For the past three-quarters of a century, the United States has led the world in technological innovation and development. The nation now risks falling behind its competitors, principally China. The United States needs to advance a national innovation strategy to ensure it remains the predominant power in a range of emerging technologies. Innovation and National Security: Keeping Our Edge outlines a strategy based on four pillars: restoring federal funding for research and development, attracting and educating a science and technology workforce, supporting technology adoption in the defense sector, and bolstering and scaling technology alliances and ecosystems. Failure could lead to a future in which rivals strengthen their militaries and threaten U.S. security interests, and new innovation centers replace the United States as the source of original ideas and inspiration for the world.

The DoD has identified the 20 most critical technologies that will be key to improving America's defense capabilities into the 21st century. Led by Senior Dean and Scientific Advisor J.S. Przemieniecki, the Air Force Institute of Technology's team of experts put together this important book for everyone involved in defense research and development. Each of the 20 critical technologies is examined in-depth, including physical and engineering principles. A full description of the technology in its current state of the art and its projected impact on future weapon systems is provided.

In a rapidly changing world, there needs to be a critical reappraisal of traditional military/industry relationships. This book, packed with data, industry-specific case studies, and sophisticated analysis, is such an appraisal. It will be required reading for technology managers and policymakers in industry and government, as well as those concerned with technological and economic competitiveness.

In a world where advanced knowledge is widespread and low-cost labor is readily available, U.S. advantages in the marketplace and in science and technology have begun to erode. A comprehensive and coordinated federal effort is urgently needed to bolster U.S. competitiveness and pre-eminence in these areas. This congressionally requested report by a pre-eminent committee makes four recommendations along with 20 implementation actions that federal policy-makers should take to create high-quality jobs and focus new science and technology efforts on meeting the nation's needs, especially in the area of clean, affordable energy: 1) Increase America's talent pool by vastly improving K-12 mathematics and science education; 2) Sustain and strengthen the nation's commitment to long-term basic research; 3) Develop, recruit, and retain top students, scientists, and engineers from both the U.S. and abroad; and 4) Ensure that the United States is the premier place in the world for innovation. Some actions will involve changing existing laws, while others will require financial support that would come from reallocating existing budgets or increasing them. Rising Above the Gathering Storm will be of great interest to federal and state government agencies, educators and schools, public decision makers, research sponsors, regulatory analysts, and scholars.

Physics at the beginning of the twenty-first century has reached new levels of accomplishment and impact in a society and nation that are changing rapidly. Accomplishments have led us into the information age and fueled broad technological and economic development. The pace of discovery is quickening and stronger links with other fields such as the biological sciences are being developed. The intellectual reach has never been greater, and the questions being asked are more ambitious than ever before. Physics in a New Era is the final report of the NRC's six-volume decadal physics survey. The book reviews the frontiers of physics research, examines the role of physics in our society, and makes recommendations designed to strengthen physics and its ability to serve important needs such as national security, the economy, information technology, and education.

Militaries with state-of-the-art information technology sometimes bog down in confusing conflicts. To understand why, it is important to understand the micro-foundations of military power in the information age, and this is exactly what Jon R. Lindsay's Information Technology and Military Power gives us. As Lindsay shows, digital systems now mediate almost every effort to gather, store, display, analyze, and communicate information in military organizations. He highlights how personnel now struggle with their own information systems as much as with the enemy. Throughout this foray into networked technology in military operations, we see how information practice—the ways in which practitioners use technology in actual operations—shapes the effectiveness of military performance. The quality of information practice depends on the interaction between strategic problems and organizational solutions. Information Technology and Military Power explores information practice through a series of detailed historical cases and ethnographic studies of military organizations at war. Lindsay explains why the US military, despite all its technological advantages, has struggled for so long in unconventional conflicts against weaker adversaries. This same perspective suggests that the US retains important advantages against advanced competitors like China that are less prepared to cope with the complexity of information systems in wartime. Lindsay argues convincingly that a better understanding of how personnel actually use technology can inform the design of command and control, improve the net assessment of military power, and promote reforms to improve military performance. Warfighting problems and technical solutions keep on changing, but information practice is always stuck in between.

Countering Cyber Sabotage: Introducing Consequence-Driven, Cyber-Informed Engineering (CCE) introduces a new methodology to help critical infrastructure owners, operators and their security practitioners make demonstrable improvements in securing their most important functions and processes. Current best practice approaches to cyber defense struggle to stop targeted attackers from creating potentially catastrophic results. From a national security perspective, it is not just the damage to the military, the economy, or essential critical infrastructure companies that is a concern. It is the cumulative, downstream effects from potential regional blackouts, military mission kills, transportation stoppages, water delivery or treatment issues, and so on. CCE is a validation that engineering first principles can be applied to the most important cybersecurity challenges and in so doing, protect organizations in ways current approaches do not. The most pressing threat is cyber-enabled sabotage, and CCE begins with the assumption that well-resourced, adaptive adversaries are already in and have been for some time, undetected and perhaps undetectable. Chapter 1 recaps the current and near-future states of digital technologies in critical infrastructure and the implications of our near-total dependence on them. Chapters 2 and 3 describe the origins of the methodology and set the stage for the more in-depth examination that follows. Chapter 4 describes how to prepare for an engagement, and chapters 5-8 address each of the four phases. The CCE phase chapters take the reader on a more granular walkthrough of the methodology with examples from the field, phase objectives, and the steps to take in each phase. Concluding chapter 9 covers training options and looks towards a future where these concepts are scaled more broadly.

This book debates and discusses the present and future of Disruptive Technologies in general and military Disruptive Technologies in particular. Its primary goal is to discuss various critical and advanced elucidations on strategic technologies. The focus is less on extrapolating the future of technology in a strict sense, and more on understanding the Disruptive Technology paradigm. It is widely accepted that technology alone cannot win any military campaign or war. However, technological superiority always offers militaries an advantage. More importantly, technology also has a great deterrent value. Hence, on occasion, technology can help to avoid wars. Accordingly, it is important to effectively manage new technologies by identifying their strategic utility and role in existing military architectures and the possible contributions they could make towards improving overall military capabilities. This can also entail doctrinal changes, so as to translate these new technologies into concrete advantages.