Corps have broad roles in warring areas, boss says

[1/22/04]Bomb testing and “tele-engineering” have been among missions of the Army Engineer and Research Center in Vicksburg since the shooting part of the war on terrorism began.

Dr. James Houston, director, said ERDC has also dispatched about 15 employees to Afghanistan and Iraq along with about 350 Corps of Engineers employees.

ERDC is made up of four laboratories with headquarters at what was founded as Waterways Experiment Station in Vicksburg in 1929. Additional labs are in Illinois, New Hampshire and Virginia.

Houston said overall, the Corps of Engineers has about 350 people involved in the battle against terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq, most of whom are civilians.

Tele-engineering refers to the use of remote technology to allow design work to be done without a whole team of designers at a site, Houston said.

“We developed a suite of equipment that can be carried by one person that can communicate through satellites in a secure mode,” he said.

About 120 of the sets of equipment are deployed around the world with many of them in Afghanistan and Iraq. They can communicate directly from the battlefield to the tele-engineering operation center at ERDC that is manned 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

“They can get back with us and describe a problem, and even show us the problem, and then we get experts at ERDC, the Corps of Engineers and some cases universities to answer almost any question very rapidly,” Houston said.

He said the center has had about 900 requests from Afghanistan and 1,500 from Iraq.

One of the problems posed during the fighting in Iraq, he said, involved a fear that the Iraqis would use one of the country’s large dams to flood a certain area while coalition troops were trying to traverse it.

“One Saturday we briefed a general officer, this was at the height of the battle. The next morning Special Forces secured the dam,” he said.

In another situation, the Iraqis had blown up part of a bridge and the question was whether the bridge could be used by the huge Abrams main battle tank, could it be repaired or would the tanks have to take a different route.

Another contribution the ERDC made is with troop movement.

“Back here we were looking at all kinds of intelligence … figuring out maneuver routes, where the tanks should go, where the troops should move,” he said.

Mentioning the Daisy Cutter Bomb that was used in both Afghanistan and in Vietnam, Houston said researchers at ERDC were involved in its development.

“All these bunker-busting bombs you hear about the Air Force dropped … ERDC here in Vicksburg has been involved in the testing or designing,” he said.

Base camp construction is another important mission ERDC and Corps engineers are working on.

“We’ve got almost 200,000 troops in Iraq. They have to live somewhere and be protected,” he said.