Homeland security master degree

Byline: Kyle Balluck

In February, Virginia Gov. Mark Warner (D) announced the formation of the Institute for Defense and Homeland Security , a consortium that brings together university, industry and federal research and development efforts. Its first executive director is Hugh Montgomery , a 30-year veteran of military research and development programs.

Personal Background

I have six patents. I actually worked as an undergraduate at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It's interesting to be able to have a liaison with them again. I started after graduation from college -- I went to a little school called Mississippi College -- I started at Dahlgren Naval Surface Warfare Center and my personal background was reactive materials and physical chemistry of reactive materials and weapons R&D. Some of my patents have to do with technologies that later became flame and incendiary weapons. You may have seen the thermobaric weapons that were used in Afghanistan. I have some of the early patents on the work in that area. We didn't call it thermobarics then, we called it reactive fragmentation, but it's some of the same basic technologies.

I went to graduate school at the University of Tennessee. And actually, I have a master's degree. I have two doctoral dissertations, but they're both classified. So I've done all the work for the doctorate, I actually graduated first in my class, but I'm a mister instead of a doctor because they can't publish the dissertations. ... I'll probably die a mister instead of a doctor because of it though.

Initial Focus

It's hard to focus on [the Department of Homeland Security] at this point because they are forming themselves as we speak. It's very difficult to take 22 agencies, put them all in together and then have suddenly a well-oiled machine. It doesn't work that way, particularly the size of that agency. Secretary Ridge has a huge challenge on his hands to be able to bring those disparate groups together in one set of objectives and common goals and common cultures. The cultures for each organization are different. ... The Department of Defense is a long-established entity, one that I've grown up in and understand well. So my near-term goals will focus on known program opportunities within DOD -- not at all ignoring opportunities within DHS.

Gaps in the Federal R&D Infrastructure

One of the things many people are not aware of is that we've lost a whole generation of scientific and technological help as people retire from the Vietnam era. ... Back in the '60s, we were in the space race and it was a very patriotic, romantic and any other adjectives you want to add thing to become part of the science and technology community -- to put a man on the moon by 1970. After NASA succeeded in its moon race and after Vietnam began to wind down, the federal laboratory infrastructure tended to back off in hiring for about 10 or 15 years.

It wasn't until Ronald Reagan became president that that began to turn around again. There was then a reset of the hiring practices. There was a large number of people that came in in the Reagan years. And then another change in the paradigm in the '90s when they began the federal downsizing. That's continued to this day. Because of that, you have a generation of people that are in their upper 50s that are ready to retire or already retired that are exceptionally talented. CLICK TO HEAR MORE

Filling the Gap

Universities tend to look at science and research far, far out -- 10, 15, 20 years. They're developing science. Businesses -- and this could be a shipbuilder, or Intel, or Microsoft -- have to satisfy their stockholders and the movement of business opportunities over a very short term, usually two years or less. So that leaves a huge gap between the two-year point where industry takes over things and the 15-year point where academia does science and technology. And traditionally, that's been done by the federal government.

You have the federal government taking the risks of developing new technology and then handing it off to the private sector to produce. With those people leaving ... the paradigm has to change. Because the people are not there. If we're going to maintain our lead in science and technology internationally, it means that universities have to look in closer, to become more applied. And businesses, industry, will have to take a little bit more risk and look further out. But there will still be a gap. And that's the role that I see IDHS stepping into to help. As the federal government is less capable of doing that because the people are not there, the institutes like IDHS can come in to help transition research into development and then ultimately into production. So that it becomes a win-win for us, for academia, for business and for the nation. CLICK TO HEAR MORE

The Federal Budget

One of the problems that is not well known with the federal government is that the science and technology portion of the budget, whether it be DOD or other agencies, has dropped steadily since the Vietnam/space race era. I know the budget I was responsible for -- the Department of the Navy, which was in the $3+ billion range in the '60s, in today's dollars, is down to about $1.2 billion, I think, now. It's dropped down by about two thirds. ... The last budget I was responsible for, the science and technology budget of the Navy, as it came out of my office, dropped on the order of 40-48 percent. While the top line of the department of the Navy went up. So there was more money in the budget, but less money in science and technology.

The reason for that is not just in the military, we have an aging infrastructure. It costs more to keep airplanes flying and ships at sea and things like that because the hardware tends to be older. And we've also raised the pay or our military people, which I fully support. But those are costs that tend to be paid right now. And those costs have to be traded off in a zero-sum budget against other things. And research and technology are areas that will not give you a direct payoff in 10 or 15 years.

The GPS Model

I was at the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren back in the early '70s. ... We had a joint meeting with the Naval Research Laboratory, looking at how to spend our internal science and technology dollars. These were very small pots of money. And you gave them only your best and brightest people because it was this was your seed corn for the future. ... In '73, your TV had vacuum tubes, your world was analog, the idea of a home computer was not even a gleam in the eye. And this bright scientist from Naval Research Lab came in and said we've been working on precise timekeeping research for about six or eight years and we think we have the ability now to create a new system called global positioning system -- GPS. And if you think of 1973 terms -- that would have been Buck Rogers to the extreme -- but he said we can do a prototype of this to see if it's going to work.

I think they asked for $150,000 for NRL and $150,000 for Dahlgren to check it out, to see if it would work. And that program was on the borderline of being funded. Everything above it was going to be funded, everything below it was not. And the argument was whether to fund that one. And if you think about it, as a Buck Rogers program, in terms of dollars, it looked like we would be launching a dozen satellites at about a billion dollars apiece. So that's kind of hard to fathom. And then if we launched them, it's going to send a signal that will tell you you're sitting in this room. And in 1973, that was really hard to believe. But we decided that a technology like that would have such payoff that it was worth investing in. So we did. After we put a little of money in it, the Air Force put some additional money into it, the Navy put in more money and it built up and became what it is today. We didn't have a single idea of this being commercial. CLICK TO HEAR MORE

Repurposing Technology

One of the things I am going to try to focus on is to try to use as much existing technology and hardware and infrastructure as possible and minimize, if we can, building new things. I'll give you an example. I just submitted a proposal for ... a program called Red Cell. The Oak Ridge national lab has been working for some time to get to build chemical, nuclear and biological detectors that will react in ones of seconds so that they're tactically significant if there's any kind of an emergency -- chemical release or whatever.