From The Source: Dr Roger Lough, Chief Defence Scientist | ADM Jul 07

1 July 2007

By Gregor Ferguson

2007 marks the centenary of defence science in Australia. To mark this anniversary ADM interviewed Australia's Chief Defence Scientist, Dr Roger Lough, who joined the Defence Science & Technology Organisation 43 years ago as a junior rocket scientist. He spoke in Canberra to ADM's editor, Gregor Ferguson.

Profile - Dr Roger Lough
1974 Ph.D in Chemistry, University of Adelaide
1976 Harkness Fellow, US Army and Navy missile programs
1983 Defence Science Attache, Australian Embassy, Washington
1987 Chief, DSTO Guided Weapons Division
1993 Founding Chief, Air Operations Division
1997 Founding Chief, Land Operations Division
2000 First Assistant Secretary, Science Policy
2002 Director, DSTO Platform Sciences Laboratory
2003 Appointed Chief Defence Scientist

ADM: In the 43 years you've worked for DSTO what have been the biggest changes in the organisation and the way it works with its stakeholders?

Lough: Back in the early day a client, stakeholder, customer, military user, was an alien concept. DSTO was a university without students, effectively. That's not to say it didn't do relevant defence work - of course it did.

But in those early days it was more about supporting the functions at Woomera than it was about meeting the immediate or long-term needs of the ADF. Now that, of course, has changed markedly through the years.

It really is a partnership between DSTO and the ADF in terms of the program of work that we do, in terms of the ADF having visibility of it, in terms of the relationships between the scientists and the military users.

We're much more integrated into the way the ADF does business, our knowledge of the ADF domain is one of our competitive advantages, if you like and that's what basically drives our program compared to, say, 20 years ago.

ADM: Which of your predecessors was responsible for that change, because it would have taken quite a strong leader to turn the organisation around and turn the relationship with the ADF?

Lough: The quintessential moment was in 1992 where the then-secretary of Defence, Tony Ayres, and the Deputy Secretaries came down to a DSTO retreat at Jambiru valley, near Nowra, and said "You guys are going to have to change what you do, otherwise you're history."

The message was delivered to DSTO in no uncertain terms, and DSTO said, "We'd better do something about this."

The CDS then was Bob Ward, very soon followed by Richard Brabin-Smith, and 'Brab' was the primary driver, because most of the changes happened through the 1990s and he was the instigator.

So if anybody should be given credit for changing us from a university without students to an integral part of helping the ADF solve problems, it's 'Brab'.

ADM: The ADF is facing difficulties recruiting and retaining uniformed personnel - does DSTO face a similar problem?

Lough: It depends which area you are talking about. For new graduates DSTO is reasonably competitive so we generally don't have too much of a problem recruiting new graduates. Where we do have the problem is after they've been with DSTO for a number of years.

They tend to be very marketable and we have a high loss rate between the five and 10 years service period. And I think that's going to get compounded downstream if the current trend continues, if the quantity of scientists and engineers coming out of universities is going to decrease, and we will be in an increasingly competitive market and will have to tackle that when we come to it. But at present we fill our recruitment quota reasonably well.

ADM: Is the pace of technological advance faster now than, say, 20 or 30 years? Or is the emerging challenge simply the rate at which new technologies are adopted for military or terrorist purposes?

Lough: In general, the technology is moving faster than it was 20 years ago. That's not to say there weren't things moving fast in the defence field 20 or 30 years ago, if you look back and see the rate at which guided missile technology changed between 35 and 25 years ago - it was a revolution.

But what's changed in the last 10 or 15 years is the pace of information and communications technology (ICT) and the pervasive impact that's had on just about every piece of military equipment and every piece of the military domain.

IT is driven by the civil sector so our challenge is to adapt it for the military sector. And not just in the technical sense - it's how you use it, how you protect it, all those sort of issues.

The other aspect of technical change is that because ICT is so pervasive now everything is a system, or a system of systems, so therefore it becomes more complex.

The human aspect is very much more important now than it was say 25 or 30 years ago and so therefore our technological view of what Defence needs has to intimately connect with the human, rather than just say, "Here is a shiny new widget that can do the job a bit better than the previous one."

ADM: But are you, industry and the ADF able to respond quickly enough to these changes? Identifying new technologies and their potential is one thing; absorbing them and exploiting them in an organisation sense is another.

Lough: There's a couple of issues here - first, the requirements and procurement process. Defence understands that for fast-moving technologies its traditional procurement cycle is longer than the technology refresh cycle - and there's a fundamental problem there.

The Kinnaird process has, to some extent, to be adapted to allow for that, and we are looking at that.

The other aspect is that militaries are, by their very nature, risk averse organisations. They are designed to be risk-averse and command-driven and all those sorts of things.

So therefore you need to work harder at slightly different things to get militaries to adapt to new technologies. It's not that they don't adapt - they do adapt, but they adapt in a different way from a mining company or a transport company.

So it's a different culture that you've got to put the technology into, you've got to basically look at a much wider frame of reference for how you're going to use the technology, and of course there is no profit motive to drive it like there is in the private sector.

ADM: What technologies are you exploring or developing for use by the ADF and Australian security agencies in the future - say a decade or more from now? And do you see any significant 'game-changing' technologies emerging in the future?

Lough: Well we're looking at Hypersonics quite deeply at the moment, which we consider to be one of the game changing technologies in which Australia has a reasonably long-standing base, and we are up at world class capability in that technology.

In terms of other technologies that are classed as 'gamechangers' such as nano-technology and biomaterials, our function - because they've been led by the civil sector - is to look at how we can adapt them into the military domain.

We are also looking at smart materials: materials that heal themselves, or that tell you when they're broken, and that whole concept of lightweight, smart materials.

You can apply them to aircraft and submarines: you can embed sensors in them, they can absorb oxygen or carbon dioxide, they can function as a much smarter piece of kit than just a piece of material to keep a wall up.

So those two technologies are key ones. The other ones that are game changers are ones that we are not exactly working on but maintaining activity at the cutting edge on, like Network Centric Warfare - how do you use it?

The issue of how best to use experimentation in these complex, adaptive systems? What's the theory of complex adaptive systems and how do you apply that into the military domain? These are all game changers that we're looking at.

ADM: It looks as if Hypersonics is one of the few areas where you're actually doing leading edge R&D to advance the knowledge - in most other areas you're simply applying the knowledge.

Lough: I'd challenge that - we lead in other areas traditionally, like Over The Horizon radar, and some areas of the energetics world and some areas of data and information mining.

For certain customers, in terms of our interactions with our overseas peers, we would consider ourselves to be at the cutting edge.

A lot of our work is advisory, however I'd make the following points: firstly, you have to do research work in the field to be able to be competent to be an adviser.

And secondly your reputation as a Science & Technology (S&T) organisation, which brings the reputation as an adviser, means that you have to be world-class in selected areas to maintain your reputation and to get people in through the door.

We've always maintained that if we revert to simply being an engineering agency that gives advice, we will be on a downhill track. We are determined not to do that.

ADM: DSTO dominates the S&T landscape within the Australian defence community, but how much leverage do you derive from your relationships with the universities, other S&T institutions and industry?

Lough: We have a good interaction with the universities. About 20 per cent of our long range research program goes out to universities.

We have a long established relationship with the universities and we have a formal system of centres of expertise where we form a long-term relationship with a university and fund them on a long-term basis, for a chair, guarantee them research fellows, infrastructure, money, that sort of stuff. We do that in areas where we need the long-term expertise, such as Photonics and Hypersonics.

Industry doesn't do an awful lot of low-TRL (Technology Readiness Level) research. We tend to be involved with industry as partners - using them to bring a TRL up to 3, 4, 5, whereupon the CTD program can play a part.

But we do use industry and universities in partnership - the CRC program is a classic example of how they all come together, to be able to leverage everybody's input into getting a product that is useful to the ADF.

ADM: We've had the Trenberth Report and more recently the 2007 Defence Industry Policy Statement. What effect have these had on the way DSTO interacts with industry?

Lough: One of the outcomes from the Trenberth report was a doubling of the CTD program, from $13 to $26 million. DSTO is part of but doesn't own the process for identifying the technology demonstrators that need to be done and for their transition afterwards.

And you'll find the industry policy in the broad addressed those issues, specifically the transition. So that's likely to change and hopefully improve under the auspices of the industry policy.

Trenberth gave us the reason to focus on SMEs as a key partner for the DSTO program. That's not to say we ignore the big five, or anything like, but we have a special place for SMEs - especially the high-tech SMEs - and an integral part of DSTO's mission is to help identify those relevant SMEs and to ensure that their technology remains viable. As part of the mission we will partner with them to help bring that about.

ADM: Australian industry has some significant smarts, but how much value do you derive also from dealing with major foreign prime contractors in Europe and North America? And also with equivalent organisations overseas such as DSTL in the UK, DARPA and the service research laboratories in the USA and DGA in France? What do you gain from them and what do you contribute in turn?

Lough: The big five companies here are all branch offices of big overseas companies, with the notable exception of Tenix. Each company has its own characteristics and we do have strategic alliances with each of them which are active. I think that's the first point to make.

The second point is I suppose that the amount of collaborative R&D that gets done under these varies, and really reflects where they are in their business cycle.

Where we see the value is the ability of these companies to reach back to their original R&D centres and to pull some technology into Australia to then work on in an Australian problem and spill that out into SMEs when they need to.

So one of our motivations is not only to help them develop something for the ADF but to get the best technology out of their home ports, if you like, bring it to Australia, and synergise it with ours.

With 2,400 people we can't cover the entire waterfront of the technology the ADF needs. Therefore we use our international partnerships as a significant lever for our program.

And we do that in a number of ways - firstly, the multi-laterals, the TTCP [The Technical Cooperation Program] and the service equivalents. These address advanced technology, at a non-systems specific, pre-competitive level.

We put about 200 staff years of effort a year into that program and that's our key technology leverage inwards. That provides the foundation for the bilaterals which are between us and the US, the UK, and Canada, which tend then to move into the more systems-specific issues, and then you tend to get much more of a system collaborative program with a specific product at the end of the day.

We have several joint programs under way with the UK, the US, France and Singapore, so we put a lot of store by our international connections. There's a significant leverage for our program.

ADM: Whether dealing with terrorism/national security or conventional military threats, what are DSTO's current and near-term technology priorities? What are the things that are keeping you awake at night?

Lough: In the near term, in support of operations, it's the counter-IED activity, both on the energetic materials and the electronics side where we're ramping up a lot of work; the other area in counter-terrorism is working with the intelligence agencies, mostly in the IT space.

In terms of other shorter term activities supporting the ADF it's really the advice role for major projects JSF, AWD, Air 7000, P-3 replacement, LHDs, Anzac ship upgrade.

And the other area is operational analysts in the AOs (Areas of Operations) in the Middle East, East Timor as well, and the Solomons - they collect information, reach back here for technology insertion, if that's necessary, and run the quick and dirty studies for the commanders on the ground.

They need to be trained and rotated, just like any other deployed personnel - the AO is a dangerous place so we have to be careful how we do that.

ADM: 100 years from now, how would you like people to remember today's DSTO? Will this be the good old days or will it be the ark ages?

Lough: I suspect that in a hundred years the whole nature of what a nation state is will have changed, and to some extent the whole nature of technology.

I suspect in a hundred year's time there will still need to be some people and organisations that are looking at security in one form or another. And I'd like to think that they look on their forebears with pride.