The Defense Department must do a better job anticipating how nation-states or terrorists could use modern-day technology to harm the United States, according to John Young, the Pentagon’s director of defense research and engineering.

Improving the Pentagon’s ability to assess such threats is one of Young’s top priorities as defense officials construct the fiscal year 2008 budget, he told Inside the Pentagon Oct. 26.

“It was one thing to red-team what the Russians might do in response to a fifth-generation fighter, like an F-22 or a Joint Strike Fighter,” Young said. “It’s a whole different thing -- that we haven’t done much of -- to red-team how an adversary might use [information technology] and hackers” to attack, for example, the U.S. power grid, he added.

In military jargon, the term “red-team” describes the attempt to view war scenarios through the eyes of an intelligent adversary.

The protection of reachback links between decision-makers and computer systems in the United States and forward-deployed troops abroad is of particular concern to Young.

“We’ve got to protect that infrastructure and recognize people will come after those pieces,” he said.

Besides information technology, the spread of small power sources and high-performance sensors warrants study of what adversaries could do with these capabilities, according to Young.

Steven Cambone, the under secretary of defense for intelligence, already has made a small number of personnel available for such a study, he added.

Biometrics also is high on the list of science and technology priorities for the next fiscal year, according to Young.

The field comprises technologies to identify and store biological characteristics -- for example, fingerprints, facial features, or iris patterns.

Last month, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England gave Young the lead for overseeing and directing DOD’s biometrics programs, initiatives and technologies.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, Young said, DOD wants to step up the use of biometric technology to control access to U.S. bases. “There have been instances with people that seek access to those facilities who . . . also have been involved with previous terrorist acts,” he explained.

Collecting biometric information is crucial at a time when other types of information, such as names or government-issued identification numbers, can be counterfeited.

“You can envision a time where you can collect an image at a distance, put it in a database and correlate it with other sets of information” to uniquely identify an individual, he said.

To Young, the increased use of biometrics is a reflection of 21st-century threats.

“As the war on terrorism is more about individuals than nation-states, there’s a desire to have unique technologies to be able to . . . identify an individual [and] follow [his] movements, if you need to,” he said.

A related priority is the development of technologies to tag, track and locate suspected terrorists, Young told ITP. “There [are] a lot of technology opportunities out there to look at very small devices or very unique aspects of individuals” that could help warfighters keep up with their movements, he added.

Another priority for FY-08 is what Young calls “human, social, cultural behavior” modeling technologies.

According to Bush administration policy, the Pentagon -- along with other parts of the U.S. government -- should early on try to influence emerging conflicts around the globe in an attempt to avert open war in those places. The Pentagon now needs technologies that can help predict what reactions certain U.S. actions might draw from a local population during that phase of an engagement, Young said.

“It’s a softer science, but . . . it aligns exactly with some of the new warfighting plans that [U.S. Central Command] and [U.S. Special Operations Command] have devised for the global war on terror,” according to Young.

As an example of the technology needed, Young cited simulation software used during U.S. Joint Forces Command’s most recent Urban Resolve exercise.

During the drill, which finished last month, JFCOM officials used the Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation tool to simulate coalition and insurgent activity -- including the use of improvised explosive devices -- to gauge neighborhood reaction in Baghdad and predict over time how residents are going to view efforts to stabilize the city.

Officials at the command are preparing a proposal to send SEAS technology to cities in the Middle East where U.S. forces are engaged in operations (see related story).

Tools like this “won’t necessarily give you a course of action,” Young told ITP. “But [they] will give you a sense of options and how those options might be reacted to, and what options would be bad options [in the context] of the country’s infrastructure . . . cultural norms and behavior.”

In the area of weapon systems technology, DOD in the next fiscal year will continue an effort to link service weapons and sensors -- like Aegis ships, Patriot missiles or Airborne Warning and Control System aircraft -- to engage airborne targets, Young said.

The services each have created their own “kill chains” from sensors to weapons, but sharing data between the different platforms would enhance commanders’ abilities to shoot down airborne threats, he added.

Finally, Young wants an emphasis on fielding surveillance technologies, like synthetic aperture radar, more quickly, he told ITP. These systems could be used to observe a specific area in a war zone, retaining the data they record. Officials later could retrieve that information to analyze “bad activity,” like IED attacks, and try to prevent it from happening again, according to Young.

“I think the demand for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance data [will] keep growing,” he said. DOD is considering putting synthetic aperture radar systems on unmanned aerial vehicles to help meet that demand, he added.