Bill Wulf: Real threats to national security.

William A. Wulf is President of the National Academy of Engineering. He recently testified at a House hearing on “Sources and Methods of Foreign Nationals Engaged in Economic and Military Espionage,” making the point that espionage is not the major factor affecting national security and that misguided attempts to thwart it can do much more harm than good. His testimony is worth reading in its entirety, but here are some pertinent excerpts:

I am convinced that security – real security – comes from a proper balance of keeping out those that would do us harm and welcoming those that will do us good. Throughout the last century, our great successes in creating both wealth and military ascendancy have been due in large part to the fact that we welcomed the best scientists and engineers from all over the world. No other country did that, and nowhere else has the genius for discovery and innovation flourished in the way it has here. I am deeply concerned that our policy reactions to 9/11 have tipped that balance in a way that is not in the long term interests of the nation’s security...

To be sure, 9/11 and globalization have changed the balance point. There is good reason to fundamentally rethink our policies. However, several recent policy changes, related to visas, treatment of international visitors, deemed exports, and so on, have had a chilling effect. Enrollment of international students in U.S. colleges and universities has declined. Scientists have chosen to hold conferences in other countries. U.S. businesses have had to shift critical meetings to locations outside this country. In the meantime, foreign companies, universities and governments are marketing themselves as friendlier places to do business or get an education. In the race to attract top international talent, we are losing ground...

After WW II, the U.S. forged a mutually reinforcing triad of complementary R&D strengths in industry, academia and government. However, U.S. industrial laboratories have greatly reduced their support for long-term basic research; and many U.S. corporations are shifting research and development to overseas locations—not just because foreign labor is cheaper, as is the common and comfortable myth, but because it is of higher quality! U.S. government laboratories are in various states of disarray, and no longer maintain the stature that they did in 1960’s. Government support for the physical sciences and engineering at universities has declined in real terms, and is suffering further under present budget pressures – clearly, a strong research capability is not a current federal priority. Enrollment in the physical sciences and engineering, as a percentage of undergraduates, is among the lowest in the industrialized world – the U.S. now graduates just 7% of the world’s engineers, for example. Given that our 12th graders score among the lowest in the world in science and mathematics, the ranks of U.S. born scientists and engineers are not likely to expand dramatically anytime soon. Our once strong triad of R&D capabilities is crumbling...

One might ask if these policy changes will improve our security. I would point out that the United States is not the only research-capable country; China and India, for example, have recognized the value of research universities to their economic development and are investing heavily in them. By putting up barriers to the exchange of information about basic research, we wall ourselves off from the results in these countries and slow our own progress. At the same time, the information we are “protecting” is often readily available from other sources...

The 2001 Hart-Rudman Commission, which in February of 2001 predicted a catastrophic terrorist attack on the U.S., and which then proposed the Department of Homeland Security, said:

“… the inadequacies of our system of research and education pose a greater threat to U.S. national security over the next quarter century than any potential conventional war that we might imagine.”
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The international image of the United States has been one of a welcoming “land of opportunity”; we are in the process, however, of destroying that image and replacing it with one of a xenophobic, hostile nation. We are in the process of making it more likely that the world’s “best and brightest” will take their talents elsewhere. The policies that superficially appear to make us more secure are, in fact, having precisely the opposite effect...

I would like to close with another quote from the Hart-Rudman report:

“Second only to a weapon of mass destruction detonating in an American city, we can think of nothing more dangerous than a failure to manage properly science, technology, and education for the common good over the next quarter century.”