There is an "ocean engineering problem"— it won't go away 

 even though general goals are unconvincing because their costs are 

 too open-ended and separate specific goals don't win enough votes. 



Complaints from those with whom the panel made contact proved 

 to be less along the line of specific technological deficiencies than they 

 were organizational in nature. There was concern for the lack of 

 understanding of the need for ocean engineering until it proved late 

 and expensive to correct what foresight might have prevented. There 

 was concern for the lack of continuity in ocean engineering development 

 which meant inefficient, stop-start investigations. There was concern 

 for the lack of meso-scale activity mid-range in size, mid-range in time, 

 and mid-r ange in money. There was concern about the lack of timely 

 communication of data that did exist. 



The panel's findings were: 



• The ground has been well-ploughed. 



• There is no question but that there are things to do in ocean 

 engineering but too many to do all at once. 



• There is no general agreement on what projects or programs 

 ought to be done first. 



• This may be because no one thing ought to be worked on first 

 and many ought to be worked on simultaneously. 



• Drifting along until we hit a snag seems hardly the useful 

 way to go. 



On the relative roles of government and industry in ocean engineer- 

 ing—there seems to be agreement in principle. It is: The cost of ocean- 

 engineering research and development is to be borne by those who 

 would benefit from it. If the development is for a specific operation 

 with specific users, the costs should be assumed by the operator and 

 reflected in the price of the product or charge for service, or, if there 

 are many and disparate operations by whose use the public is generally 

 benefited, the cost should be borne by the general taxpayer and requests 

 for funding must compete with other and unrelated demands. 



The hitch comes in deciding whether a particular development fits 

 one definition or the other. The ambiguities seem to arise in three 

 ways: (1) when the direct benefits are hard to figure, (2) when the 

 benefits are twice-removed, i.e., when the direct results might stimu- 

 late benefits but their nature is not directly foreseeable, and (3) when 

 differing conception of the detail, the risks, and the time-to-payoff 

 raises the argument of who should pay for the middle stages. This is 

 especially complex because the expenditure of government funds in 

 the early high-risk stages of development leads to a government interest 

 in later stages where industry would otherwise prefer to go it alone. It is 



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