schneiderism

Over the last 50 years nothing has driven technology innovation like the military industrial complex. Sure, academic institutions, independent researchers, and private industry have achieved many things, but for sheer volume nothing can touch what the United States military technology research behemoth has accomplished. For researchers, this is where the big money lies and we’re talking about projects in areas beyond armaments and weapons like networking science, trauma medicine, communications, materials sciences, robotics, and transportation. Behind this is DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is the central force behind the Department of Defense research initiatives that we usually hear about after they are no longer relevant. Their motto is “Bridging The Gap,” which may be a stretch. Regardless, DARPA is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, and along with that celebrating 50 years of technology innovation… some of which is not actually used to kill people.

Oddly silly promotional video for DARPA’s 50th:

Found this video via Ares.

I cannot help but be riveted by the concept of network science, actually an emerging scientific discipline that combines interacting physical, informational, biological, cognitive, and social networks… and in a way that scares me a little bit. It seems that the Department of Defense shares my fascination, but not my hesitations. The Pentagon is devoting resources (now up to $7.5 million in research grants) to what it deems a priority area of investigation and research in the effort to understand complex and variable networks. This is directly related to how the Pentagon and related constituents can then work on an understanding of the structure of the diffuse networks employed by our nation’s enemies. An underlying goal of this research is the ability to anticipate who might join such a network, which takes threat assessment to an entirely different level. So, network science would seem to be a holy grail, of sorts, for the abstract goal of developing predictive modeling. Again, very interesting and very scary, and surprising that it only garners $7.5 million currently. I suspect that will be increasing once efficacy is established. How does the military view network science:

“Initiation of a field of network science would be appropriate to provide a body of rigorous results that would improve the predictability of the engineering design of complex networks and also speed up basic research in a variety of applications areas.”

That’s from a 2005 report by the United States Army, which I have excerpted from a post at DangerRoom, Wired’s national security blog that pretty much gets my attention every day, and where I first came across this story.