Best and the Brightest Forge a Way Ahead.

• Author: Lewis, Mark J.
• Position: Emerging Technology Horizons

* NDIA created the Emerging Technologies Institute with the overarching goal of delivering critical new technologies into the hands of our warfighters. To do that, it is very clear that there is a list of technologies that will have, and in many cases are already having, a transformative impact on the future of warfare.

But it isn't enough to merely advocate for those broad technology areas; equally important is focusing the Defense Department's precious research-and-development dollars on the right projects that will have the biggest payoffs.

Not every idea in artificial intelligence, or directed energy, or even hypersonics, will make sense from a practical standpoint, or even from an operator's point of view. Every dollar spent on bad science or a dead end is a wasted dollar that could have been spent on something more useful.

That is why it is important to be skeptical, in a scientifically rigorous way, of even the most promising-sounding ideas.

We need to take risks; and indeed, America's willingness to invest in high-risk, high-payoff science has been one of the keys to our scientific and technological prowess. But there is a difference between investing in risky ideas and things that are just plain dumb.

In her classic book Imaginary Weapons, author Sharon Weinberger explored the world of Pentagon science, including an examination of how fringe ideas sometimes get funded by mainstream defense organizations. Though her work is full of comedic elements, including descriptions of actual half-baked research projects that a well-educated high-school physics student would have recognized as absurd, it carries the somber warning that there is at times a "fuzzy line between heartfelt conviction and obsessive delusion."

Weinberger highlights defense programs that had very little scientific grounding but were still funded at significant levels, showing that when credentialed experts raised concerns they were often ignored.

In sorting through the myriad proposals and pitched concepts, the Defense Department must be able to separate the proverbial wheat from the chaff, zeroing in on the most promising ideas and avoiding the ones that are infeasible, impractical, or downright impossible.

This creates an extremely difficult challenge: err on the side of being too conservative and a scientific portfolio can stagnate; but allow bad science a foothold and that portfolio becomes significantly diminished in both quality and impact. That is why we need...