Posted on: Thursday, August 2, 2001

Navy to take Kaua'i grads to Japan

By Jan TenBruggencate
Advertiser Kaua'i Bureau

NUKOLI'I, Kaua'i — Two recent Kaua'i High School graduates will accompany a U.S. Navy admiral to Japan Saturday to inspect and help install a computerized military command station.

Erin Tsuda and Nicole Nishimura, both of Lihu'e, are summer interns with agencies working on military applications.

Rear Adm. Paul S. Schultz said he believes it will be good for the students and good for the military to keep them interested in engineering.

"This is a perfect way for an existing Navy project to invigorate bright, young, promising engineering students from Hawai'i, where the system is being built," Schultz said yesterday during a break in a week-long briefing on the Modular Command Centers.

Schultz, Okinawa-based commander of the Navy 7th Fleet's Amphibious Force, said he is excited about the systems, which will bring three-dimensional images from radar, electro-optical systems, satellites and other sensors to central command centers and allow operators to distribute information to units in the field via computers and even personal digital assistants.

"This is leading-edge technology that's not available yet to the rest of the Department of Defense," he said.

It was coordinated by the Office of Naval Research and put together by a number of government agencies and small contractors, including Oceanit, Solypsis, Science Applications International Corp, Cambridge Research, Orincon and others. Several have offices on Kaua'i.

Tsuda, who plans to enter the University of Hawai'i to study engineering, is an intern with SAIC. Nishimura, who will start at Portland State in computer engineering this fall, is an intern with the Office of Naval Research.

They are among 30 Kaua'i high school and college-age students in summer jobs with technology firms and agencies on the island, many of which were arranged through the help of the Kaua'i Economic Development Board.

Tsuda and Nishimura were the only two of six invited to join Schultz who could make it. They will spend two weeks in Japan. They will start in Okinawa and learn about Schultz's command. Then they will fly to Sasebo, Japan, to assist in the installation of a Modular Command Center on the USS Essex, Schultz said.

He said the local community and the Defense Department both benefit if bright young people can be encouraged to work in technology fields and bring the work back home.

Schultz said he was impressed that most of the work on the Modular Command Centers was done by small technology businesses.