies are active participants in Administration working groups that have been tasked on a rapid-response basis to coordinate Federal technological resources and needs for combatting terrorism. In recent remarks to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans noted that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) within the Department of Commerce (DOC) supports 75 programs related to defense against terrorism. NIST is also the formal research and technical resource for FEMA efforts to apply state-of-the-art technologies to disaster preparedness and crisis response. The Secretary also cited the role of NOAA, another DOC agency, in providing satellite-based weather and environmental analysis capabilities that help counter terrorist threats and strengthen U.S. economic security. In addition, NITRD agency funding supports the development of the Nation's leading IT, science, and engineering researchers, including the foremost specialists in cybersecurity technologies and tools. (Please see Enhancing IT Education and Training for the High-Skills World for more on NITRD's role in building the skilled IT workforce that U.S. economic security requires.)

NITRD agencies are also participating in the development of a plan for a long-term integrated supercomputing R&D program to strengthen national security. In its report accompanying the FY 2002 Defense appropriation bill, Congress tasked the Secretary of Defense to prepare such a plan by July 2002.

The information technologies now being fielded in U.S. counterterrorism activities represent the outflow of the IT R&D pipeline. Fundamental Federal IT research keeps the pipeline full of powerful, innovative ideas so that nextgeneration technical advances can be prototyped and commercially developed even as the current generation is deployed. This is the process that fueled the digital revolution and continues to drive U.S. economic growth.

Particularly in the areas of critical and networking infrastructure protection and intelligence management, national and homeland security require:

• Intensified research in cybersecurity technologies and methods to develop advanced networks that can replace the vulnerabilities of today's Internet with self-healing, trusted, high-bandwidth systems for secure U.S. commerce, communication, and connectivity
• Advanced software algorithms for high-performance data mining, synthesis, analysis, and management of massive quantities of unstructured, heterogeneous information from many sources
• New hardware and software assurance technologies
• Innovative methods to protect U.S. citizens from theft and misuse of their identity information and to assure the security of travel

Major Research Challenges

• Cost-effective advances in high-end computing to provide the data storage and compute power for intelligence analysis, high-performance national defense systems, and critical scientific research
• Large-scale data mining, intelligence analysis, and information management technologies
• Advanced cryptography and authentication technologies for secure communications
• New methods to achieve security, attack-resistance, and self-healing in high-speed wireless and wired networks
• Embedded, networked sensor technologies for reconnaissance and autonomous weapons systems
• High-assurance software design for mission-critical systems
• Improved interfaces and interoperability of heterogeneous, multimodal IT devices and functionalities

CIA Report: Maintain U.S. Leadership in Key Technologies To Enhance National Security

Federal IT R&D investments also play a long-range strategic role in sustaining the Nation's overall strength, according to a November 2001 report by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In the report, "Global Technology Scenarios Through 2015," a panel of experts concludes that U.S. national and economic security in the years ahead will be inextricably linked to our continuing world leadership in science and technology innovation.

The panel identifies six technologies - gene therapy, wireless communications, image understanding, cloned or tailored organisms, MicroElectroMechanical Systems (MEMS), and nanotechnology - as those most likely to have "high impact" on U.S. national security.

The rapid emergence of these high-impact technologies is enabled by cutting-edge IT capabilities - such as computational modeling, simulation, and interactive digital instrumentation - pioneered in Federal R&D, and all the high-impact technologies will rely on continuing advances in IT R&D to further their development. Four of the six technologies - wireless communications, image understanding, MEMS technologies, and nanotechnologies for advanced computation and computing components - are the focus of current research in the NITRD Program.

Five additional technologies that the CIA panel calls "enablers" are seen as having a significant impact on national security by 2015 if technological innovation, market demand, and synergy among the emerging technologies are all robust between now and then. The enablers are: optical communications, regenerative medicine, efficient software development, sensor webs, and advanced materials.

Three of these five enabling technologies are high priorities today in the Federal NITRD program, and research in the other two areas - regenerative medicine and advanced materials - requires high-end data storage and management, computation, and networking technologies developed by the NITRD agencies.

Among the hallmarks of new technologies that are successfully adopted, the panel notes, are that they result from Federal or commercial R&D "in specific fields of technological innovation" and "they are platform technologies with many potential spinoff applications." Predicting that the pace of technological change will accelerate over the period examined, the panel envisions that all six of the high-impact technologies will have been adopted in the U.S. by 2015.

The uncertainties affecting the relative advantage or disadvantage for this country, the panel concludes, lie in "the intensity of technological development, the degree of U.S. leadership, and the level of diffusion of technologies (new and existing) to developed, developing, and less developed nations."

The panel argues that "the United States is well positioned to maintain its current leadership role in technology." But it cautions that "continued investments by government and industry in R&D" and "an educational system capable of producing sufficient graduates in science, engineering, and medicine" will be critical to sustaining U.S. preeminence.