Synergy Between Engineering and the Military

By Andrea Dace

Chief of Operations, Lt. Col. Jeff Talley knew he was a world away from his job in Indiana as assistant professor of engineering at the University of Notre Dame the evening Saddam Hussein’s army simultaneously launched six long-range missiles at 416th Engineer Command headquarters in Kuwait. A U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reservist, Talley had been sent to Kuwait months earlier to plan engineering support for what was to become Operation Iraqi Freedom. Now, standing there in a desert tent, wearing the chemical suit and flack jacket he’d had on for weeks straight, Talley did the math. "I was thinking there was no way we were going to shoot down all six. A patriot missile battery can shoot down only so many incoming at one time," he remembers. "Luckily, his people were pretty bad shots. A couple went out into the ocean, a couple missed us, and we shot down two or three. We had only one hit, maybe half a mile away."

This episode typifies the life of Talley, who has melded engineering and combat soldiering into a unique career that benefits many, including his students. He has actually been a soldier much longer -- 23 years -- than a university professor, having begun active duty straight out of Louisiana State University, where he attended on a ROTC scholarship. The day he graduated in 1981, "I was commissioned and went on my first assignment for the Army Corps of Engineers that same day," he recalls. He later accepted the rank of captain with the active reserves when he left the Army to pursue graduate education in environmental engineering in 1992.

Then, in late 2001, reservist Talley had been teaching at Notre Dame for a year when he got a phone call telling him he had 72 hours to pack his bags and report; his country needed him for technical engineering work for a potential war on Iraq. Leaving his wife, four kids, students, and research, he went to the Middle East to plan the infrastructure for the quarter of a million U.S. soldiers, airmen, and seamen expected to come through Kuwait, which had only one airport and one seaport at the time. After four weeks there, he came back to the states since it wasn’t certain the president would go to war. But as he relates, "Low and behold, soon after the semester started in January 2002, I got the call." He was told his entire reserve unit was being deployed to Kuwait.

Talley says he came under combat the whole time -- exactly what he was trained for. He talks about engineering in an Army Corps of Engineers troop unit as having fundamental differences from engineering in the private sector. "First off," he says, "you have to be able to do it alone -- to design, construct, and whatever is needed without contractor support. Next, you have to be able to do it and survive while under conventional, chemical, and biological attacks."

With President Bush declaring that major combat in Iraq had ended May 1, 2003, Talley was home by September. He resumed his job at Notre Dame, now as a full professor. Also since his return, he served part-time on the Global War on Terror directorate at the Pentagon. He spent spring break in 2005 finishing up a two-year strategic planning project at the Pentagon, and he was made full colonel in the reserves.

While Talley did conventional civil engineering work in the Middle East, his area of research involves environmental remediation and the entire range of physio-chemical processes that control or influence contaminants in ground and surface water systems. Calling himself "the liberal arts man," with a laugh, Talley has graduate degrees in political science and world religion in addition to engineering. He says other military engineers kid him about that all the time.

With his combination of academic pursuits and military experiences, Talley brings a unique perspective to the engineering classroom. Occasionally, he shows photos of the Army’s engineering work in Kuwait and Iraq and asks students to suggest their own solutions. He has graduate students doing long-distance remediation studies on an expanse of sabotaged oil fields in the southern desert of Ramallah, an extension of one of Talley’s special assignments during the war. He has also designed a new course he’ll teach with a colleague from Notre Dame’s political science department entitled Engineering the Peace. This will investigate the solution of nation building as a non-violent way engineers and scientists can influence foreign policy.

"There is certainly a conflict," says Talley, weighing in on the tension between a military objective of winning at all costs and the potential of engineering to make things better. "The good news is I saw a tremendous amount of restraint at many levels in the Iraq war – that absolutely everything had to be done precisely to minimize damage and destruction to non-combatants." He acknowledges the deliberate and non-deliberate damage done in Iraq but thinks the military’s strategic goal agrees with what an engineer would want. "If you’re trying to win the population’s support, not as an occupying army but a liberating army, the last thing you want to do is destroy their homes, their schools, or their infrastructure because that’s the fastest way to alienate them. From a practical perspective, what you destroy today, you have to rebuild tomorrow."

Currently, Talley’s research interest extends to novel embedded sensor systems, nets of wireless sensors linked to microprocessor controls that detect and monitor environmental contaminants in situ. One application is controlling combined sewage overflows. For example, a heavy rain can overload most cities’ "dumb" sewage systems, as wastewater mixes with rainwater and runs untreated into streams. Talley describes a solution with smart sensors linked to smart valves, "Almost like an environmental star wars system." The sensors talk to each other and make adjustments in real time, via the valves, to prevent or control environmental damage.

The project’s initial funding is from the state of Indiana, but Talley says several organizations including Homeland Security and the Department of Defense are interested because the net can be expanded to provide cost-effective environmental security. He says the embedded sensors can be plug-and-play upgraded to target specific threats. For example, if a terrorist dumps a pathogen into Lake Michigan, the system can avert contamination of the water supply that might not otherwise be identified before 10 thousand people become sick or die in Chicago.

Talley says he plans to continue his mission of teaching and doing hands-on research with his students. While he has offers to take outside jobs, he has no plans to leave Notre Dame or academia. Still a relatively young man at 45, he has already accomplished so much and has a lot ahead of him. But, for the time being, he’ll stay in Indiana and enjoy the calm . . . without long-range Iraqi missiles zeroing in on him.

---

Andrea Dace is a freelance writer in Williamsburg, Virginia