November 2020
GovCon Different Podcast
“The world has envied America’s R&D model but the world is catching up. Who are the patriot scientists and researches behind the scenes and what new models do they need? Former DASD for research, Dr. Melissa Flagg, has the answers.”
October 2020
Academic Influence
“Top earth scientist Jesse H. Ausubel discusses his role in the first census of marine biodiversity, determining species abundance through filtering ocean-borne DNA, climate change, and his role in organizing large-scale scientific observations. Director of the Program for the Human Environment and senior research associate at The Rockefeller University, chair of the Richard Lounsbery Foundation, and a former executive of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Ausubel talks with Dr. Jed Macosko, academic director of AcademicInfluence.com and professor of physics at Wake Forest University.”
October 16, 2020
OODAcast
“In this OODAcast we ask Dr. Flagg about her approach to decision-making, her views on technology trends, and discuss the potential impact of a wide range of critically important subjects including:
We also ask for her lessons learned on mental models relevant for decision making and explore her eclectic reading habits.”
September 2020
Issues in Science and Technology
“For a holistic twenty-first century science and technology policy, the United States must go beyond the Endless Frontier.
In borrowing its title from the 1945 policy framework created by Vannevar Bush, the Endless Frontier Act currently before Congress seeks to increase federal government investment in science and technology to “combat China” and boost American innovation. Bush’s vision was successful in the post-World War II years, but the S&T system has undergone fundamental change —both domestically and internationally—in the intervening 75 years. What is needed now is an entirely new framework fit for the unique social, technological, and security concerns of the twenty-first century. Bush’s original Endless Frontier may be best known for increasing federal funding and creating the science agencies we know today, but its true legacy is the way it analyzed the existing S&T system, created a new institutional landscape, and offered a global model for others.
For the United States to remain a leader in global science and technology, focusing on only one kind of input (federal investment) or on one other country (China) won’t be sufficient. In fact, a fundamentally new approach to S&T policy is required, one that can leverage and optimize the diverse and dynamic system that has evolved, manage new risks, and better deliver benefits to society.”
September 2020
Center for Security and Emerging Technology, Georgetown University
“The United States must adopt a new approach to R&D policy to optimize the diversity of the current system, manage the risks of system dispersion and deliver the benefits of R&D to society. This policy brief provides a new framework for understanding the U.S. R&D ecosystem and recommendations for repositioning the role of the federal government in R&D.”
2020
Journal of Strategic Studies
“Andrew W. Marshall, who shaped the way in which contemporary international security experts think about strategy, has been mostly associated with the invention of net assessment. The intellectual sources of this analytical technique, and of the related competitive strategies concept, could be traced to Marshall’s efforts to uncover Soviet post-World War II defense transformations. This article outlines the essence of these Soviet innovations – the empirical frame of reference that inspired Marshall. It provides a new perspective on the history of the net-assessment methodology, advances the debate within strategic studies over the nature of military innovations, and offers insights for experts examining defense transformations worldwide.”
May 2020
2020
The Andrew W. Marshall Foundation
Andrew Marshall’s initial notion of a diagnostic net assessment came about while he worked at the RAND Corporation, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s.
It was during his time at RAND that Marshall, along with Joe Loftus, Jim Digby, Herb Goldhammer, Albert Wohlstetter, and others, began to understand that trying to describe the nature of the long-term competition between the United States and the Soviet Union required methods of analysis that were by definition broad and multi-disciplinary in nature.
For Marshall, to understand a competition between two nations meant studying the people, the organizations, and the decisionmaking structures of each country, including its comparative strengths and weaknesses. To the RAND analysts, understanding the nature of a competition was not a study of raw numbers; it was about conducting a structured systematic analysis that looked to the past for trends and then constructing alternative futures based in part on that trend analysis.
Because of the uncertainty about the future, the assessments would depend on the question; include factors such as ideology, demographics, political economics, financial institutions, cultures, religion, education, science, technology, research and development, manufacturing, budgetary constraints, organizational constructs, the possible emergence of disruptive technologies, and military organizations, tactics, doctrine, and force structure.
By nature, net assessment is subject to considerable uncertainty. The principal outcome of Marshall’s analysis was to identify two or three areas of emerging problems or opportunities about which a decisionmakers still had time to make strategic choices and decisions.
