In Fall, 1999, Air Force Lt. Col. Mark Snyder (PhD, 1990) became a Professor of Aerospace Studies at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. In response to the editor's request for an article about how he has used physics in his US Air Force career, he sent the write-up below. He was then commander of Detachment 1 of the 31st Test and Evaluation Squadron at Kirtland AFB, Albuquerque. His email is snyderm@afotec.af.mil.

"How has my physics education benefited me as a USAF officer? I have benefited greatly! People may wonder why. After all, a military officer does "military" things...like awarding contracts for R&D or testing, designing new equipment, evaluating warfighting doctrine, and training to fight the next war before it gets here.

Physics is a basic science. More importantly, physics is a disciplined approach to arrive at the objective truths using scientific tools and problem solving. Possessing a disciplined approach from my physics background has been the key to my success in the USAF for 17 years. I have worked with contractors and the Air Force to use the scientific method. Many contract efforts in R&D cut corners in an effort to get the best results at the lowest price. Best results do not always translate into objective results if your experiment design is flawed by not controlling the proper variables, obtaining enough data for statistical confidence or measuring the wrong factors with the wrong kind of equipment. These types of errors are common.

As a Lieutenant, my first assignment was to review a large experimental effort that was trying to find the failure mechanisms for semiconductor devices exposed to large electrical overstresses. Scientific evidence showed that failure in diodes, transistors and other devices reflected a fine structured behavior that was similar to a Bennet pinch in gaseous plasmas; isotropic current flow would collapse to a column that would grow an overheat the device to failure. The contractor's experimental design treated the semiconductor device under study as a black box that would be exposed to electrical overstress and an empirical fit would be made to match some aspect of voltage and current to device failure. Hundreds of devices were planned to be tested to failure to obtain good statistics.

The physics of what was happening in the semiconductor devices was not being studied by the experiment, and it was unclear that device design was the primary factor affecting device failure. The results of the tests were inconclusive. Device failure had failure points that often covered three orders of magnitude or more. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent to arrive at the conclusion that finding under what conditions a device would fail was difficult. A solution was eventually found and my doctoral thesis explained the physics of device failure.

My current assignment is as commander of a detachment that performs modeling, simulation, flight test, and analysis of the combat effectiveness of fighters and bombers. Adherence to proper test design and the scientific method is essential to arrive at conclusions that give policymakers options. If you test the B-2 bomber under conditions not equivalent to war and tell the policymaker it will work in war and he uses the bomber in a wartime scenario...the results may not be very good. Being able to tell the policymaker objectively what a weapon system can, or cannot, do requires the use of the scientific method. Test design, establishing meaningful measures, controlling flight test variables, and having models that accurately take the physics into account are essential to the mission.

Throughout my career I have used my basic grounding in problem solving in situations as varied as finding the long-term impact of reduced resources on nuclear treaty monitoring to the impact of reduced manpower to accomplish my tasks. Physics has been the touchstone in every endeavor I have participated in."

This page was last modified on December 21, 1999