Previous IFPA-Fletcher Conferences

National Security Strategy and Policy:
Planning for and Responding to Threats to the U.S. Homeland

October 28-29, 2004
Ronald Reagan Building
and International Trade Center
Washington, D.C.

John Stammreich, Vice President Homeland Security, Phantom Works, the Boeing Company

Introduction By: Dr. Dale Klein

John Stammreich: Good Afternoon. Well, I guess I am the last panelist of the last panel. This panel is about emerging technologies and their effect on Homeland Security. I gave a presentation a couple weeks ago describing all the leading edge and exciting technologies that Boeing is working on, and I know that I could fill the 15 minutes with a lot of very interesting information on individual technologies. I thought about it and decided there are bigger issues that are really driving what emerging technologies are going to shape the future, so I took a higher level look at it.

Boeing is in a unique position in the homeland security and homeland defense area. We have a major division of our defense operation that is very actively involved in homeland security. We did the very large baggage screening deployment contract where we deployed more that 4000 explosive detection machines into more than 440 airports in six months. We currently have a number of contracts with DHS. But Boeing is also the largest commercial aircraft manufacturer in the United States and we have built 12,000 of the 17,000 commercial airliners that are flying today. As a consequence, we are vitally concerned about the vitality and survival of the commercial aviation sector, which is more than 9% of the gross national product. We, therefore, look at Homeland Security and Homeland Defense from a broader perspective.

With that in mind, my first chart is a chart out of the 9/11 Commission recommendation, one of the many recommendations. I've put in red what I consider to be a strategic direction coming from the Commission (Hard Choices…), and I put in blue what I consider that tactical (Identify…). I can point to a large number of activities right now in the US government that are in the blue (tactical). I have a hard time finding the ones that are in the red (strategic), and that concerns Boeing. The issue, basically, is how do we get into a strategic mode?

You heard Admiral Loy last night talking about the fact that he’s still facing 87 oversight committees. I heard Secretary Ridge a couple weeks ago saying in the last 200 days, he and his staff have been on the Hill 395 times. With that kind of environment, it’s very difficult to sit and talk about what you’d like to work on because you're answering “why aren't you” and “why not?” That is a concern.

In a perfect world, non-political, you’d like to have a balanced, sensible approach, with the realization that you can’t do everything and you can’t build a perfect net. You’d like to focus your investments on balancing effectiveness and affordability. And you’d like to believe that people have the realization that sometimes the responses-- you’ve heard a couple times here in the last two days, that responses have to be carefully weighed so that they don’t do more harm than the attack. The low-hanging fruit, which may seem very attractive, may have unintended consequences.

Now, for a company like Boeing, when we look at things like low-hanging fruit, for instance, wouldn’t it be nice to go put military anti-missile technology on all 17,000 airplanes. That sounds like a wonderful idea. And Boeing might like to see that happen, except for the fact that we install those kinds of systems on military airplanes and we know that the mean time between failure on a commercial airliner black box is 10,000 hours. Anything less than that, Boeing may have to underwrite the cost of selling the airplane to the airlines. Right now, the military is flying systems that have a mean time between failure of 250 to 300 hours. With a commercial airliner flying 3,000 to 4,000 hours a year, that means that every airplane, every month, will require repairing the system. The current military technology doesn’t work in the current air travel system. If we accept the fact that a system could be found to protect commercial airliners from SA7s and SA9s, the terrorists are not sitting still while we are out there putting equipment on 17,000 airplanes over the next seven years. They could have obtained an SA16 and given it to a sympathetic college physics professor somewhere and said, “Go take a CCD out of a Sony camera and make this missile optically guided.” Now you have just spent $5B to equip and $10B per year increased cost to operate the fleet and the public is no safer than when you started. So you’ve got to be careful what you assume is low hanging fruit, because you may not get the result that you think you're going to get.

In a perfect world, you’d really like to move from reactive to proactive. You’d like to detect early, you’d like to be able to enable quick, coordinated, decisive action, and contain the threat as far away as possible. You’d like to emphasize deterrence versus response, and actively deter the threat rather than have to wait for it. To do that, you have to understand what influences and what deters the enemy.

To do all that, you need to have collaboration and integration of information and resources on a broad sense. This chart is another way of looking at that. This is a classic threat deterrence view which basically says what you’d like to drive the terrorists down into the lower left-hand corner from a standpoint of minimizing his payoff from an attack. At the same time, you’d like to drive him to the right-hand corner that basically creates enough uncertainty in his attack where basically he’s going to be discouraged.

So how do you do that? One underlying thing that we see that enables that kind of ability to understand what’s happening across a broad field of sensors and information stovepipes is to have network centric operations or network effects operations. Today, network centric operations are very well accepted within the Department of Defense, and people outside the Department of Defense and US government may think the Department of Defense invented it. Admiral Cebrowski will tell you that is not the way it happened; the broad acceptance came from the commercial side, and the commercial tsunami overwhelmed the Defense Department.

If we were able to get the right information to the right elements at the right time by using the tools you see on the left of this chart; automated cognitive knowledge management, interoperability between new and legacy systems, broadband communication, and visualization systems that fuse imagery into usable intelligence. The visualization software available today is being installed in many airports and many government facilities. It will allow one guard to watch 300 or 400 cameras at one time. These are the kinds of things we need to really be effective.

Those of you who are network centric oriented know what Metcalf’s Law is, the effectiveness of a network increases by the square of the sensors. So to move from reactive to proactive, you need the kind of information access and knowledge management that comes from these kinds of technologies.

We looked at where does this technology come from or who was the early adopter, and on the left of this chart you see all the technologies that we feel are what’s driving this tsunami of network centric operation, and you see it’s quite a list. And you can also see where it came from or who became the early adopter. The majority of the list of enabling technologies came out of the commercial side, and a lot from the military side.

So how has this technology been leveraged and how is it being leveraged? I would argue today that spiral evolution of all the existing nets in the world is underway. Consciously or unconsciously, spiral development is happening. You walk into NORTHCOM and look at the chat rooms that are being used to fuse together all the information coming in from the 39 National, State and Local agencies and it’s all being done by 19-year-old tech specialists and 23-year-old tech sergeants who basically have either written software on the back of an envelope to cross over between the stovepipes or they're doing it in their head. But it’s happening. They're not using the normal requirements, modeling development chain that you would normally expect from a planned top-down deployment of technology.

The Joint War Fighter Interoperability Demonstration, 04, that just took place this summer (which the combatant commands do every year), sponsored by JFCOM, is a great example. Over 100 companies and government agencies demonstrate high readiness level technology (TRL 6+) software and hardware to allow people to communicate together and be interoperable across all the agencies. Because of these types of exercises, I see combatant commands being early adopters. They are learning from those things and they're using their credit cards and they're buying the software and hardware needed to get their job done.

The other thing that’s happening today is there’s a tremendous amount of enhanced data mining and information management going on right now in commercial industry. Today, the battle between Wal-Mart and their competitors is being fought with the latest network centric software tools. They know where every RFID-tagged item is in their food chain, the buying habits of their customers, the environmental factors that influence their customers, suppliers and competitors. And they track all those things in real time to know exactly what they need to compete.

I saw a published quote recently that went on for a paragraph and was all about knowledge management and network centric operations being dominant on the field of conflict and it sounded like I was reading something General Eberhart had written. It not until the end of the paragraph that I realized it was written by the president of a large retail company. They're not just thinking about it, they're doing it.

So where is the future of networks going? The near-term future is a 12-to-18-month cycle. Swarming nets keep growing. Swarming nets is a term I picked up out of Kevin Kelly’s 1998 book New Rules for the New Economy. It’s a book that was written before the dot com bubble burst, but it really describes all these networks that have been written by people that are in use today. A swarming net is, in his vernacular, a network that has been turned loose with a shell of object-oriented rules around it that say “Go out onto the network and learn everything you can about this subject and collaborate”. And they're out there, and it’s amazing. Some of these networks are growing in intelligence way beyond what their creators thought they could do.

Threat correlation, cognitive knowledge management, decision aids are migrating from commercial industry. Right now, if you're a card counter and you walk into a gambling institution anywhere in this country, your face is going to be recognized by the latest facial recognition software and your name’s going to go up on a screen and you're going to be escorted out the door. The gaming industry is using threat correlation software that is very sophisticated.

I also see this whole networked area becoming very biological rather than the traditional electromechanical-- the way it's growing is just the way a cell grows, just the way a baby grows. It collaborates from cell to cell the way it needs to, to function and to grow. It doesn’t wait to be told, it has DNA, it knows what it’s supposed to do, and it just does it as best as it possibly can. So based on all that I have said about how the commercial world have shown that they are the early adopters, I feel quite strongly that commercial forces and practices are going to dominate the networkcentric operational world.

So what are the implications for homeland security? As I said before, understanding the nature of the threat and deterrence are vital to affordability. The search for the Holy Grail/silver bullet sensor is giving way to layered sensors. We just spent a lot of time trying to find a perfect biosensor, the perfect rad sensor, and what we learned was that the threats are so diverse and the scale of the problem so large, that no single technology can provide a useful answer. We learned it with the Post Office. There was no way we were going to find an anthrax sensor that was fast enough to handle the volume of mail, but have a false alarm rate low enough where you wouldn’t be shutting it down all the time. The answer was a layered group of sensors. Every network of sensors we look at, the network is always smarter than an individual sensor, especially if there is a diversity of sensors.

Greatest payoff in this area, I believe, is going to be in the area of automated cognitive information systems that can share and collaborate. And I believe that homeland security capabilities in this area are going to come from technology push rather than requirements pull. When the technology is there, people are going to recognize it, they're going to grab it, and they're going to install it. When people feel that they need to do something that’s right for this country, they're not going to wait to be told to do it; they're going to grab it and do it.

Improvements in information management and collaboration is going to come from the commercial world at their own pace, and their own pace is going to be very quick.

I believe that the collaborative capabilities of these swarming nets and the mobile ad hoc communications that are coming will spontaneously break through organization and cultural barriers. DoCoMo invented the i-mode phone system that allows you to text message each other, and they sold 29 million phones in two years in Japan. There is a book called Smart Mobs that talks about how 10,000 people were rallied in Philippines to force the government to change their mind on an issue, and all the coordination was done by text messaging. So the commercial world is out there with handheld texting capabilities with impressive capability, and the Millennium Generation behind us, the 10-to-19-year-olds, can text message with their thumbs faster than anybody could ever imagine you could type with all ten fingers. So it’s happening.

My last chart, what are the implications of all this? I think the implications are we need to acknowledge the fact that there are complementary advances being made in both commercial and DoD network worlds, and they are boot strapping each other, and they're doing it not because of some government requirement to use commercial technology. For the people who are writing the proposals, the people who are sitting at the terminals, if it’s something that’s going to help them get their job done, they're going to grab it and do it.

To achieve the situational awareness and domain awareness necessary to contain terrorism, we need to take advantage of this natural dynamic of the network world. The current top-down, scripted, architecture-driven R&D development cycle is an artificial overlay on net development. I believe that spiral evolution, infused with technology breakthroughs, is synergistic with the natural evolution of the net.

My last line describes the Net Generation. (I consider everybody from the ages of 10 to 90 who is an early adopter and is very comfortable on the Net as the Net Generation.) I feel that the Net Generation and the Net entities that they spawn will collaborate regardless of the structure to achieve success; whether you want them to or not, they're going to figure out how to do it, they’re going to get the information they need.

I think what we need to do within the government and within industry is to make sure that we’re cognizant of the fact that these tools are out there in the commercial and civil world and they're not the artifact of the Army’s Future Combat System or of some other system. This is the world that’s driving both the US economy and it’s driving the Asian economy and it’s just starting to drive the European economy. It's the world we live in.

Thank you. [Applause]