Colonel Stephen Ressler described both the serious nature of his work creating an engineering program in Afghanistan and the interesting aspects of his work on a Discovery Channel television production in Morocco, at a speech on Friday. Ressler, the head of the department of civil and mechanical engineering at West Point, spoke as part of the Jones Seminars on Science, Technology and Society.
During the speech, titled "Adventures in Engineering Outreach"From Morocco to Afghanistan," Ressler said that each project had its own set of difficulties and challenges due to issues specific to the foreign locations.
In 2007, Ressler served in Afganistan as part of a group working to establish a civil engineering program at the newly formed National Military Academy of Afghanistan in Kabul.
Ressler said that he and his associates faced several challenges during the project, such as a two-month deadline and difficulties recruiting qualified faculty.
There were few well-educated engineers in Afghanistan at the time, he said, because a significant percentage of the Afghani population had left the country due to the previous period of violence. The team recruited graduates of Kabul University as the program's first generation of professors.
Ressler said that he formed close personal relationships with his Afghani colleagues during his time there.
"My Afghan friends will be my Afghan friends forever," he said, adding that he stays in touch with his acquaintances from the project via email.
The graduation of the Academy's first class will be a huge milestone for the program, and would signify a key step in creating a more stable civil engineering and building capacity in Afghanistan, Ressler said.
After the speech, an audience member asked Ressler a question regarding the National Military Academy of Afghanistan's policy of admitting women. Ressler replied that although there are currently no female students, the school plans to admit women to the program within two to three years.
While Ressler characterized his project in Afghanistan as "deadly serious," he saw his work in Morocco as "frivolous and bearing no useful purpose whatsoever."
In 2004, Ressler participated in the Discovery Channel production of "Superweapons of the Ancient World." He and a team of six other American experts met in Marrakech, Morocco to build a working, full size replica of a 1st century Roman "tortoise" battering ram to be tested against an ancient-style wall that was over 20-feet high and12-feet thick.
Though the Moroccan project was perhaps more "frivolous" than his work in Afghanistan, the team in Marrakech faced a multitude of difficulties, he said. These obstacles included aquiring their own materials on site using "just enough high school French, spoken with an Inspector Clouseau accent to get by" and constructing their own forge, which used a $25 leaf blower to reach temperatures upwards of 2400 degrees Fahrenheit.
During the production, the team was filmed by a British production company working on a documentary. Ressler said several times he suspected that logistical issues had been manufactured by the documentary crew in an attempt to "create good telly."
The team was ultimately able to knock down the wall by using a "load path" design technique, starting with the ram head and working backwards through the rest of the structure, to produce a functional, historically accurate ram.
The ram toppled the wall and, to the surprise of those involved, sent ripples through the soil, causing the back portion of the structure to explode.
