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Missile Defense

Russian military leaders have expressed concern about US plans for a national missile defense system. Will defense technology be limited by possibilities for a strategic imbalance? Is this just SDI all over again?

rshowalter - 08:00am Jul 2, 2001 EST (#6398 of 6404)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

My intention was to work for the government for my lifetime, solving problems I was specialized to do, giving answers that other people could and would use, concentrating on problems of importance that were thought to be, in some sense (in retrospect, usually a social sense) "too hard" for others. People around me emphasized thes problems were "Robert Showalter problems." I was to make breakthrough inventions, on call, of a stark analytical nature -- and hand off he solutions when other people could use them. That was something I wanted to do -- and still want to do.

I refused to lie, at a decisive time, on a matter connected to the discourse of the 1972 nuclear arms talks. I was to exaggerate how close I was to a solution of the tracking problem that made the difference between animal and human technical function on interception controls. I thought that do do so, in context, would be destabilizing.

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rshowalter - 08:02am Jul 2, 2001 EST (#6399 of 6404)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Here's a snapshot of what I set out to do, with some encouragement and support, after stopping daily association with military matters. -- It is from a piece of writing I did some years ago. It gives a sense of what I knew at that time -- partly due to more-or-less formal education and work, partly due to attention to specific problems of concern to the government -- especially problems of system control and guidance, and partly due to an interest in inventions and patents that started when I was fourteen years old.

"In my early twenties, I set out to make "analytical invention" a possibility and to make "analytical engineering" more efficient. I was interested in questions like "How do you define and design an optimal structure in a fully specified, complicated, fully commercial circumstance?" For instance, suppose an airplane design needs a wing, to mount an engine and connect to a specific fuselage. How do you arrive at a FULLY optimized design for that wing, in a case of real technical complexity, with "optimal" a defensible word in terms of all the technical considerations that pertain at all the levels that matter in the case (aerodynamics, structure, fabrication, maintenance, cost)? How do you even approach such a job?

That's been my core interest -- and it relates to a special approach to doing problems referred to in MD6376 lunarchick 7/1/01 8:23am ... much of the detailed work I've done has related to issues discussed in references in MD6381rshowalter 7/1/01 12:05pm
Some of that work has related to things of interest to the military, some not.

You can say that I've tried to find ways to invent in ways that have disciplined beauty, in the real, complex socio-technical world in which we live. By training (perhaps mistraining) I've tended to concentrate on problems that are large, and that have, in some clear sense, stumped a field of endeavor. I can talk about nuts and bolts of that sort of work.

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