The word "leadership" has been thrown around quite a bit.  I thought about
in in the context of both the Instrumentation Frontier and experimental 
design.
As I mentioned in my talks, from my point of view the best definition is
both having vision and the ability to execute that vision.  I think 
leadership
is important both in the national and global sense.  We are driven by the
need to think about the science and perform experiments. That requires
talent, infrastructure and funding.  If we "outsource" the execution of our
ideas we will soon lose the motivation to have them.  It is very 
frustrating
to have an idea, only to see it  ignored or developed by others because we
do not have the resources or support to do it ourselves.

Leadership is not exclusive, but we need to contribute to the global 
field in
a way commensurate with our national resources. If we continue on our 
current path,
with the agencies telling us not to think big,  we are in serious 
jeopardy of
losing the ability to execute any significant vision, even the small 
ones. We
owe it to the field as a whole to provide our share of leadership.

Ron


On 8/23/13 9:08 AM, Ashutosh Kotwal wrote:
>> The harder question is whether it's well-motivated compared to other expensive (non-EF or non-HEP) science projects. Clearly many LHC discoveries would provide compelling motivation for a higher-energy machine, but such a discovery has not yet materialized.   We've tried to take a hard look in our NP report at the case in which _nothing new_ is seen at the LHC; you can judge for yourself how well we've done, but it's clearly a more slippery argument.
>
> I think we all agree that we are not ready nor motivated to started digging the VLHC tomorrow.
>
> But I think at the next snow mass in 10 years, we would like the VLHC preparations to be as advanced as the ILC preparations are today. Note that significant ILC preparations were done before the Higgs discovery.
>
> Fortune favors the prepared mind.
>
>
>> (2) I've seen and heard some comments about "US leadership".  This is probably just semantics, but the implications trouble me, because:
>> 	(i) "US" is ill defined: is it work done by US citizens? Or profs at US institutions? Or at US facilities? Or with US-built parts?
>> 	(ii) "leadership" is somewhat pejorative to the rest of the community.   Isn't it enough that we work towards "continued US strength" rather than trying to make sure we have our elbows in front of our colleagues in other communities?
>> 	(iii) Why is "US leadership" so important in such an international community with poorly-defined fuzzy borders?  Is such nationalism just used cynically to sell the project to Congress, or is there a real argument to be made that it's critical that we are #1?
>
> When the rest of the world starts calling us #7 I think we will not like the sound of that.
>
> regards,
> Ashutosh
>
>
>> Cheers,
>> Daniel
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