When Will We Stop Blindly Pissing Away Money Down the R&D Rat Hole?

Blog Summary

This provocative entry criticizes inefficient and poorly directed research and development (R&D) spending. It argues for more targeted, accountable, and results-oriented R&D investments. The author calls for a reassessment of how funds are allocated, advocating for a strategic approach that aligns with clear commercial objectives and delivers tangible outcomes.

Blog Content

Let me start by saying that I am a physicist and have been involved with many of the leading U.S. research facilities over the years — Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia Laboratories, just to name two.  I also directed the Socrates Project under the Reagan administration.  So the quick knee-jerk reaction to the title that “I don’t understand research and development or the value of technology” holds no water at all.  Please don’t even try to argue this point.
Research and development (R&D) does not equate to a competitive advantage in the marketplace or on the military battlefield.  Knowledge for knowledge’s sake is a worthwhile pursuit.  Totally agree.  But it is conceptually flawed and detrimental to the objective — being competitive — when companies and governments use the need to increase economic and military might as justification for higher expenditures on R&D.  But yet this is the rapidly rising battle cry among the leading thinkers in Congress, the Pentagon, academia, think tanks, and the press — “Raise R&D funding levels, and America’s future will be secured.”  How so far from the truth.
One highly critical set of decision makers who suffers from this R&D is the key to competitiveness thinking is the leadership in the office of the Secretary of Defense.  But this was all avoidable.
In the late 1980s, I “assisted” in writing legislation that would force DoD out of this R&D is the key to competitiveness thinking.  As a member of the intelligence community, working directly with the U.S. Congress was considered a hanging offense.  But I was willing to risk it because I foresaw that DoD thinking in this manner would lead to the massive dilemma that DoD is now at a loss to address — the rise of China as a military threat and the almost total erasure of U.S technology leadership on which our military strength is based.

The legislation mandated that the Secretary of Defense develop and present a Department of Defense technology strategy to Congress every year.  It was a process that would force DoD out of its R&D is the key to competitiveness thinking.  The legislation passed, and for all intents and purposes, lies dormant and unexecuted to this day.

But let me go back to the beginning of the story — The Socrates Project.

Throughout the 1980s, I was the Director of the Socrates Project within the U.S. intelligence community.  I also initiated the program.  The Socrates Project had a two-fold mission.

1/ Utilize the full range of intelligence to determine the true underlying cause of America’s declining economic and military competitiveness, and then 2/ use this understanding to develop the required solution.  We were fully successful in both aspects of our mission.

What we determined (and covered in our last blog but is worth restating) was that the cause of the decline was America’s shift from technology-based to finance-based planning that began at the end of World War II.

In finance-based planning all decision-making is based upon manipulating the acquisition and utilization of funds, and the final measure of success is how well we optimized the fund exploitation to achieve the objective — generating a profit.

In technology-based planning, the foundation of all decision-making is the outmaneuvering of the competition in the acquisition and utilization of the technology.

How effectively an organization or a country outmaneuvers the competition in the technology exploitation fully dictates the level of other resources and how they must be utilized to generate a competitive advantage.  The other resources include but are not limited to manpower, natural resources, time and funds.

Where technology-based planning starts with the foundation of maneuvering in technology for a competitive advantage that then dictates the rest of the business plan, finance-based planning leaves technology exploitation, which dictates competitive advantage, to chance.  The manipulation of funds, which is the focus of finance-based planning, often leads counter to generating a true competitive advantage in the marketplace or the military battlefield.  The finance-based planning organizations of the U.S. pride themselves in being highly effective in what equates to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

What is competitive advantage?

All competitive advantage is a matter of satisfying the customers’ needs better than the competition, where the customer needs are defined from the customers’ perspective and covers the full range of their needs.  This goes for both commercial and military competitive advantage.  If you are not excelling at satisfying one or more customers’ needs, no amount of slick marketing, branding, or financial optimization — Financial shell games — matters.  The organization is going to die.  Or in the case of DoD, be totally ineffective.
Outmaneuvering the competition in the acquisition and utilization of technology is a multi-faceted, fluid, on-going chess game played with the technologies of the world.  Winning at this technology chess game requires a technology strategy.  When I use the term “strategy,” I am not using the simplistic, conceptually flawed term that is traditionally passed off as “strategy” in the business community.  Strategy is not the same as a vision statement, a target list of products or services, a road-map, an exercise in consensus building, or glorified trend analysis that really belongs at the racetrack.
In the case of a technology strategy, the limited resource is technology, where technology is properly defined as any application of science to accomplish a function.
A technology strategy consists of a coherent set of offensive and defensive technology acquisition and utilization maneuvers.
The set of technology acquisition maneuvers consists of the full range of means to acquire the technology that the organization requires, and prevent or hinder the competitor from acquiring the technology that it requires.  At some points in time, the technology strategy may be executing maneuvers to acquire technologies for the organization, while at other times, it will be executing maneuvers to retard the competitors from acquiring technology, and at other times it will be doing both.  Research and Development (R&D) is just one of the mechanisms in the full set of technology acquisition maneuvers.  But when this one mechanism is used, it is both very precisely and accurately targeted and is done in a systematic coherent process interconnected with a full range of precisely planned offensive and defensive acquisition and utilization maneuvers.
Just executing the one mechanism of R&D is extremely costly and highly ineffective for generating and maintaining a competitive advantage.
The U.S. using R&D as the sole means to address technology exploitation for a competitive advantage makes it a one-trick-pony knuckle-dragging Neanderthal event next to a modern agile fighter with a full range of fighting techniques and weapons at his disposal.   The Neanderthal may get in one or two good hits, but the modern fighter will consistently outmaneuver him until he is fully exhausted, and then he is simply and unceremoniously eliminated.
So, from Socrates’ intelligence-based view, who was the modern agile fighter?
It was then and now has developed into the China we know today.  China was executing very aggressive, highly coherent countrywide technology strategies that, if left unchecked, were guaranteed to enable China to evolve to sole super-power status faster than any country in history.
It was seeing the utter futility of the DoD R&D approach to technology exploitation, and China’s aggressive technology strategies that caused me to risk my neck and career to draft the legislation that would transform DoD into the agile, multi-faceted fighter needed to ensure our military super-power status and contain China’s aggressive technology-based strategies for military, economic and political dominance.
The legislation passed but has never been executed. Since then, as we all can see now, China has gone from barely being on the Pentagon’s threat radar and even then only because of its massive manpower and communist government to, by some people’s estimates, being the #1 threat to the U.S. with that threat rapidly growing by the day.
Is R&D important?  You bet it is — We have some of the best researchers and research facilities in the world. But R&D is only effective when it is a coherent element in a complete, holistic technology strategy to achieve and sustain competitive advantage.
We need to stop being the Neanderthal before it’s too late.  We must evolve or expire.

By Michael C. Sekora – Past Director of the Socrates Project, President of Quadrigy, Inc. affiliated with Operation U.S. Forward