Under mandate of Section 253, Study and Report on Effectiveness of Air Force Science and Technology Program Changes, of the Fiscal Year 2002 National Defense Authorization Act (Public Law 107-107; U.S. Congress, 2001), the U.S. Air Force contracted with the National Research Council (NRC) to conduct the present study. In response, the NRC established the Committee on Review of the Effectiveness of Air Force Science and Technology Program Changes—composed of academics, active and retired industry executives, former Air Force and Department of Defense (DoD) civilian executives, and retired general officers with acquisition and science and technology (S&T) backgrounds. The committee was to review the effectiveness of the Air Force S&T program and, in particular, the actions that the Air Force has taken to improve the management of the program in recent years in response to concerns voiced in numerous study reports and by Congress. The committee’s principal charter was to assess whether, as a whole, the changes put in place by the Air Force since 1999 are sufficient to assure that adequate technology will be available to ensure U.S. military superiority (see Box ES-1).

The committee conducted four open meetings to collect information from the Air Force and its Scientific Advisory Board (SAB), the U.S Navy, the U.S. Army, and DoD. A great many factors influence any judgment of the S&T program’s sufficiency in supporting future warfighter needs; these factors include threat assessment, budget constraints, technology opportunities, workforce, and program content. Given the relatively short time available for this study and considering the detailed reviews conducted annually by the SAB, the technical content of the S&T program was necessarily beyond the committee’s purview. Rather, the committee focused on S&T management, including areas that have been studied many times, in depth, by previous advisory groups (e.g., Defense Science Board [DSB], SAB, Air Force Association [AFA], Naval Research Advisory Committee [NRAC], and NRC). Besides addressing technical content, those prior studies and congressional concerns highlighted four overarching S&T issues: advocacy and visibility, planning, workforce, and investment levels. In response, the Air Force instituted changes in S&T management. This study should be considered a review of Air Force work in progress, because there has been only a relatively short time (for an organization working to annual budget cycles) for the effects of these changes to be manifested.

The Air Force S&T budget total is set from the top down (i.e., allocated by Air Force leadership in competition with other demands, such as readiness, modernization, and operations—a competition held against the backdrop of dramatic reductions in overall Air Force funding during the 1990s). As a competitor for scarce resources against shorter-term, often more pressing concerns, S&T’s success in the budget negotiations is dependent upon the Air Force leadership’s perception of the value that S&T can bring to meeting the needs of the Air Force. This perception is dependent on both the program’s true value and the effectiveness with which that value is communicated to Air Force leadership.