Ten-Year Counterdrug Technology Plan and Development
Roadmap
Planning Counterdrug Technology Development
Organizing the Plan Around Technology Panels
The national priorities and goals as set forth in the National Drug Control Strategy
provide the framework for performing technical assessments and forecasts of advancements
needed in technology and system capabilities to counter drug trafficking and drug abuse.
Agencies perform technology assessments to plan future improvements in their capabilities
and to reduce future system procurement costs. Technology assessments are organized
according to the four panels and provide an essential component of a ten-year development
roadmap. Technology initiatives are derived from each panel.
Technology assessment activities also allow law enforcement agencies to predict how the
drug trafficking organizations could exploit advancements in technology for their own
purposes. Additionally, assessment of drug abuse trends relies on basic addiction research
performed by academic, government and industry pharmaceutical laboratories, and societal
research performed by prevention and treatment provider, monitoring, and study
organizations.
The Development Roadmap Approach
Figure 4 illustrates the stages of counterdrug technology maturity in the ten-year
roadmap from development to deployment. The development roadmap chart for the ten-year
development program defines three stages of technology development: ready to field or
block upgrade off-the-shelf (OTS), maturing, and emerging focused R&D. The color
coding for the charts depicts the projected availability time for the items on the chart
as defined below:
- Off-The-Shelf (OTS) technology (shown in Blue on Figure 4) can be deployed with
operational systems or should be available after some test and evaluation in less than 18
months. Federal drug control agencies can often meet their technology needs by acquiring
commercially available OTS products, by block upgrades/improvements to existing systems,
or by adapting systems used by other agencies.
- Maturing technology, such as technology demonstrators or prototypes (shown in Green on
Figure 4) after test and evaluation in operational testbeds, would transition to full
scale production systems within 1 to 6 years. Frequently, prototypes must be configured
and operationally tested to meet the mission specific needs of drug control agencies.
- Emerging focused R&D (shown in Red on Figure 4) represents advanced concept
technology needed to satisfy specific drug control agency mission requirements within a
time horizon of 7 to 10 years before production systems could be expected. For unique drug
control agency requirements, general development R&D innovations must be focussed onto
specific mission needs. In these cases, R&D assessments at the laboratory level must
be performed to validate the principles that will ultimately be embodied in the fielded
product.
Figure 4: Generic Development Roadmap
Forecasting Resource Availability
It is important to note that this plan is not a budget document, nor was it used to
construct the FY 1999 – 2003 drug control budget. In drafting the development
roadmaps for each panel, certain assumptions were made including expectations about
realizing future resource levels consistent with the President's FY 99 budget request.
Given these circumstances, the timeframes and levels of activity within each element of
the development roadmaps may need to be adjusted to reflect new or changing circumstances.
