The Technical Intelligence Program exists to better connect the Director, Defense Research and Engineering offices to the Intelligence Community in order to better inform DoD Research and Engineering decision-makers, increase the viability of the science and technology planning process and avoid technology surprise.   This program encourages collaborative work within the Defense and commercial S&T communities and with the U.S. Intelligence Community on emerging technologies and applications with the potential to pose national security challenges.

Principal initiatives within the Technical Intelligence Program include:

• The Trilateral Emerging Technologies Cooperative Initiative:  A tri-lateral effort involving the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom to conduct assessments on emerging and disruptive technologies.  This initiative involves multiple organizational participants from each nation and culminates in an annual conference that rotates between the partners.
• Forecasting Future Disruptive Technology:  A collaborative effort involving the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences.  This initiative has resulted in open workshops in other countries in technologies of interest and has provided detailed insight into such topics as information technology, advancements in space technology, biotechnology applications for genetic engineering, and meta-materials.  The web link for this project can be found at http://www8.nationalacademies.org/cp/projectview.aspx?key=48795
• The S&T Net Assessment program assesses selected technologies from both a domestic and foreign development perspective and has produced seven assessments since its implementation.
• A future technology war game that leverages the expertise of highly qualified subject matter experts from across the military Reserves community.  This annual war game assesses the potential impact of technologies emerging from other nations.  This war game seeks to inform decision makers about the potential impact of these technologies on our military capability balance.  Recent war games have focused on such topics as the potentially disruptive impact of commercially available sensing/tracking technologies envisioned to be available in 20 years.
• Country S&T baseline studies by the Library of Congress/Federal Research Division (LOC/FRD).  Three studies are complete and three additional studies are underway.  More will be conducted.  Country studies by the LOC/FRD can be found at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/