be established as the effective way of ori^anizin^ o(can engineering 

 development without incurring large down-stream costs. To encourage 

 the formation of a focus for marine affairs in NOAA, we believe this 

 Institute should report to the Administrator of NOAA, who would 

 maintain it as a distinct entity with appropriate bonds to other 

 government agencies who have engineering tasks to perform in the 

 oceans such as the Department of Interior, the Navy, the Coast Guard, 

 etc. The Institute should be authorized startup funding of |5, $lb, 

 and $25 million for three successive years with a mandatory reexamina- 

 tion and re-evaluation of the effort starting two years after day one 

 and a major reassessment five years later. The task of this Institute 

 would be to stimulate and support engineering research (advanced 

 development) in the oceans to meet civilian needs by using seed money 

 to get good work started but not supported indefinitely. The essential 

 task of the Institute ivould he to range the field rather than get bogged 

 down in expensive demonstration programs. It would be to support 

 work and act as a catalyst in new areas of special materials and tech- 

 niques which would serve a multiplicity of marine activities. It would 

 have a central responsibility for improving professional communica- 

 tions and encouraging the development of standards. 



To do this job the Institute would have to have the in-house 

 technical capacity to be stimulated by technical problems, to help 

 prevent falling behind in ocean technology, and to monitor the 

 technical quality of contracts. It would need a Board of Governors 

 representative of industry, the universities, and government to exert 

 the pressure to keep the Institute technically competitive. It would 

 be desirable to have a mix in funding with a major portion of the 

 disbursed funds being used for direct out-of-house support and for 

 fund-matching with outside sources as an earnest of effort and as 

 a check on judgement. Thirty to forty percent should be reserved for 

 in-house efforts or centralized facilities. 



Det Norske Veritas, the highly regarded technical research and 

 standards-setting agency in Norway which uses a mix of government, 

 private, academic, and professional expertise on marine and offshore 

 problems is an example of the organizational status we have in mind. 



One of the National Institutes of Health with a touch of the 

 National Bureau of Standards would be a closer analogy amongst U.S. 

 institutions in organizational structure— more so, for example, than the 

 Office of Naval Research or the Institutes which grew up around the 

 Department of Defense in the fifties and sixties. The reason is that 

 the mission of the Institute for Engineering Research in the Oceans 

 would be to catalyze activity for many users who are dispersed 

 throughout the nation rather than to stimulate technical activity by 

 many suppliers for a centralized, government user. In any event we 



