alumni profile
Paul Kaminski (PhD 1971 AA)

For the last several decades, the U.S. military has had the decidedly useful advantages of seeing more and being seen less than its foes thanks to advanced reconnaissance and stealth technologies. Paul Kaminski (PhD 1971 AA) has been deeply involved in making those technologies a reality. For his efforts, he received the National Medal of Technology at the White House earlier this year. This fall, he was named a Pioneer by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).

Now a defense advisor and consultant, Kaminski continues to bridge the worlds of engineering and policy in the service of national security.

What were you honored for?

I was honored for two activities. The first began early in my career, in fact right after I left Stanford. I began work to help define and assess the utility of and the feasibility of a new type of national reconnaissance satellite. The ultimate result was an operational reconnaissance satellite, the basic version of which is still flying today and collecting useful intelligence. I’m unable to give you the name of the program or any details. That’s still classified. But it is an unconventional imaging satellite.

What does that mean, “unconventional”?

Our early reconnaissance satellites, the first one of which has been declassified, a program named Corona, actually exposed film with a camera in orbit and the film was rolled up on a reel that was located in a re-entry vehicle

That re-entry vehicle could be ejected, and it would then re-enter the atmosphere, deploy a parachute and then we snatched it in the air with a C130 airplane. The one I worked on doesn’t use film and operates in a different manner to produce intelligence from data that resemble images of objects and events on the ground. I can’t describe the details of how it operates, but it sends data down in near real time. Because this system produced a different kind of image, a big question was ‘what kind of useful intelligence information could we get from this?’ So I was involved in a program that built prototypes of the sensor system. We flew various  prototypes on low altitude and high altitude aircraft so we could collect the data and train a group of interpreters to look at the images that resulted and  see what kind of intelligence data we could extract. Then we could decide how much money it was worth spending as a country on this kind of unconventional imaging system.

It’s still flying, so it must have been worth it.

It was and it has proved very valuable. We’re making upgrades and have improved versions of this kind of capability for the future. I’m still involved, though not in the direct program manager way as I was before.  Now I serve on the advisory board for the director of the NRO.

So all this right out of grad school?

Yes, I left Stanford in 1971 and went to work for the NRO in Los Angeles. I worked on some other things for about a year. I started work on the unconventional imaging work in about 1973 and continued this through 1976.

I was an Air Force officer, and I was selected to attend one of the senior Service Schools in Washington in 1976. So I attended the Industrial College of the Armed Forces from 1976-77. During that time, I ran into now Management Science and Engineering Professor Bill Perry who was serving as undersecretary of defense, and Bill invited me to come to work for him as his special assistant working on a number of our high technology efforts in the department. That’s where I first got exposed to the stealth program which we were in the process of launching. I did some very early assessment work for Bill Perry to help him reach a conclusion as to whether this technology was really going to pay off for the country and whether it was prudent for us to make substantial investments. I gave him a positive assessment.

The stealth program began first with  Research and Development airplanes to demonstrate basic technology feasibility in 1977 and 1978. When we had positive results we committed to building some operational airplanes. I stayed in that as Special Assistant to Bill Perry through the Carter administration and when the administration turned over, of course Bill Perry was out. At that time, I was selected by the Air Force to be the program director for the Air Force stealth activities, including the F-117, which was well underway at the time, and the B-2, which we were just defining, plus an advanced, stealthy cruise missile and some other programs. That was a really a challenging, exciting, and fun job!

Who was your adviser while you were here? What was your thesis about?

My PhD thesis adviser was a wonderful guy named Art Bryson, who now is an emeritus. He was an extraordinary person -  an able and enthusiastic mentor to me, and an inspiration with his combination of capability and humility. And I had a number of great professors at Stanford that I ran across many times in my career -  people like Bob Cannon and Dan DeBra.

I did my thesis in a field called advanced estimation theory — being able to take measurements that have errors in them and knowing the dynamics of the system being measured, combine all that information in the best possible manner to estimate the “state” of the system. This approach was used to estimate the flight attitude of the F-117, as well as the location and orientation of a national reconnaissance satellite. This ended up all fitting together just beautifully for me.

What brought you to what you do today?

I served as director of the stealth program for three to four years. Then I decided to leave the Air Force after 20 years of service, at which time I rejoined Bill Perry in an investment banking and technology strategy business called Technology Strategies and Alliances. That business had two offices. One on Sand Hill Road near Stanford and an office in Virginia. We worked together in that business with other colleagues for about 10 years. When Perry left to be deputy secretary of defense [for Bill Clinton], I took over as CEO of that business. I stayed in that position for six or nine months, at which time Bill was pressed into service as Secretary of Defense and he called to ask for my help. In 1994, I came back into government, this time as a Senate-confirmed appointee as Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology. That job was responsible for all research and development, and all acquisition and logistics for the Department of Defense.

I continued in that position until Bill Perry’s departure in 1997. Then I went back into private business. I am the chairman and CEO of a small consulting company called Technovation Inc., and I serve on several company boards: one large public company, General Dynamics, and several other interesting, mostly technology-oriented companies. One is called In-Q-Tel, which serves as a  venture capital catalyst for the intelligence community. Another is RAND, which focuses on public policy research.

Besides the NRO advisory board, I also serve on the Defense Science Board, the FBI Director’s Advisory Board, and the Senate Select Committee for Intelligence’s technical advisory board. I also do consulting and advisory work for large technology and defense oriented companies, and small non-for profit entities in my consulting business.

The U.S. faces different threats than it did during the Cold War. How has that forced defense technology to evolve?

I think one of the important needs for the evolution of technology, and at the same time one of the challenges involves a much higher degree of integration. We need to be able to gather the myriad of information that our various sensors provide to us and to be able to collate it and derive knowledge from it, and then deploy that knowledge in a useful way. Look at some of the difficult things we’re seeing in Iraq today, for example, being able to gain some insights as to where improvised explosive devices are likely to be deployed, and what conditions lead to their deployment so that we don’t have to be finding them by hearing explosions. It’s a very difficult problem, but we are starting to make some progress on that problem by doing a better job of integrating many different types of information including human intelligence.

I think another challenge area for us today is recognizing our growing dependence on space. There are concerns that many of us have today about being able to preserve the survivability of our spacecraft. Simply playing defense is not enough. We need some redundancy among space and airborne systems and we need some ability to put other people’s assets at risk if they start doing bad things to us. A comprehensive program will be needed in our defense posture and also in our geopolitical posture to deal with these issues.

Are you optimistic about the future, given that we are in this transition?

I am optimistic about the country going forward. But I think we need to do some serious work to recharge our technological base of talent. We have lost some of the talent and capability we once had, both in our government and in our industry. A particular area where expertise is needed is in systems engineering. You can see why that would be important when you think about the growing need for integration I spoke about. I’m just finishing up chairing a study for the National Research Council on system engineering for the Department of Defense. I also think another area in which the country has to reach out more broadly is in cooperative arrangements with our key allies. No country is going to be successful fighting terrorism by itself. This is a global problem, so we have to be willing to marshal and work with our allies in a constructive manner.

November 2007