"Scientific Predator": Russia’s Answer to DARPA

The State Duma has approved a proposal to establish an organization responsible for R&D in the area of military, specialized, and dual-purpose technologies. But before the Russian counterpart to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) can materialize, there are questions to be answered and problems to be solved. 

In pursuit of breakthroughs

Russian lawmakers almost unanimously voted to set up the Foundation for Advanced Research (FAR), whose research will focus on technological breakthroughs. 

“We are giving birth to a scientific and technological predator of sorts that should monitor all advanced R&D,” Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin told legislators, adding that its budget is still undefined (it will be funded through the State Armament Program through 2020) but that its portfolio already includes 150 promising programs.

This new organization in its present form is more than one year old. Among those who pushed for its creation in 2011 were Yury Solomonov, general designer of the Moscow Thermotechnology Institute, and Vladimir Verba, general director of Vega Concern. But their efforts were clearly directed at creating a lobby for military industry leaders that would be able to “shout down” the Defense Ministry and its tight-fisted head Anatoly Serdyukov.

They often cited DARPA to make their case for a Russian counterpart. So why is the American experience in this field so attractive, and is Russia seeking to reproduce its track record?

A model to emulate

DARPA was established by the U.S. Department of Defense in 1958 in order to deal with the crisis engulfing the R&D divisions of defense corporations, which were operating in isolation from each other and often without much to show for it. Needless to say, it was a waste of time and resources.

In the meantime, the level of monopolization and lobbying was steadily rising, which led troubled President Eisenhower to coin his famous term, “the military-industrial complex,” which he used to describe the closely-knit group of Pentagon generals and executives from defense corporations. 

As a result, they set up a compact agency with a mission to identify “missing technologies” (to be developed within the next 10-20 years) and place orders for R&D.

DARPA has never been a bureaucracy. It is exceptionally flexible, giving a free hand (including in terms of personnel recruitment) to top managers who carry out projects under its orders. (Their long-term career prospects with DARPA are close to nil, because they are mostly hired for five or six year terms.)

The agency’s annual budget amounts to nearly $3 billion, and the money is often spent on absolutely crazy R&D projects. But occasionally it produces gems like GPS, Stealth technology, the Saturn V carrier rocket, the M-16 assault rifle… not to mention the Internet.

Accountability and rapacity

FAR’s projects are still secret: all that’s known is that there are about 150. At the same time, its budget is yet to be defined.

This raises several questions. If there is a list of projects, where are the relevant business plans and, accordingly, funds for their implementation? If these 150 projects were approved without business plans, can we assume that they are at best general avenues of research? Dmitry Rogozin went on record as saying that the funds would be allocated from the State Armament Program. But it will expire in 2020. What will be the financing mechanism in subsequent years?

Now is the right time to outline FAR’s future field of work. Will it engage solely in defense programs? If so, it would be logical to make it subordinate to the Defense Ministry.

But if it handles all possible “critical infrastructures” and other innovations, it will have to coordinate the interests of the Economic Development Ministry, the Ministry of Transport, the Ministry of Communications, the Ministry of Industry and Trade and quite likely even those of the Ministry of Education and Science (not to mention the Defense Ministry). This leads to the conclusion that the foundation should have some top-level managers.

The FAR bill is rather vague on this issue: its general director shall be appointed by the president, while its supervisory board shall include representatives delegated in equal number by the president and the government. So, in all likelihood the second option will come to pass.

But this immediately gives rise to a new problem. The discussion will have to be fine-tuned first at the level of the supervisory council and later at the level of the council on science and technology.

But lacking, on the one hand, a direct managing customer (like the Pentagon in the case of DARPA), and broad independent powers, on the other, FAR will have to be a discussion society in the early stage so as to decide what the most promising avenues of R&D are.

It will be particularly interesting to see how this extra-departmental team is going to explain to Mr. Serdyukov and his guys that they vitally need this or that defense technology. But this, after all, is not so important. The important thing is that after the mission setting is over and done with, a management problem is going to emerge. Managing futuristic programs requires a level of competence that is beyond the current Russian engineering corps.

What’s more, DARPA and similar organizations in other countries don’t produce finished products. They only produce demos of technologies or physical effects. A foundation of this kind should not transform new technologies into developmental prototypes or production models. 

It is still a mystery how the results of advanced research, even if achieved, will be used, because the state of the defense R&D system is, to put it mildly, lamentable. It will also be of interest to see how the foundation’s intellectual property will be managed. Insofar as the bill mentions dual-purpose technologies, the proposed procedure for commercializing R&D results in the civilian sector is also a matter of some interest.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s and may not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.