KEY NOTE 

Science & Technology Challenges 

Dr. Donald M. Dix 

Director, Advanced Technology 

Office of the Director 

Defence Research and Engineering 

USA 

Science & Technology Challenges 

Dr. Donald M. Dix 

Director, Advanced Technology 

Office of the Director, 

Defense Research & Engineering 

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It is a pleasure for me 

to be here for at least two reasons. First, it provides me the 

opportunity to get out of Washington -- and for those of us who 

live and work there, a paraphrase of an old line sometimes seems 

applicable: A day out of Washington is like a day with sunshine. 

The second reason, and the more important one, is that I have a 

chance to talk with members of the technical community about my 

favorite topic -- technology development and demonstration. In 

that regard, I'd like to focus my comments on some challenges we 

face in the technology world, and how these challenges may relate 

to the efforts which are the subject of this conference -- 

finding options for halon. 

Of course, a keynote address on almost any subject dealing 

even remotely with the Defense Department poses some challenges 

of its own these days. As you are all keenly aware, we live in 

an era of remarkable geopolitical change. One consequence of 

this change is that we in the Defense Department are in the 

latter stages -- at least I hope it is the latter stages -- of 

large reductions in our force structure, our expenditures, and 

our laboratory infrastructure -- including personnel. By large 

reductions, I mean reductions in the neighborhood of 40% in most 

areas. Another consequence of this change is that we are placing 

greater emphasis on upgrading and/or extending the life of our 

existing systems, foregoing the expense of new ones. Yet another 

consequence of this change is that the Department of Defense 

(DoD) is being called upon to be more environmentally 

responsible. And if all of that is not enough, we are now 

looking at a somewhat different political direction in the 

Congress. 

From the standpoint of Science & Technology, the impact of 

all of these factors is sort of a good news/bad news story. The 

good news is that the Department's-leadership has made a - 

concentrated effort to sustain the necessary long term 

investment, to maximize the productivity of this investment, and 

to articulate the need for this investment. And this effort has 

met with some success -- our Science & Technology investment has 

not decreased substantially over the past few years. The bad 

news is that, projecting into the future, it seems that 

sustaining the current level will be exceedingly difficult -- we 

must be prepared for reductions in our Science & Technology 

investment. 

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One might be tempted to say that this backdrop provides the 

Science & Technology community with a whole new set of challenges 

-- do more with less, be more accountable, capitalize on dual-use 

aspects of technology, be more environmentally conscious, and so 

on. Indeed, this view may have graduated to the category of 

conventional wisdom. 

However, I believe the broader challenges facing the Science 

& Technology community have not changed significantly -- the 

broad challenges are eternal, as it were. At the risk of 

oversimplification, I believe these broad challenges are only two 

in number. The first is relevance and the second is application 

of resources. Meeting the challenge of relevance demands that we 

demonstrate that our efforts have a high probability of offering 

significant benefits to some segment of society -- in the 

Department's case, this segment is reasonably well defined. 

Meeting the challenge of application of resources demands that we 

employ the proper resources -- from government, industry, and 

academia -- in the pursuit of specific endeavors. As I said, I 

believe these challenges are essentially invariant with time. 

But certainly our current situation lends more urgency to the 

task of dealing with them. 

For practical purposes, I could conclude my remarks right 

here -- since the remainder is merely an expansion of some of the 

details of these challenges. But since I know you want to hear 

more -- and you're a captive audience to boot -- I'll continue. 

four straightforward questions about any technology effort. 

(Parenthetically, I make no apology to those several of you in 

the audience who have heard them before.) The first three are 

the highest level questions: 

The first challenge -- relevance -- can be met by answering 

o What are we trying to do? 

o By when? 

o What difference will it make? 

And at the next level: 

o Why do we think we can do it? 

For specific undertakings, the first three questions can and 

should be answered quantitatively. The fourth can be answered in 

terms of rigorous scientific and/or engineering principles. The 

answers to the first three questions, of course, both bound the 

effort and enable value judgments to be made on its potential 

benefits. The answer to the fourth question enables technical 

judgments to be made on the likelihood of success. 

together, the answers to these questions provide the basis for 

relative investment level. 

Taken 

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Although these questions are simply stated, the answers do 

not come easily. Too often, the first two questions -- what are 

we trying to do? By when? -- are answered in terms of making 

something better by some unspecified amount at some unspecified 

time in the future. Clearly, answers of this nature do not serve 

any useful purpose, since everyone already knows we are trying to 

make something better in the future -- quantitative goals and 

specific timeframes are a necessity. 

For reasons that may be understandable, the technology 

community many times has a reluctance to establish quantitative 

goals and specific timeframes. some of these reasons appear to 

be: (1) aversion to the risk of failure, (2) fear of stifling 

creativity, and (3) reluctance to abandon paths of research that 

would be excluded by total commitment to the goals. I do not 

believe any of these reasons are sufficient. One of the beauties 

of technology work is that failure is rare -- the only way you 

can do it is by not achieving a goal, and simultaneously not 

understanding why you didn't achieve it. So, we should have 

little fear of failure. With regard to stifling creativity, I 

believe that if the goals are set properly, they will in fact 

foster creativity -- after all, necessity is still the mother of 

invention. So we have no legitimate worry on this score. 

Finally, a total commitment to goals will indeed foreclose some 

paths of research; on the other hand, continued pursilit of such 

paths would constitute a waste of one's time, and who wants to do 

that? 

The third question -- what difference will it make? -- 

requires answers of two different characters. First, the 

difference it will make needs to be expressed in terms that the 

potential users of the technology will understand. In DoD 

parlance, this usually means a difference in performance and/or 

cost characteristics of a system -- more range, more payload, 

less signature, less cost, etc. -- or, to take the case in point, 

the elimination of halons. 

The second part of the answer is to establish that the 

technology is likely to be used in a timely manner. Again in DoD 

parlance, this means that we must provide the opportunity to get 

usable products into the hands of the warfighter more quickly. 

This not only requires a suitable transition target, but also 

that technology outputs are demonstrated to a point where the 

risk is acceptable for introduction into a system development. 

The fourth question -- why do we think we can do it? -- is , of course, a technical question that demands a technical answer. 

Since all. technology ef 

been done before -- or 

don't know how to do -- 

Forts involve trying 

stated another way, 

some evidence of PO 

to do 

trying 

ssibil i 

what has not 

to do what you 

ty must be 

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provided. Again, this is sometimes difficult to extract. And it 

should not be -- after all, it is at the core of our professional 

life. 

I offer a little side challenge to each of you for the next 

few days. Judging from the conference program, you are going to 

hear a lot about current technology efforts and future aims. I 

would challenge each of you not to let any presenter off the hook 

until he or she has either answered the four questions to your 

satisfaction or admitted that they don't know the answers. It 

will be a mutually beneficial undertaking, because it is 

important that all of us involved in these efforts understand the 

answers. Without the answers, we literally do not know what we 

are doing, and the area is too important for this to be 

acceptable. 

Let's turn briefly to the second broad challenge -- 

application of resources. Meeting this challenge first requires 

that all interested parties share a common goal, or goals. This 

includes government, industry, and academia as appropriate. 

Without common goals, it is difficult to see how our collective 

resources can be used wisely. A second requirement is that 

investments by the participants -- particularly government and 

industry -- are roughly in accord with the respective benefits. 

In the Defense Department, this immediately raises the question 

of dual-use technology. Our challenge here is twofold. First, 

in those areas where military applications drive the technology, 

we must ensure that the technology is amenable to its civil uses --only in this manner can we attract the necessary civil 

investment and, further, capitalize on the larger production base 

that civil application offers. Second, in those areas where 

civil applications drive the technology, we must adjust our 

efforts to ensure that we can capitalize on its use. Clearly, 

meeting the challenge posed by application of resources requires 

considerable effort. 

Let me move now from the general to the specific -- the 

Department's search for alternatives to halon. Our major current 

effort is in trying to achieve the goal of the Technology 

Strategy that we issued almost three years ago. This Strategy 

answered the questions of what we are trying to do and by when. 

Specifically, we are trying to identify and/or develop feasible 

alternatives that would permit the elimination of halons used in 

weapons systems for five purposes: 

o Fire extinguishment in occupied spaces by 1996 

o Fire extinguishment in unoccupied spaces by 1996 

o Explosion suppression in occupied spaces by 1996 

o Explosion suppression in unoccupied spaces by 1996 

o Thrust control in booster rockets by 2000 
We define a feasible alternative as one for which the 

relationship between weight, volume, cost and effectiveness is 

known, and for which the penalties for use -- as measure by these 

parameters -- is not "excessive" when compared to halon. 

The answer to our third question -- what difference will it 

make? -- is rather self-evident: it will provide the opportunity 

to eliminate halons, albeit at some cost. And we have identified 

potential applications for transition -- for example, in three 

developmental aircraft: the Marine Corps tilt-rotor V-22, the 

Navy upgrade F-18E/F, and the new Air Force fighter F-22. 

The answer to the fourth question -- why do we think we can 

do it? -- is imbedded in our TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT PLAN, or TDP 

for short, with which many of you are familiar. It identifies 

potentially viable alternatives for total flooding, streaming, 

and thrust control that we are evaluating through laboratory and 

full-scale testing. 

Some of the more promising alternatives under current 

investigation: 

o FE-25 for aircraft engine nacelles (V-22 and F-22 

applications 1 

o 

o Inert gas generation for unoccupied aircraft spaces (V-22 

FhL200 for ship occupied propulsion equipment spaces 

and F-l8E/F applications) 

o Fine water mist for ship occupied propulsion spaces, and 

unoccupied aircraft and ground combat vehicle spaces 

o Powders/hybrids for ground combat vehicle engine spaces 

o Perfluorohexane for streaming agents and thrust control (the 

later involves Minuteman applications) 

Will all of these alternatives eventually prove to be successful? 

Probably not. But I am confident that a sufficient number of 

them will prove to be successful. 

So I think it's fair to say that with our Strategy and TDP, 

and the current state of execution, we have met the two broad 

challenges, and the prospects for success are high. However, the 

goal of these efforts is to find alternatives for halon quickly, 

and we remain committed to that goal. Simultaneously, we 

recognize that it may be possible to develop technology for more 

optimal solutions, given more time for research. 

So we have taken the first step beyond our current efforts. 

We have begun constructing what we call a Next-Generation Fire 

Suppression Technology Program, or NGP for short. Dr. Dick Gann 

from NIST will be presenting this in more detail later in the 

conference, so I am not going to steal his thunder. But I will 

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briefly address how we think we are meeting the two broad 

challenges. 

First, the four questions, which by now I assume you all 

remember. We are trying to identify and/or develop fluids, 

processes, and/or techniques that will result in explosion 

suppression and fire extinguishment that is approximately as good 

as Halon 1301 when used in weapons systems. And we are trying to 

do it by 2004. The difference we expect to make is that we will 

have alternatives that not only have less weight, volume, 

effectiveness, and cost penalties than the alternatives that will 

emanate from our current TDP efforts, but will be more easily incorporated into existing weapons systems. 

the alternatives likely to result from the TDP activities is that 

they may not be readily amenable to incorporation in existing 

systems -- they tend to require more volume for the same 

effectiveness, and such volume is not generally easy or 

inexpensive to obtain in an existing system. Inasmuch as we 

anticipate that many of our existing weapons systems will be 

around for a considerable time, it is important that we make 

elimination of halon via retrofit as easy as possible. 

A difficulty with 

Why we think we can do it is best answered by looking at the 

major elements of the NGP. There are six elements: 

o Risk Assessment and Selection Methodology 

o Fire Suppression Principles 

o Technology Testing Methodologies 

o New Suppression Concepts 

o Emerging Technology Advances 

o Suppression Optimization 

What these elements mean to me is basically threefold in 

nature: (1) that we believe there may be new compounds that 

potentially have the same effectiveness as halon; (2) that 

through a greater understanding of fire suppression principles we 

may be able to come up with "designer" compounds that are as 

effective as halon; and/or (3) that maximizing the efficiency of 

fire suppression may result in system solutions that are as 

effective as halon-based systems, though the compounds used may 

be less effective. 

Hence, I believe we have answered the four questions 

adequately -- although the answer to the fourth one should 

undoubtedly be strengthened. 

next few days will contribute to a stronger answer to why we 

think we can do it. 

Hopefully, your activities of the 

The second broad challenge -- application of resources -- we 

intend to meet by ensuring that our best and brightest 

researchers -- hopefully this is not a pejorative term -- have 
the opportunity to participate in achieving the common goal, and 

also ensuring that government, industry, and academia efforts are 

well integrated. 

Obviously there are several pitfalls -- technical and 

otherwise -- along this road. I don't believe it is necessary to 

dwell upon them. However, one pitfall I would like to emphasize 

is that of considering our Next-Generation Plan a generic fire 

research program -- because it is definitely not that. I am sure 

that the need for generic fire research will continue long after 

the year 2004. But our NGP is not pursuing the perfect truth; 

rather we are pursuing that relevant truth, or imperfect truth, 

or practical truth that will enable us to achieve our goal. 

will require commitment and focus on the part of all of you who 

participate. I am sure that you will be able to meet this 

requirement -- after all, it is only a matter of answering four 

questions. 

This 

You have my best wishes for a successful conference, and 

beyond that, for developing alternatives for halon. 

Thank You. 

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