to get anywhere. You have to deal with existing lab structure. An ARPA-like organization cannot succeed if, in fact, it was supposed to support and integrate all those labs and use that as its basis of success, and then they have to deal with the incumbent business interests. One of the key things, examples of DARPA, was how it created information technology capability despite the fact that IBM dominated all of the information technology development at the time that it created that very successful program, but it did it by not having to directly address but create alternatives to those incumbent capabilities. So my suggestion is that there is value in an ARPA energy that could be created, but if you are going to do that you have to understand that first of all you need to have that galvanized focus, you need to have an approach that is allowed to be independent, and it has to have top-level leadership if it is going to succeed. Thank you. [The prepared statement of Mr. Van Atta follows:] ENERGY AND CLIMATE CHANGE RESEARCH AND THE "DARPA MODEL" DR. RICHARD VAN ATTA' Prepared Testimony for The Committee on Government Reform House of Representatives SEPTEMBER 21, 2006 With energy and climate issues increasingly the focus of public policy discussions, the notion that a special research organization—sometimes referred to as ARPA-E-should be created has emerged as one alternative for focusing resources and management attention. More specifically, there have been calls to create a new entity, modeled on the notably successful Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, to perform advanced R&D directed at finding technological solutions to the climate change challenge.2 Having spent a fair amount of time looking at DARPA's research program over the years I have been asked what would it take for such an organization to be established and be successful drawing from the historical perspective of the unique organization that it would emulate-DARPA. This will be the focus of my remarks today. Some key questions we might consider in our discussion are 1. How similar are the type of research tasks of DARPA to those entailed in addressing energy and climate change and how are they different? 2. What are DARPA's key organizational features that have contributed to success and could those features be replicated within the political and 1 The author is a research staff member at the Institute for Defense Analyses. The views expressed in this testimony are solely those of the author, and they do not represent the views of the Institute for Defense Analyses, the Department of Defense or any other individual or organization. 2 The DARPA model-sometimes referred to as ARPA-E, or E-ARPA, has been suggested in several venues, most notably in the National Academies' Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future, National Academies, Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy (COSEPUP), 2006, economic environment surrounding energy and climate change in the executive branch, Congress, and private industry? 3. Are DARPA's 'cultural features' that have been central to its success reproducible under the various possible contemporary arrangements for addressing energy and climate change? As a former Department of Defense and Department of Energy executive, Dr. Appealing as the DARPA model is, energy and climate-related technology development would present new and different challenges. For example, DARPA does not create for the market – even though technology developed by DARPA has succeeded in the marketplace. Its customer is the Secretary of Defense and ultimately the armed services. Most of the technologies relevant to energy and climate solutions will have private sector customers. This is a problem that DARPA has not had to confront. Still, DARPA offers valuable lessons concerning managing and spurring successful technological innovation. It may be that an imperfect solution to the challenge of technology development still might improve on the record of existing institutions.3 Understanding DARPA We begin this discussion with the following questions 3 What is the "DARPA Model”, which, as we will explain, raises the question "Which DARPA?" What were the origins of DARPA and how did it evolve? What have been DARPA's "successes"-why is it so well regarded? What is the basic "motif" of DARPA success and what are key factors in achieving success? What is relevance of DARPA model for other policy areasparticularly energy and climate research? The "DARPA Model" DARPA's primary mission is to foster advanced technologies and systems that create "revolutionary" advantages for the US military. Consistent with this mission, DARPA is independent from the military Services and pursues higher-risk research and development (R&D) projects with the aim of achieving higher-payoff results 3 John Deutch, "What Should the Government Do To Encourage Technical Change in the Energy Sector?" MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, Report No. 120, May 2005. than those obtained from more incremental R&D. DARPA program managers are encouraged to challenge existing approaches to warfighting and to seek results rather than just explore ideas. Hence, in addition to supporting technology and component development, DARPA has on occasion funded the integration of largescale "systems of systems" in order to demonstrate what we call today "disruptive capabilities." Underlying this "high-risk-high payoff” motif of DARPA is a set of operational and organizational characteristics that Deutch and others have referenced including its relatively small size; its lean, non-bureaucratic structure; its focus on potentially change-state technologies; its highly flexible and adaptive research program. We will return to these characteristics later. What is important to understand at the outset is that in contrast to the then existing Defense research environment, ARPA was manifestly different. It did not have labs. It did not focus on existing military requirements. It was separate from any other operational or organizational elements. It was explicitly chartered to be different, so it could do fundamentally different things than had been done by the Military Service R&D organizations. The reason for this dramatic departure was that President Eisenhower and his key advisors had determined that the existing R&D system had failed to respond to the realities of the emerging national security threat embodied by the Soviet Union. This threat was manifest in a crescendo event-the launching in 1958 of the Sputnik satellite. The response to this not only the creation of a research entity to perform research that others had not adequately pursued, but to embed this organization within a newly created oversight structure reporting to the Secretary of Defense-namely the Director, Defense Research and Engineering, or DDR&E. DARPA's origins: Strategic Challenges ~1958 ARPA was initially chartered in response to the orbiting of the Sputnik satellite, which raised the specter of the Soviet Union as a technological as well as political threat to the United States. Sputnik itself demonstrated that the USSR not only had ambitions in space, but also had developed the wherewithal to launch missiles with nuclear capabilities to strike the continental United States. Therefore, at the outset ARPA was focused initially on three key areas as Presidential Issues: space, missile defense and nuclear test detection. Regarding the first issue, space, soon after its birth a large element of · Soon, based on the initiative of Director of Defense Research and Engineering (DDR&E), John S. Foster, a counterinsurgency program (AGILE) was started as the Vietnam War heated up. * The original name, Advanced Research Projects Agency, ARPA, was changed in 1972 to Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA. Briefly in 1993-95 the Clinton Administration reverted back to ARPA, but in 1996, the Congress mandated that the name be changed back to DARPA. In historical references I use the name of the organization at that time, either ARPA or DARPA, but for general discussion the current title, DARPA, is used. 5 Herbert York states it was well understood in ARPA that its broad role in space programs was temporary, with the creation of NASA already in the works both in the White House and in Congress, see Herbert York, Making Weapons, Talking Peace, Basic Books, New York, 1987, p. 143. |