COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Recruiting: General
Military targeting academic recruits
MARC PARRY, Times Union
October 22, 2007
TROY -- Richard Radke uncaps a marker and sketches an airplane in his
seventh-floor office overlooking the football field at RPI. It seems
like a normal plane, except for the giant laser that shoots from its nose.
The plane in this drawing is in development in real life on a runway
at Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert. But when Radke toured
it in July, he couldn't see the nose. For security.
"I can't say too much about it," Radke said. "But it was pretty
amazing that such a thing exists."
The 32-year-old engineering professor has seen many such things this
year. He's one of a dozen people who were picked for a Defense
Department program created to expose young researchers to the U.S. military.
The exposure is firsthand. They board a nuclear attack submarine (it
was docked), jump from a paratrooper training tower (34 feet) and eat
military rations (chicken with noodles and a vanilla shake). The
researchers, who need security clearances, also hear hours of
briefings from military and defense industry leaders.
It continues today as Radke begins his swing through the nation's
intelligence establishment with a visit to the CIA.
The point of the 2-year-old program is to familiarize young American
professors who specialize in computer science and related fields with
the research interests of the Defense Department. The professors get
access to -- and hopefully funding from -- a world that otherwise can
be tough to crack, while the military gets to deploy their brainpower
toward government needs.
Collaborating with the military is nothing new for Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute.
In 2006, 59 percent of the school's research awards came from the
federal government. The Department of Defense accounted for 13
percent of that total, according to Wolf W. von Maltzahn, RPI's
acting vice president for research.
Pentagon funding went from $5.5 million in fiscal 2003 to $9.5
million in fiscal 2007. The projects have included research on the
detection of improvised explosive devices, the deadliest obstacle for
American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"Long term, many of these research grants have some military
relevance," von Maltzahn said. "I would not say it's directly
military research."
Before this program, called the Computer Science Study Group, Radke's
direct exposure to the military was limited to a college roommate who
was in Navy ROTC.
The Guilderland resident didn't have friends or relatives in the
service. He grew up in Milwaukee, Wis., the son of an English teacher
and an electrical engineer. He studied at Rice University in Texas
before getting a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Princeton. Like
many professors, he says, "I skew more on the Democrat side."
He specializes in computer vision and image analysis: designing
algorithms that can help computer programs perceive images in the
same way people do. One of his projects focused on better targeting
cancerous tumors.
"I'm not your typical electrical engineer in the sense that I hardly
know anything about circuits or power," Radke said. "I just know
about signal processing and image processing."
Now he also has firsthand knowledge of seven of the country's nine
military combat command centers. This week he's finishing a four-part
program that lasts about 20 days. Since it began in April, his group
has hopscotched the country in a windowless KC-135 military refueling
aircraft that smells like jet fuel and is so loud you need earplugs.
Other highlights: watching three F-15 fighter jets refuel in midair
and visiting a "petting zoo" filed with the planes, tanks,
helicopters and missile launchers of America's adversaries.
The next step comes in November, when Radke submits a research
proposal to the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
The U.S. established the agency in 1958 after the Soviets launched
Sputnik. It's famous, among other things, for supporting the early
research that gave rise to the Internet.
Said Radke: "This is a great way for me to understand what the DOD
lifestyle would be like."
Marc Parry can be reached at 454-5057 or by e-mail at mparry@timesunion. com.
Pentagon proposal Here, in Radke's words, is the research project
he'll be proposing to the Pentagon: "3-D laser range scanning of a
complex environment can provide invaluable guidance for how to
respond to a dangerous situation. ... We hope to be able to construct
accurate and useful 3-D representations of an environment, built up
from multiple laser range scans and digital pictures from different
angles. Users will be able to use our algorithms to (show the
locations) where it's 90 percent likely an object the size and the
shape of a trash can could be hidden."
This archive consists of a topically organized selection of
articles culled by members of the Counter-Recruitment List Serve from printed
publications and web sites. The archive is not complete. We have chosen
material relevant to the work of