are organizing the third Quantitative Methods in
Defense and National Security (QMDNS) confer-
ence, which was established to link defense prob-
lems to statistical solutions. Participants include
both defense industry workers and statisticians. (See SHOP
www.galaxy.gmu.edu/QMDNS2010.)
SDNS also established a speakers program
(see Page 63 and
www.amstat.org/sections/sdns/
speakers.html), again with funding from an ASA
member initiative, to provide speakers and travel
funding to universities and colleges interested in
hearing a presentation about statistical aspects of
national security challenges. We have a dozen peo-
Visit the ASA’s online marketplace at
ple on the speakers list and encourage you to both
invite a speaker to your institution and add your
www.amstat.org/asastore
name to the list.
Success Stories
While there is much more that statistics can con-
tribute to this field, statisticians have made an
impact on national security problems. One example
is a major defense acquisition program that ran into
reliability problems because of faulty methodology
for tracking reliability improvement during devel-
opment. It was a statistician who laid out the rules
for estimating reliability, allowing the program to
get back on track (see “Missile Reliability”). Other
examples can be found at
www.amstat.org/sections/
sdns/SDNS_ThePresent.pdf and
www.amstat.org/
outreach/pdfs/StatSigNationalSecurity.pdf.
Next Steps and Lessons
Our next steps for outreach to policymakers are
to continue and broaden our current activities by
reaching more officials and statisticians and revisit-
ing those we’ve already met. For outreach to stat-
Books Apparel
isticians, we hope our enthusiasm for the many
interesting problems statistics can address in this
field was manifest. We welcome your involvement
and advice.
As our history indicates, this has been a long
road, but we can point to real progress for statistics
in national security issues. Clearly, much remains to
be done. One lesson we’ve learned is that we need to Purchase T-shirts, books,
do a better job of educating decisionmakers about
JSM Proceedings, and gift
what statisticians do. For those who realize the value
of statistics, our experience is that sometimes the
items!
statistics is not always done by statisticians. So, we
need to communicate more convincingly that stat-
isticians can bring state-of-the-art techniques to a
problem, which may yield better solutions faster.
For other sections exploring how to better reach
policymakers, we highly recommend using the
S A V E 1 0%
resources available from the ASA, especially fund-
ing through member initiatives. n on your first purchase by entering ASASTORE at checkout.
December 2009 AmstAt News 33
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