This is the third in a series of articles about my personal experiences inside the military-industrial complex. Parts 1 and 2 can be found here and here.
A friend of mine once said, "They change the names to protect the guilty," and that certainly could apply to the Naval Electronics Lab where I worked for about six years after leaving UCSD with a MS degree in Information and Computer Science. Luckily, I got a summer job there which I converted to a full time job just before my daughter was born (Caesarian) which would have cost a lot of money had it not been for the medical insurance which came with full time employment. But the name change bit. After a couple years they announced that, henceforth, NEL would be known as the Naval Electronics Laboratory Center. This evidently seemed like some sort of grand culmination to some people who actually gazed off into the distance as if some magnificent denouement had occurred. Actually, nothing much had happened except the name had been changed to protect the guilty. In later years they changed the name a couple more times to NOSC (Naval Ocean Systems Command) and then NRAD - Naval Research and Development and finally SSC San Diego or SPAWAR. People actually get paid to sit around and dream up name changes and move blocks around on organization charts.
In my experience nothing much was accomplished by NEL, NELC, NOSC, NRAD, SPAWAR. I was given a couple of unmemorable make work projects. I finally realized that if I was to accomplish anything and not be completely bored, I would have to create my own projects. I had been working on a source coding scheme at UCSD with Professor Pieter Schalkwijk who had developed a method that came to be known as the Schalkwijk algorithm so I decided to carry on with this work and it was actually funded for a while. I worked with another engineer by the name of Al Roth who developed a hardware version and I developed the software. We were able to obtain a patent for this work called "Variable-to-block-with-prefix Source Coding Technique", and I felt that at least I had accomplished something although its relevance to any actual naval system was not immediately apparent. Later I saw a way to generalize Schalkwijk's work, and I ended up writing a paper called "A New Universal Coding Scheme for the Binary Memoryless Source." which was published in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.
Meanwhile, I was becoming increasingly disenchanted with NEL(C). First of all I was completely philosophically averse to the military-industrial complex after my time as a student radical at UCSD during the Vietnam war. To my amazement my Top Secret clearance sailed through. I guess they failed "to connect the dots." Since I had gotten married and was expecting a child, I needed a job, and I wanted to stay in San Diego. That was the only reason I went to work there - to support my family. When my marriage broke up a few year later I had no real reason to remain employed there, and I couldn't wait to leave. I rebelled against the informal dress code and stopped wearing a tie and dress shirt. I eventually got banished to Battery Ashburn which was a windowless WW II bunker far away from Building 33, the main building, not that any of the other offices were all that scenic or comfortable. Nobody knew or cared what I did or what I was up to. There was some code that they put down on my time card so that I got paid. I let the multiple levels of management worry about that. I took two hour lunch breaks, came in late and left early. During mu lunch breaks I went to a nearby Presbyterian Church and they were nice enough to let me use one of their Sunday School rooms to practice my trumpet. I had decided that I wanted to make a major effort to be a musician.
My resolve was to remain at NEL(C) until my paper was published in the IEEE Transactions and then quit and become a musician. Finally, I got word that it would be published and I quit without giving the customary two week notice. I just walked in one day and announced, "This is my last day." I guess that was burning my bridges behind me. I was tired of a meaningless, unproductive work life, and my back hurt from sitting at a desk all day. I was proud that at least I had done something meaningful with my paper in information theory although most of that work was done on the sly. It wasn't funded. I left the military-industrial complex for the last time and never looked back.
My experience at NEL(C) was similar to what I had experienced before at General Dynamics, Lawrence Livermore and Picatinny Arsenal. There was a lot of insignificant make work, layers and layers of middle management and department heads that spent the majority of their time back in Washington coaxing money out of Pentagon and Congressional coffers. The more successful department heads were able to coax more money than the unsuccessful ones and, therefore, had larger departments and higher GS ratings. Cost plus contracts gave the incentive to maximize costs in order to maximize profits, or in the case of civil service, to build larger departments under you and obtain higher GS ratings which in turn would result in higher salaries. Any meaningful work was done by PhDs at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Lincoln Laboratories or similar places and in the halls of academia by the likes of my first adviser at UCSD, Irwin Jacobs. In fact Jacobs had so much contract work from the MIC that he eventually quit teaching and started his own company, Linkabit, in order to capitalize on that. Later he went on to found Qualcomm and become a billionaire. The engineers at places like NEL(C) were contract monitors at best. Or they had little meaningless projects doled out to them from the pot of cash their department head was able to assemble. There was no rhyme or reason to any of this. None of the individualized puzzle pieces fit together into any sort of coherent, unified whole. There was no mission into which the various departments fit and did their appointed tasks as part of a comprehensive effort that provided a needed component of naval warfare. It was middle class social welfare brought to you by the military-industrial complex. Instead of the saying about the Societ Union's MIC - "We pretended to work, and they pretended to pay us" - in the good ole USA, the appropriate counterpart was "We pretended to work, and they actually did pay us and they paid us quite well!"
I was happy to leave the MIC to which I was philosphically opposed and besides I didn't like the lifestyle of sedentery work - sitting at a desk all day. I wasn't happy to be part of the ostensible war effort although, with the degree of incompetence represented by NEL(C), I felt if anything that the war effort was being set back. I have no regrets; in fact I'm happy I didn't spend 30 wasted years there, bored out of my gourd, just in order to retire and get a pension. The hours have never dragged since I left; I've never been bored. My life has taken on more meaning and I believe that I am making a contribution to society as opposed to being a parasite consuming taxpayer money for doing little of any significance besides collecting a paycheck. I am glad though that I made use of my time there (on my own inititaive and only partly funded) to advance the cause of information theory which at least represents some sort of scientific truth - blowing the truth as my friend Morty would say - instead of shoveling the bullshit. The method I developed later became know as the Lawrence algorithm, and, after generalizing the theory to the non-binary case, I obtained another patent, "Multilevel Digital Compression based on Lawrence Algorithm".