The Role of Computing in National Defense Technology
Bob Selden
Bob Selden received his B.A. degree from Pomona College, Claremont, California, and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
He worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1979 to 1988, then served as science advisor to the Air Force Chief of Staff and to the Secretary of the Air Force from 1988 to 1991. Subsequently, he returned to Los Alamos in his current position as an Associate Director for Laboratory Development. In this capacity, his principal responsibilities include providing the strategic interface with the Department of Defense.
Bob Selden has received both the Air Force Association's Theodore von Karman Award for outstanding contributions to defense science and technology and the Air Force Decoration for exceptional civilian service.
The focus of my presentation is on the use of computers and computational methods in the research and development of defense technology and on their subsequent use in the technology, itself. I approach this subject from a strategic standpoint.
Technology for defense is developed to provide the capabilities required to carry out tasks in support of our defense policy and strategy. Considering the broad scope of defense policy and strategy, and the capabilities needed to support them, makes the fundamental role of computers and computational methods self-evident.
Our national security policy can be simply stated as our commitment to protect our own freedom and our way of life and to protect those same things for our friends and allies around the world. National security strategy can be put into two broad categories. The first category is deterring nuclear war. The second is deterring or dissuading conventional war and, failing that, maintaining the capability to conduct those actions that are necessary at the time and place you need to conduct them.
These simply stated strategy objectives provide the basis for the defense forces that exist today. As we look into the future, the characteristics of the kinds of systems that the military has to have are forces that are mobile and have speed, flexibility, and a lot of lethality. You may have to attack tank armies in the desert and go in and shoot weapons at the enemy one at a time with an airplane, against an enemy that has sophisticated defenses, which can result in many losses of airplanes and pilots. You also need accuracy. For instance, suppose the U.S. has to go in and take out all of the facilities related only to chemical warfare. In that case, chemical storage sites and the means of delivering chemical weapons would have to be exactly targeted. To have the fundamental capability to do any of those things, we need systems that provide information, communications, and command and control, as well as the ability to make all the elements tie together so that we know where those elements are, when they are going to be there, how to organize our forces, and how to make the best use of those forces.
Now, let us look at the enabling technologies that allow such complexities of modern warfare to take place successfully. Many of the key enabling technologies depend on the exploitation of electronics and electromagnetics. In short, a major part of the ball game is the information revolution—computing, sensors, communication systems, and so forth, in which very, very dramatic changes are already under way and more dramatic changes are yet to come.
Supercomputing as a research methodology has not truly come of age inside the Department of Defense (DoD). As a whole, the DoD laboratories, as opposed to the national laboratories, also have not been involved with computing as a methodology. It is true that part of the problem is cost, as well as procurement regulations, etc. But the real issue is that there is not a supercomputing culture—a set of people like there is in many of the organizations we have heard from during this conference, to push for computing as a major methodology for doing R&D. Being able to recognize the significance of the broad supercomputing culture will result in a tremendous payoff in investments in large-scale computation as a part of the research process within DoD.
Despite these comments, we are seeing an absolutely unprecedented use of data processing, computing, and computing applications in military hardware, operations, simulations, and training. This is a revolution in the kinds of military equipment we use and in the way we train. It is also true that the number-one logistics problem for maintenance cited in military systems today is software.
Now I would like to discuss some of the impact and applications of computing in military systems and military operations. Computing is a fairly unique kind of technology in that it is both enabling and operational in end products. It is an enabling technology because you do research with computers, and it is an operational technology because you use it with real equipment in real time to do things in the analysis and management, as well as in the systems, themselves. Computing and computational methods are pervasive from the very beginning of the research, all the way to the end equipment.
In operations, real-time computing is an extremely challenging problem. For instance, to be able to solve a problem in a fighter airplane by doing the data processing from a complex electronic warning system and a synthetic-aperture radar, the computational data processing and analysis must be accomplished in near real time (perhaps seconds) and a display or other solutions presented to the pilots so that they will be able to make a decision and act on it. This complex interaction is one of the hardest computational problems around. In fact, it is every bit as challenging as any problem that is put on a Cray Research, Inc., computer at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Another area of application is in the area of simulation, which includes training, simulation, and analysis. This is going to be an area that is just on the verge of exploding into the big time, partly because of the funding restrictions imposed on the use of real systems and partly because the training simulators, themselves, are so powerful. We already have cockpit simulators for pilots, tanks, training, war games, and so on. The National Testbed that the Strategic Defense Initiative is sponsoring in Colorado Springs is also an example of those kinds of large-scale computer simulations.
The world of computing has changed a great deal over the past decade. A look at Figure 1, the distribution of installed supercomputing capability in the U.S. in 1989, shows the leadership of defense-related organizations in supercomputing capabilities. It also shows a growing capability within DoD.
Figure 1.
Installed supercomputing capability in the U.S. in 1989. CYBER 205-class or above
(source: Cray Research, Inc.).
In conclusion, computing is coming of age in both the development and operation of defense technology. Future capabilities are going to rely even more on computation and computational methodology, and this will also be a time of planning, training, and analysis. Computing is a pervasive enabling technology.