SPACE WARS: The old college try.
Burkholder, Steve
The Old College Try At the University of Michigan, hard hit by the worst recession in forty years, the Geography Department was one of the first to feel the ax last year. But the budget-cutters...
...But the budget-cutters didn't just trim things back...
...All of which explains why the University of Michigan is knocking itself out this spring to become a sort of Air Force Space Academy—a place where the U.S...
...The concept was spelled out last November by an Ate Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) document calling for bids on the robotics contract...
...Tuition has soared, but not enough to close the gap...
...Gamota and others in Michigan's higher echelons tout the Air Force contract as a form of "basic research" to advance the frontiers of knowledge...
...The state's share of the university's budget has shrunk from 30 to 21 per cent...
...He knows that the Air Force is betting big money on robotics as a foundation for what it calls "a new generation of sophisticated, intelligent systems...
...they eliminated the entire twenty-five-member department...
...The Air Force hopes to "ease manpower needs" by producing "intelligent remotely piloted vehicles" that could "revise course appropriately, select targets of opportunity, and cooperate with other RPVs," the AFOSR said...
...And better for programs—especially in engineering and the applied sciences—of interest to those who can pay for them...
...But why is the Air Force interested in robotics...
...We are a military organization, and whatever we do is mission-oriented...
...A former Bell Laboratories physicist who served as the Pentagon's director of research from 1976 to 1981, Gamota has become the architect of a plan to pump military dollars into Ann Arbor's depleted coffers...
...But, pressed by reporter Bonnie DeSimons of the Ann Arbor News, Colonel Clarence Gardner of the AFOSR Directorate of Electronic and Material Sciences told a different story: "What we are really interested in is advanced aerospace systems...
...James Anderson of Lansing, Michigan, long a student of military spending, put the point even more succinctly in a recent speech at Ann Arbor: "The Air Force is interested in robotics for only one reason—to preserve and enhance its capability to make war...
...The contract would serve as the essential start-up funding for a new Center on Robotics and Integrated Manufacturing (CRIM), through which the university hopes to lure major corporate and Federal funding in the years to come...
...The other "intelligent system" the Air Force wants to investigate through its robotics research contract is the application of robot intelligence to sophisticated weapons guidance and targeting...
...So the university has announced a plan to make itself "smaller but better...
...Also under consideration for possible elimination—elimination, not just reduction—are Michigan's Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations, its Center for Continuing Education of Women, and the Institute for the Study of Mental Retardation and Related Disabilities...
...The university is competing with three other institutions—Stanford University, Carnegie-Mellon of Pittsburgh, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—for a three-year, $7.2-mil-lion Air Force contract to do research into robotics...
...It's not hard to understand why Michigan is so hungry for Air Force money...
...And he who pays the fiddler calls the tune...
...According to the publication, the Air Force also wants to build "autonomous command and control systems with the ability to sense, think, and act, such as an air defense system that could track aircraft, detect and identify hostile threats, and take appropriate action...
...That turns out to mean smaller for educational programs that help poor and working people, women, minorities, and the disabled...
...This year it may be the School of Art, the School of Education, and the School of Natural Resources...
...Reprogrammable robots would eliminate the need for costly, time-consuming retooling of entire factories each time a new weapon is produced...
...Air Force can learn the art and science of waging nuclear war in space...
...Steve Burkholder (Steve Burkholder, a free-lance writer in Madison, Wisconsin, wrote "The Pentagon in the Ivory Tower" in the June 1981 issue of The Progressive...
...One of the "intelligent systems" is manufacturing...
...That's where George Gamota, director of Michigan's Institute of Science and Technology, comes in...
...The Air Force is interested in robot-controlled "small-batch production," which would enable military industries to build very limited quantities of strategic bombers, missiles, rockets, and other armaments...
Vol. 46 • June 1982 • No. 6
