Deployed Soldiers and Social Science Academics
(Part 3 of 5)
edited by Rob W. Kurz, Small Wars Journal
This is the third installment of a five-part series. Each article was co-authored by one Army soldier/civilian and one university professor/academic as part of a joint research project. This project and product responds to the Army's objectives regarding the integration of cultural social sciences into its training and operations.
Fitting Into the Fight - An Engineer's Dream
From a Brigade Troops Battalion S3
by Major Alexander Fullerton and Dr. Garth Myers
Fitting Into the Fight - An Engineer's Dream (Full PDF Article)
The provision of infrastructure and services for Sewer, Water, Electricity and Trash (or SWET in its military acronym form) is boring to most people, or, more charitably, SWET belongs to a category of things people don't like to think about. In much of the urban United States for at least the last fifty years or more, most of the time, indeed, people don't have to think of these things. Most residents of US cities flush their toilets, turn on their taps, switch on their lights, computers, televisions, or microwaves, or take out their garbage without a thought. The trash might require some thought: is trash day on a Monday, or a Wednesday, maybe we should recycle, can I take the hazardous stuff to the special collection spot on Saturday or not. There are certainly professionals in all of these spheres who think about them all the time, because their companies or government offices are all about sewage, water supply, electricity, or solid waste management -- there are a lot of people who work for a living in these realms. But for most American urbanites and suburbanites -- even most rural dwellers - SWET just happens.
But there are a lot of places in the world where SWET doesn't happen at all. Urban geographers have often thought of cities like organisms, or spoken of the urban metabolism, the circuits and networks of a city's body. In the US, or in the Western world in general, SWET provision works like the respiratory system, it is like breathing, in, out -- this was the first time all day, as you read this, that you thought about breathing. But in many other places, when SWET does not happen (in other words when infrastructure and services are lacking for SWET), cities and the people in them must somehow find ways and means to get by. There is no getting by without water, but millions of people throughout the world go without the other components, or subsist with makeshift or even illegal service provision for them.
Fitting Into the Fight - An Engineer's Dream (Full PDF Article)
