Dream Weaver

Alan R. Shaffer distills ideas into technologies that protect troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Most people out in the [Defense] laboratories don't know who I am, and that's OK," says Alan R. Shaffer, the bespectacled director of plans and programs at the Office of the Director of Defense Research and Engineering. Shaffer, who manages a staff of 30,000 and a budget of $25 billion, says bringing 21st century technology to the military requires discretion. He doesn't look over his employees' shoulders as they dream up smart ways to give a warfighting edge to American soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Too much oversight wrecks ingenuity-a lesson Shaffer, 53, learned in the 1980s as a young intelligence analyst and meteorologist assessing the Soviet Union's use of laser technology and its effects on the atmosphere. The Soviet government's top-down control, he says, stifled creativity and competition. "They weren't keeping up in the world of computers and high technology," Shaffer says, adding the Soviet laser program failed because the Russians were expected to rely on rudimentary computers and simple equations. "They kept falling further and further behind," he says.

In college, Shaffer hoped to be a journalist but decided he couldn't write well enough. Graduating with a mathematics degree from the University of Vermont, he entered the Air Force in 1976 as an officer. After serving his four years in exchange for tuition reimbursement, Shaffer stayed 20 more because supervisors allowed him to pursue his interests and work with sophisticated communications equipment.

Intelligence and meteorology also taught him to distill, like a journalist, in-flight weather data that pilots needed to operate missile targeting systems. The Air Force prepared him for his mission at Defense-not only to develop countermeasures to weapons of mass destruction, irregular warfare weapons and counterinsurgency methods, but also operations to win hearts and minds.

"We now have a very active pro-gram in human social cultural behavioral modeling," says Shaffer. "We've reached out to the psychologists, anthropologists and sociologists to better understand other cultures."

Some of the technologies the agency has produced already are in the field in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among the most notable are the Gunslinger, which mounts acoustic sensors on a vehicle to triangulate the sound of a sniper's gunfire and ferret out his location, and Mine Resistant Ambush Protection vehicles that protect soldiers from improvised explosive devices.

"Life is not a dress rehearsal," says Shaffer, who believes a competitive edge is crucial to his mission's success. It's a hard-working philosophy that he trusts, and one that is especially true for the soldiers on the ground.