(Outline of goals and strategy for the project, with special emphasis on guidance to leaders of the seven panels)

Executive Summary

 This project is aimed at helping the Federal Government, and more specifically the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Dr. Jack Marburger, to use effectively the nation’s and the world’s scientific and technical community in a timely response to the threat of catastrophic terrorism. The National Academies (which includes the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council) have established a committee of distinguished scientists and engineers to help the government to develop a Science and Technology Program Plan and Research Strategy for combating terrorism.

This Committee on the Science and Technology Agenda for Countering Terrorism will be co-chaired by Lewis M. Branscomb and Richard Klausner. The Committee will undertake the tasks enumerated below, and through the leadership of individual members of the Committee and supporting panels will perform a number of studies.   With panels operating in parallel and under a tight time schedule, these studies will be brought back to the parent Committee and integrated into a set of required capabilities, research priorities, and guidelines for the effective use of science and technology. This document describes the object of those studies and guidance for their performance.

In addition to these studies, the Academies will create fast-track expert working groups providing expert advice on focused topics at the request of the Technical Support Working Group and other governmental entities. The output of these short-term efforts, which will address high priority and urgent needs of the government without a formal report, will also help to inform the committee and its panels on the needs of the agencies responsible for counter-terrorism activities and their needs for new technology or new understanding.

Background

 The terrorist attack on the United States on September 11 has galvanized the nation to defend the homeland and to pursue those responsible. But terrorist attacks on highly developed societies, including the United States, are not new.   They are activated by deeply felt grievances, sometimes motivated by an abhorrence of materialistic societies, and frequently organized by sophisticated fanatics. They are made possible by the vulnerability of contemporary industrial societies, which have deployed technology to maximize economic efficiency and to stabilize an otherwise highly variable nature, all at the expense of societal resilience. [1] While the immediate emergency focuses on Al Qaeda, the most likely source of the 9/11 attack, the vulnerabilities remain and other episodes of destruction of the nation’s tranquility can be expected so long as both the vulnerabilities and the motivations exist. The USA is not alone in being so threatened; indeed developed democracies in Europe and Asia have lived with this danger for some time. The threat is global and the solutions must also be global.  The science and technology community is highly motivated to help. The problem is that the structure of agencies, the distribution of assets in research budgets, and procedures for sorting out worthwhile proposals from the chaos of ideas, plans and claimants on priority funding may not be optimally suited to address these threats most effectively.   In traditional military emergencies, government structures take the time to adapt to new, crisis driven circumstances before responding to enemy threats. This time the enemy is already in our homeland.   There is no time to waste.

Phase I: the domain specific studies of R&D priorities

 This S&T agenda for counter-terrorism will be prepared in two phases. In the first phase, the Committee will have three tasks to complete in four to six months: (1) prepare a carefully delineated typology or taxonomy for the application of science and technology for countering terrorism, (2) prepare research agendas in seven key areas, and (3) examine a series of cross-cutting issues.

 As context for these studies, the Committee will seek to define the nature of the challenge that society faces. It is well understood this is not a conventional war between nation states, in the style of WWII or the Iraq-Kuwait war.Nor is it a crime fighting response, which is not sufficient to deter or prevent terrorist attacks. The characterization of the nature of terrorist threats will lead to a typology or taxonomy of terrorism to which the seven area studies will relate.

This typology will be developed for the Committee under the leadership of Philip Smith. The typology would consist of a matrix spanning the range of threats, each characterized by targets, weapons, and delivery systems, and the possible points of intervention. This effort will maintain close contact with the related work being undertaken by the Rand Corporation at the request of the Science Advisor.

Within each of the most important cells of this matrix, the seven study panels each chaired by a member of the parent Committee will attempt to outline in a preliminary way current capabilities, priority needs, and the time frames for developing various capabilities for countering the threat. The seven fast-track panel studies will be undertaken in the following areas:

1. Biological

2. Chemical

3. Nuclear and radiological

4. Information technology, computers, and telecommunications

5. Transportation

6. Energy facilities, buildings, and fixed infrastructure

7. Behavioral, social and institutional issues

 These rapid studies carried out by the seven study panels will involve additional experts, and in most cases performed in collaboration with the NRC Divisions and their staffs. 

Each study panel is asked to  

• identify the areas in the typology of terrorism to which the technical domain relates, to
• evaluate the current state of knowledge and capacity for dealing with the most significant threats, to

• identify significant barriers to the use of technology and knowledge that may be available but underutilized.

Each panel is asked to perform this evaluation in relation to the sequential elements required to manage terrorist threats:  prevention, surveillance and detection, response, and recovery. They will be asked to identify, for each key area, a research strategy that identifies the highest-leveraged opportunities for research to contribute to counter-terrorism. This is a primary goal of the study. Additional attention will be given to policies or activities that might be required to reduce any new technologies to practice and make them available for deployment. One of the challenges for each panel will be to create a report that simultaneously addresses domain-specific issue, but attempts to find what is needed that either cuts across domains or is not readily described along traditional domain lines. These cross-domain issues may prove to be the most important area of work in the project. 

The panels are not asked to produce a comprehensive catalog of all research relevant to counter terrorism, but rather to identify top priorities and pick the key issues. Short-term opportunities should be identified, but special attention should be paid to ideas, admittedly with uncertain outcomes, that might arise from new science and new inventions, even if they might not emerge for 5 years or more.   Where the ideas are already identified by studies or agency plans they should be so identified. Each study will have an executive summary not to exceed 5 pages, hitting the key issues and opportunities.

The parent Committee will meet on December 19 and 20 in Washington to launch the project and to discuss the plans of the panel chairs for their studies. Each of the study panels should plan their first meeting no later than early January. A second meeting of the full Committee will be scheduled for late January to give the teams feedback and to help in their work. Each of the teams should complete their draft reports by the end of March, and the Committee will meet again in April to bring the reports together and begin the process of producing an integrated report for review and release in May

 The parent Committee may also create special working groups (or function as a committee of the whole) as necessary to explore multidisciplinary research topics that cut across these domains, such as new sensors and instruments if they do not emerge in the individual team reports and the threats that arise from the interdependence of the areas studied by the individual panels. 

The “customer” for the S&T Program Plan and Research Strategy would be the newly created office of Homeland Security, headed by Governor Tom Ridge; the Office of Science and Technology Policy, headed by the President’s Science Advisor John Marburger; and the Office of Management and Budget. The counter-terrorism effort is assumed to be a critical national security mandate for a decade or more in the future. The Academies’ contribution is aimed to assist the government with both its near-term needs for scientific and technical advice and its longer-term needs for strengthening our institutional capacity for combating terrorism.

Phase 2

Phase two would begin with the completion of the team studies in May.  The work will be done by the committee and will focus on improving interagency capabilities and coordination, while promoting continuous input from the science and technology community into these activities.  The second phase will focus on conducting reviews of key intergovernmental research programs and examining the kinds of institution building that are needed to carry out the overall agenda and to ensure top-quality, continuous input from the S&T community.  The government must not only pull itself together across many agency boundaries – it must also build new capabilities to address the complex challenges of counter-terrorism (protection, interdiction, clean-up, retaliation, prosecution). This phase of the S&T Program Plan and Research Strategy will focus on the development of both the short and long-term technical and analytical capability that will be required by the country to address terrorism.  The Committee will need to design an institutional device for renewal of research priorities every two years or so. The phase 2 report would address the ways in which the federal R&D enterprise must evolve in policy and structure in light of the expectation that terrorism is a permanent feature of contemporary society which government must address. The report of the second phase would be delivered by September 11, 2002.

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