U.S. Military Laboratories Struggle To Preserve Status In Research

A brain drain, red tape, and pinched budgets could turn the $8 billion network of defense labs into a scientific backwater At the U.S. Army's Aviation Systems Command in St. Louis, helicopter designer Roger Smith was faced with an important career move. The Army was transferring its helicopter-design activities to San Francisco, a much more expensive place to live. But Smith's salary was set by federal law and couldn't be raised to reflect the higher cost of living on the West Coast. Looking at an opportunity that he couldn't afford to accept, Smith sent his resume off to several civilian helicopter companies. Within a short time he was hired by McDonnell Douglas in Mesa, Ariz. "They also gave me a pay raise," notes Smith. His two closest colleagues on the project had to go through similar soul-searching, with the same result: they left the Army and received more money upon joining the civilian work force. "I lost my entire design team to industry," laments George Singley, the head of the Army's advanced-concepts group, about the mass defection in 1985 from his team. Singley is not the only technical manager in the military with such problems. And his troubles are not confined to low salaries. The swollen Pentagon budgets of the Reagan years may have benefited defense contractors, but they did not do much to improve conditions at the country's vast network of military laboratories. Noncompetitive salaries, administrative obstacles to the performance of good science, and absurdly long renovation cycles have forced thousands of talented scientists and engineers into an uphill battle to conduct research on the latest technologies with military applications. Some of these problems reflect government-wide practices, to be sure, but even the favored status of the Pentagon has done little to ease their plight. And experts who have looked at the problem predict that it will grow worse. "So far the Defense Department's attitude has been to protect the technology base," says Alan Shaw, who directed a 1989 study on the military labs for the congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). "But as the [overall defense] cuts start to pinch more, some of it will come out of the labs, and of course it's going to hurt." Adds Robert Selden, chief scientist for the Air Force, "we're entering a period when the world political situation clearly calls for less defense spending. But we need to be careful that the science and tech budget, which is already small, doesn't get so small that it no longer supports a vital and critical-size organization." Specifically, Selden cites half a dozen areas, ranging from microelectronics to computational fluid dynamics, as examples of programs that need an infusion of funds to stay healthy. Right now that organization consists of the 68 labs that the Army, Navy, and Air Force operate. Despite an annual budget that tops $8 billion, they are not as well known as the national labs run by the Department of Energy. Nor, with the exception of the Naval Research Lab, in Arlington, Va., do they have a reputation on a par with the nation's leading corporate research centers. Some are relatively small, with staffs of only a few hundred, and many concentrate their efforts in a handful of specialized areas. The typical military lab, according to the OTA study entitled "Holding the Edge," is "a medium-to- large research, development, and evaluation (RD&E) center with small cells of expertise within it. However skillful and productive, [those cells] tend to be narrow and thin." As a result, the report says, "the departure of one or two key individuals could destroy that expertise." Superconductivity research is a good example of how that concentration works, says Shaw. "You might have 50 people working on the topic, but they're scattered across many labs. At an individual lab, you're more likely to find no more than five people working in this area," a group too small to take advantage of all the opportunities inherent in such work. The labs also suffer silently from a shift in national priorities. When the Bush administration agreed this year to slash the budget of the National Aersopace Plane from $427 million to $254 million, for example, the cuts had a direct impact on scientists at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base lab, as well as at several NASA labs working on the project. Few people believe that the quality of the work in the labs has declined significantly over the past decade. But experts say that the military labs face three crucial issues as they try to maintain that level. One is the problem of hiring and retaining highly qualified scientists and engineers. The second, which has been aggravated by congressional reaction to well-publicized procurement scandals, is a mounting list of requirements to follow before carrying out routine transactions. The third is increasingly lengthy delays in renovating buildings and buying state-of-the-art equipment. Although none is a major obstacle in itself, OTA notes, together they can have a crippling effect on a laboratory's ability to carry out its mission. "These problems are inherent in the laws and regulations that govern the operation of these labs," the report states. "While these laws have not changed greatly over decades, the trend within the last few years has been for their application to become more onerous. [The result has] made the government labs less attractive places to work, at a time when the market for technical talents has become much more competitive." Not surprisingly, low pay scales are a particular irritation to administrators. The mean salary in government labs is $14,000 less than in the public sector; at the top of the scale, the discrepancy is much greater. One reason is that federal salaries for all but a select number of scientists and managers are capped by law at $81,400. In industry, where no such ceiling exists, talented scientists can command salaries half again as large. When such people leave, they take with them not only their own skills, but also their reputations, which are used as a potent recruiting tool. "Even premier laboratories, like the Naval Research Lab, are having difficulty attracting the best and brightest," notes the OTA report. "Many of the RD&E centers have all but given up trying: they now recruit from a small circle of mostly local schools and hope to grow their own in-house expertise." Such hiring practices leave many labs at the mercy of their geographic location. Charles Sexton, a personnel officer at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base outside Dayton, Ohio, confirms that "most of our selections come from schools in this area," chiefly the universities of Dayton and Cincinnati and Wright State University. For officials at Rome (N.Y.) Air Force Base, the employment picture is a bit brighter: They are able to draw on nearby Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and its national reputation for excellence. Red tape is another significant hindrance, says Michael Pestorius, director of the Navy's Applied Research Laboratories at the University of Texas. "Let's assume you are the technical director of one of the Navy centers and you need a particular piece of equipment," he says. "You have the funds to buy it, and a qualified contractor is standing at the door with the desired equipment." Under standard government procedures, Pestorius must tell that contractor to cool his heels. "It takes a minimum of nine months to make the purchase," he says. "And that's true across the board." A survey of several dozen defense experts by the industry publication Defense News found that "the lab process is so clogged with paperwork that it takes three, four or even five years to start a new project." (Even contracts for simple studies take a year to award, the article notes.) A branch head at the Naval Research Lab notes that even a modest contract of $500,000 (enough for only a half-dozen people) takes six months or more to award. "Regulations from Congress are quite severe," he says. By contrast, large defense firms can complete the paperwork on major contracts in two months, and small firms as quickly as two weeks. The delays in renovating buildings and equipment stem from the lack of a specific item in the budget for such purchases. Instead, the research labs compete with the rest of the $300 billion Defense Department budget for funding under what is known as military construction. Adm. A. J. Whittle, in a 1987 review of the research labs, said that even at the height of growth in the Pentagon budget, the labs were on a 300-year replacement schedule for new construction. Current efforts to trim military spending are expected to further stretch out that timetable. What makes matters even worse is that the labs must compete with all other military construction projects, from barracks to golf courses. The problems are vast, say those who have looked at the issue. But are they intractable? John Deutch, provost of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, led a 1987 review of the labs by the Defense Science Board. In it he recommended the conversion of the major labs to government-owned, contractor-operated facilities. That arrangement, known as a GOCO, would be similar to how the Energy Department contracts with AT&T Bell Labs to run Sandia National Laboratory and with the University of California to run Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos national labs. Such a change, Deutch says, would allow the labs to pay higher salaries and speed up the purchase of equipment and renovation of facilities. But creating GOCOs is not enough, according to the OTA report. Whatever the legal arrangement, says OTA, "the tendency is for the government to impose on its contractor labs many of the same rules and regulations it lives under." The amount of red tape that a bench scientist must surmount, it notes, "is no different" at the two types of labs. In any case, Congress has made no move to implement Deutch's suggestions. Nor has it shown interest in other proposed reforms, such as exempting senior scientists from the salary cap. (Last fall's pay raise for Congress and other top federal officials affects only a handful of top science administrators across all branches of government.) Given the overwhelming pressure to trim defense spending, the most likely prospect is that scientists in the nation's military labs will continue to work under an increasingly archaic system that hinders their contribution to the country's technological needs. T.A. Heppenheimer writes about science and military issues from Fountain Valley, Calif.

U.S. Military Laboratories Struggle To Preserve Status In Research

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