The head of the Pentagon’s agency for developing cutting edge ideas and turning them into real weapons technology cautioned yesterday that Russia’s endeavor to establish a similar organization won’t be easy.
The Russian Duma, controlled by President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party, voted overwhelmingly last summer to set up and fund a new agency modeled after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), calling it the Future Research Fund (FPI).
DARPA chief Arati Prabhakar predicted it will take quite a bit of time for the FPI to develop the unique qualities required to push the limits of technology and create the risk-taking culture that must accompany it.
“I would say it’s not that easy to do, and the reason is that our ability to take big steps and to take the risk that is necessary to reach for significant impact–that’s not something that happens overnight,” she said.
“It’s something that happens as you build an organization and you establish a set of relationships and you establish fundamentally a culture that allows a group of great program managers to step out and really take on those kinds of dramatic challenges,” she added.
Effectively running an organization like DARPA relies on a recruiting strategy to attract the best talent, enabling risk taking, keeping bureaucracy out of the way, and then finding ways to put the newest technology to use even if it threatens previously established business models people are reluctant to let go of, Prabhakar said.
“Those are things that take a long time to develop,” she said at an Office of Naval Research conference hosted by the American Society of Naval Engineers.
The FPI could be operating within months and could receive up to as much as $100 billion in funding through 2020, Russia Today, a state-funded television station, reported.
Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin was quoted by RT before the July vote as saying that after 20 years of stagnation Moscow won’t be able to catch up the West through traditional weapons development programs and needs an agency to take the necessary risks. He said FPI’s initial focus will be on automating systems and hypersonic technologies.
DARPA has been around since 1958 and, among many other things, is credited for the development stealth and the Global Positioning System (GPS) technologies. It also played a role in the creation of the internet by pursuing the idea of linking time-sharing computers into a national system, according to its website.