Coming Full Circle

By Rohit K. Shukla

So Cal's Technological Moment in the Sun

This may very well turn out to be Southern California's moment in the sun. While the historical markers have long been in place, a new national urgency makes some of the area's technology skills suddenly very relevant. Are we up to the challenge?

The long winter of our discontent began in 1992, after the Gulf War. The region became a punching bag, absorbing economic body blows at a furious rate. The loss of 200,000 jobs directly or indirectly attributed to the rapidly downsizing defense industry and the collapse of real estate values made the first experiments in "defense conversion" seem hokey. Yet these experiments persevered, paying no heed to Martin Marietta CEO Norm Augustine's oft-quoted warning that "defense conversion is an enterprise unblemished by success."

Such experiments were small in scale relative to the huge transition that accompanied the region's coming of age in the 1990s. Yet the talents that emerged from the closeted defense industry were slowly working their own private magic. In the course of the next few years, while advances in information technology were linked to the great march of the Internet, "command and control" technologies, new encryption and security methodologies, satellite communications and digital asset management approaches were all contributions of the vast complex of research and development pursued by the military-industrial complex. Southern California companies like Hughes, Computer Sciences Corporation, MRV, Comarco, Illusion Engineering and many others were beneficiaries of that complex, and contributors as well to the explosion of commercial activity that followed in the mid to late '90s.

In the wake of the new national mission--one that is unfolding daily--all of the innovation that has been generated as a result of the earliest military experiments should now become even more relevant to a wide array of concerns. Security is an all-encompassing project for the nation. Surveillance technologies, many of them long in the tooth, have benefited from steady refinement over the years. Technologies enabling biotech intervention are going to be more critical. Proactive and reactive technologies to intercept and contain cyber attacks on critical infrastructure (all infrastructure is now critical, whether municipal or not) have made great advances. The deployment of these technologies, many of which have suffered from benign neglect or less-than-stellar attention, now becomes a national priority.

Ironically, these skills, resident in Southern California over a decade (and earlier in their incubation) have come full circle. For example, coordination, between agencies of the government with key roles in this new "war," and between business and government, remains a major part of our new national urgency. Even in that context, technologies that were first developed to help dispersed operations of the military are now back to guiding the management of potential disasters, and may become operationally more useful to highly mobile forces in the field.

Southern California's technology prowess may have started in a military context, then showed some of its "stuff" during the commercial explosion of the past few years. Now it is back, relevant again to the military, and of greater importance than ever to the commercial world.

It remains to be seen whether this emerging complex of histories, skills and vaunted capabilities will define a new regional competitiveness, a unique identifier for the area. What it will take is a visible campaign to promote, not hype, the true depth of the region's talents in service to the new national priorities.

In this project, the regional governments are key players. They can provide a platform for the deployment of these technologies, and can loosen their procurement processes to usher in some creative collaboration between their information technology technocracies and the companies. They can join together in a broad regional campaign to make Southern California ground zero in the fight against a shadowy enemy that will be a continuing threat for many years to come.

In this new mission we cannot play our conventional zero-sum games, where one municipality's gains are another's losses. Whether a company is in Westlake Village or West L.A. should matter less to the governments of either place, because the continuing spillover effect will help us all, in completely unpredictable ways.

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