Flash Gordon Left Me The Keys

Think Tank Taps Defense Dollars

A 12-member think tank within Sandia National Laboratories hopes to become the star technology-solution center for the government's security concerns.

Sandia grew out of the Manhattan Project, America's push to develop the atomic bomb during World War II. While many of Sandia's daily operations still center on nuclear weapons development and management, the lab is shifting its focus to the hot-button field of security. The Advanced Concepts Group think tank is looking ahead to all kinds of possible national and global security threats -- and trying to determine what the lab can do to counter them.

"ACG is focused on developing solutions to future national security threats and problems that don't yet exist," said Gerry Yonas, vice president and principal scientist at Sandia in Albuquerque, New Mexico. "(With ACG) we speed up the new idea generation and exploration process within Sandia, and stimulate creativity outside the day-to-day lab requirements."

Since 1999, ACG members have been paid exclusively to think. Their mandate is to create big ideas to meet constantly changing and complex U.S. defense priorities. The PhDs, MBAs, engineers, social scientists -- and even an artist -- who are members serve two-year stints.

Sandia is funded primarily by the Department of Energy (to the tune of $1.5 billion per year), but the lab still must seek nearly $500 million to meet this year's budget. The Department of Defense, with a yearly budget of nearly $380 billion, is a primary target as Sandia searches for additional funding.

"As with everyone else in the defense industry, Sandia has been looking at their current capabilities and how these can be retooled to the homeland security market," said John E. Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org, a defense consultancy.

Yonas, with more than 30 years in the defense industry under his belt, worked on the Strategic Defense Initiative (remember President Reagan's Star Wars program?) and today leads ACG. His goal is to "infect" the rest of the Sandia organization with ideas created within ACG.

For instance, Yonas describes a smart network in development at Sandia that came out of ACG. It is formed by tiny sensors that can "see, decide, act and communicate" with one another and with humans, military terminology that's referred to as "SDAC."

The network forms an electronic skin that covers an area as large as several miles, collecting real-time, ubiquitous, persistent information about the area, terrain and even enemy location. Yonas would like policy makers to imagine these sensors dropped into hostile territory, like the mountains of Afghanistan or the cities of Iraq, delivering information to U.S. troops long before an invasion begins.

"It seems that the brain trust at Sandia is trying to think up new proposals that the Bush administration is willing to fund," said Christopher Paine, a senior nuclear weapons analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental organization with a long history of litigation against the defense industry.

"The U.S. secretary of defense is a big sucker and seems to buy off on anything, which is an ideal situation for weapons entrepreneurs like Sandia," said Paine.

Though the defense industry is flooded with private industry offerings, Sandia's chief competition comes from federal labs such as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

According to analysts, Sandia has been well-managed historically and, because it built non-nuclear components, the lab hasn't been limited to nuclear tasks. This diversity helped win Sandia a broader market base than other labs.

With security scandals and management questions plaguing Los Alamos and other labs, ACG could be in a strong position to help shape national defense initiatives.

"Sandia is one of 26 labs (within the Department of Energy) and seems the most capable of self-promotion, which when competing for funding, projects and personnel is not necessarily a bad thing," said Jeff McKaughan, senior analyst with the Teal Group, an aerospace and defense consulting firm.

ACG members work in an open, informal office environment in New Mexico, where they interact with each other in a near-constant state of brainstorming. Leaving formal titles at the door, everyone in the group, no matter how senior by title or age, is equal in stature and opinion. If a picture of chaos and ineffectiveness leaps to mind, ACG members tell a different story.

"Sitting around yakking at each other has been very useful," said Yonas.

"What we lack in efficiency, we make up for in end products and ideas," said Ben Wu, a current ACG member. Wu heads up a project that uses a computer-based simulation tool to mock up street gangs in a game-like environment. The ACG team plays with scenarios that could cause street gangs to form, and tests ways to combat the resulting problems.

"We have no illusions that this is an oracle that can tell you what will happen," said Wu, who heads up the project. "But it will give you scenarios of what could happen, which is a lot better than having no way to test these theories at all."

The simulation project springs from the notion that the root causes of terrorism can be determined and the steps to eradicate it completely can be visualized and tested. The tool can be applied to all kinds of social and economic theories and potential solutions to societal problems.

Ideas generated by ACG that reach fruition often are developed by Sandia, but some ACG members take the work that comes out of their teams outside the Sandia umbrella.

Vipin Gupta spent his time at Sandia helping plan the binational sustainability laboratory, or BNSL (PDF), a joint project currently in development on the U.S.-Mexico border that is designed to stimulate economic growth and foster collaboration in the region. Gupta is now working with Stanford University as a science fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation to make the project a reality.

"Sandia is one of the more important labs, primarily due to its work in the nuclear field," said Teal Group's McKaughan. "But they also have far-reaching research, futuristic thinking and programs that are key to the Department of Defense's future."

ACG is banking on it.