NEXT STEPS- Homeland Security Research - Insightful Testimony

Testimony before
Committee on Science, Space and Technology
United States House of Representatives
March 15, 2011

tiny excerpt:

My name is James Jay Carafano. I am the Deputy Director of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies and the Director of the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation. The views I express in this testimony are my own, and should not be construed as representing any official position of The Heritage Foundation.

The time has probably come to give S&T a more defined statutory mission that clearly outlines its role in acquisition, life-cycle management, and the integration with other enablers for the department, such as training, human capital management, and sustainment. This step should be taken through a reauthorization bill.
It might be time to rethink the mission, structure, and purpose of the DNDO and whether these activities would not be better managed under major department activities rather than as a stand-alone activity.[11] It might make sense, for example, to transfer the office’s transformational and applied R&D portfolios to S&T.
Congress and the department need to decide—whither the Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency? The act establishing the DHS created HSARPA. At the time, legislators assumed its mission would parallel the function that DARPA serves for the Department of Defense. That vision has never been fully realized and it is an open question whether a DARPA-like activity is truly essential for DHS or whether DHS would not be better off putting the overwhelming majority of its resources on its present operational needs and leveraging existing organizations, like DARPA, for the rare occasion it needs to look at truly futuristic or “out of the box” solutions.

[link to www.heritage.org]