32 



Dr. Robert B. Oswald 



U.S. House of Representatives 



Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries 



Subcommittee on Oceanography, Gulf of Mexico, and the 



Outer Continental Shelf 



August 4, 1993 



Mr. Chairman, I am Robert B. Oswald, Director of Research and 

 Development for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Other positions 

 I currently hold include: Chairman of the Joint Engineers 

 Management Panel of the Tri-Service Reliance, and the Executive 

 Director of the Strategic Environmental Research and Development 

 Program. I am pleased to be here today to present testimony on the 

 dual use of Defense technology for oceanographic research. 



I'd like to start out by stating that I am not an 

 Oceanographer. But, I speak to you today primarily in my capacity 

 as Executive Director of the Strategic Environmental Research and 

 Development Program — also known as SERDP. SERDP is a 

 Congressionally directed program which focuses Department of 

 Defense research assets towards solving environmental issues. 

 Under SERDP we have an effort on global environmental change which 

 uses oceanographic technology. SERDP is driven by the concept of 

 Dual Use technology. One of it's principle purposes is to apply 

 DOD technology to nonmilitary, research use. 



BACKGROUND 



Technical capabilities for observing the environment on a 

 global scale have improved rapidly, especially in the area of 

 remote sensing. New and highly capable national and international 

 civil sensor systems are being developed. The Earth Observing 

 System (EOS), for example, will vastly expand our knowledge of the 

 global environment. Nonetheless, technology and cost tradeoffs 

 have limited the civil community to a subset of the full range of 

 sensor system characteristics. The classified community, focusing 

 on collecting data of national security interest, has also 

 developed a limited sensor set. Thus, the two worlds - civil and 

 classified - have developed different but complementary measurement 

 capabilities. This complementary nature suggests that classified 

 assets could extend, enhance, and, in some cases, enable 

 measurement of scientific parcimeters of environmental importance. 



OCEANOGRAPHY AND REMOTE SENSING 



Environmental ocean science is a discipline that tends to be 

 data starved, with progress springing out of new measurement 

 opportunities and new ways to think about data. A variety of 

 classified sensors and datasets offer the prospect of greatly 



