Defense officials outline top research priorities
Developing "modeling and simulation" technologies to predict, evaluate and test responses to potential terrorist threats is a top research priority for federal counterterrorism agencies, officials from the Pentagon and the White House Office of Homeland Security said on Wednesday.
"Modeling and simulation [applications] with a degree of precision we've never had before would be most helpful to us," Tom Hopkins, director of technology development for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), said during a homeland security summit sponsored by Silicon Graphics Inc.
Hopkins said those technologies could help national security officials combat "asymmetric" threats posed by terrorist groups that might use unconventional devices as weapons of mass destruction.
Modeling and simulation tools also are crucial to protecting the nation's critical infrastructure systems, according to Lee Holcomb, the Office of Homeland Security's infostructure director.
"Today, decision-makers really don't have an integrated set of modeling and simulation for the national infrastructure," Holcomb said, adding that those technologies would help security officials better understand the complex interdependencies among critical infrastructure elements such as telecommunications networks, the national power grid and the financial system.
"This is an area where I think high-performance computing and visualization will be extremely important," Holcomb said.
He added that security officials probably would earmark research dollars for developing an "intelligent" power grid with automated defenses against potential attacks.
Another top research and development priority, according to Holcomb, is improving communications capabilities for local police, firefighters and other "first responders" in the event of a terrorist attack. Holcomb said first responders need "real-time, fused data" from various sources, including sensors and surveillance systems that could alert them to the presence of biological or chemical toxins.
"We need portable detectors that they can take with them out into the field," he said.
Hopkins said DTRA also relies heavily on sensors and other surveillance technologies to study and combat nuclear, chemical and biological threats. For example, he said a "networked collection of sensors and detectors" is part of a test bed the agency is building in Albuquerque, N.M., to develop faster warning systems for airborne pathogens.
"Using humans as canaries is unacceptable," Hopkins said, adding that the experimental system also collects and analyzes data from state and local health surveillance networks.
Holcomb said developing better technologies for filtering airborne pathogens and chemicals is also an "extremely important" research priority.
Homeland security officials also are looking for "knowledge management" technologies that could fuse geographic, video, audio and text-formatted data "in an intelligent way" in order to quickly detect and share information about terrorist threats, Holcomb said.