Q & A with Cynthia Gonsalves acting director office of Technology Transition Office of the Deputy under Secretary of Defense

CHIPS, April-June, 2008

CHIPS: It sounds like a complex process. Are you looking at a 20-year program?

Ms. Gonsalves: Absolutely not! We are trying to accelerate that timeline. We would all like to see something out there today and tomorrow, but reality is that it takes time to do things. For the Technology Transition Initiative, my goal is two years because it fits the DoD budget cycle.

If I have a program manager committing to buy something two years from now, I am willing to put in two years of funding. Other things may take longer. Some of our projects have gone out to four years; the preference is to keep them shorter. Remember, I am not looking at basic research. We are looking at things that are mid-level maturity.

CHIPS: When you talk about these marvelous technologies ... are you working with all the services and government labs, not just industry?

Ms. Gonsalves: We have between 80 and 100 laboratory sites in the Defense Department.

CHIPS: Are you working with academia?

Ms. Gonsalves: Absolutely! We work with universities, other federal government laboratories and headquarters-level organizations, all the DoD laboratory structure and the private sector.

CHIPS: There have been observations in the technology press lately that the Defense Department was once the leader in technology; for example, in the development of ARPANET, the origin of the Internet, but that is no longer the case.

Ms. Gonsalves: Our office looks at that in terms of the amount of dollars we are investing in research and development and the amount of dollars the private sector is putting into research and development. If you look at the trend for the last 20 years, while our DoD R&D budget is increasing, industry is investing significantly more in independent research and development.

We used to fund about 75 to 80 percent of basic research in this country, but DoD is now funding about 20 percent. Industry has picked up the remainder.

Mr. Appler: But that is not just DoD; that goes across the whole federal government. The numbers Cynthia mentioned apply across the whole federal spectrum, including agriculture and energy. Up until the early 1980s, the federal government was the big bill payer in basic and applied research and advanced development in the United States. In that 20-year period, it switched over to the private sector, and the federal government and private industry traded places.

One major exception is NIH (National Institutes of Health) because Congress made a national commitment to double their research budget. The NIH basic and applied research budget is larger than the rest of the federal government research budget put together. That was a conscious shift.

Let me give you a different perspective. In the 1960s, the Defense Department was probably the biggest bill payer in pushing technology and state-of-the-art communications technology. With the advent of cellular phone technology and Internet technology, the federal government is a small percentage in that total marketplace.

We are not driving that train any more. We are trying to find ways to see what industry is doing from a commercial point of view to leverage it for DoD. The major investment is taking place in the private sector because that is the major source of income to that industry.