IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - June 2012 - 20

management experiences was something Siegel needed: "I am a much
more effective CTO for having been
a division general manager, business
unit director, project manager . . . . I
have much more credibility with the
people who are now in those division GM positions, because everyone
knows I was a very successful division
general manager and therefore, I understand their job."
Cohen was pleased to watch her
son receive recognition and rise to
such high ranks within Northrup
Grumman: "My son traveled and did a Siegel and his wife Robyn performing.
lot of wonderful things. At that point,
smoke from gun fire. So you look out this
I had another child and wasn't as anxious
tiny vision block and you see almost nothto run around to strange places. My son
ing. Then you have a radio that can talk to
ended up a much higher-level manager
the other vehicles that are in your vicinthan I ever was. He moved on up the ladder
ity. The fact that anybody can accomplish
very quickly." She laughs as she says this,
anything under these circumstances is
acknowledging, "He does have a higher IQ
kind of a bloody miracle. ... So, digitizing
than me."
the battlefield-bringing all of this relevant information right to the tank comDigitizing the Battlefield
mander-was a big idea, but technically
The program that "made" Siegel's career
and socially very, very difficult."
is the Force-XXI Battle Command BriIt required a communications network
gade-and-Below system, also known as
that could, according to IEEE, achieve
FBCB2, or the Blue-Force Tracker. This
"reliable infrastructureless wireless comsystem has "digitized the battlefield" for
munications for tens of thousands of
the U.S. Army, bringing interconnected
mobile platforms, without depending on
computers and real-time situational
cellular towers or fixed-site relays." This
awareness to almost every vehicle on the
proved so difficult, in fact, that the U.S.
battlefield-tanks, artillery, helicopters,
Army is still the only army in the world to
and so forth. This allows U.S. personhave such a system.
nel to see where all other members of
The Blue-Force Tracker was taken to
the combat team are, to view where the
the Balkans in the spring of 1999. In 2002,
enemy is, and to evaluate other relevant
as the Army prepared for possible combat
information, such as the location of mine
operations in Iraq, Siegel and U.S Army
fields and contaminated areas. "It seems
partner Colonel Nick Justice led the effort
so ordinary today," Siegel says about the
to deploy the Blue-Force Tracker to Iraq.
system that was started in 1995, "but it
It was a huge success. Today, 90,000 units
was so revolutionary... putting a comof Blue-Force Tracker are in use in combat
puter into the decision process for every
and peace-keeping missions around the
step on the battlefield."
world, and the Army plans eventually to
Siegel continues, "Think of how this
acquire 250,000 of them.
was before.... You're in a tank-an armored vehicle, all sealed up, no windows,
just little prisms two inches tall and eight
You Can Be...
inches wide that they call a vision block.
Siegel believes that one of the ways his
Tanks throw up tons of dust, there's
mother most influenced him is that

IEEE WOMEN IN ENGINEERING MAGAZINE

JUNE 2012

he has "always seemed to make a
specialty of hiring and promoting
women." In fact, his first two hires
were women. He says he "grew up
thinking that women as engineers
was normal, at a time when most
other people didn't."
Thanks to that, he says, "as I became a manager and was looking
for people-I pretty quickly realized I would be more successful if
I had better people working for me.
Since everybody else was competing
for the best men, I kind of fell into a
strategy that I would hire the best
women-because no one else was
trying to hire them."
In the late 1990s, a TRW survey on
women and minorities showed that 38%
of Siegel's top-tier management team was
women and minorities. For most of the
other divisions at TRW the percentage
was zero. Siegel jokes, "I had apparently
attracted all of the women managers in
the company to my division."
This, he believes, he owes to his mother, saying, "Rather than targeting me to
be an engineer-I didn't become one
until farther along in my career, having
started as a mathematician-the biggest professional influence Mom had was
causing me to believe that women as engineers and managers was normal."
Today Cohen is retired from engineering. She and her husband, illustrator David Katz, publish a series of You
Can Be... children's books encouraging
young girls to pursue careers in engineering, architecture, and many other fields.
For Cohen, attracting girls to the sciences
comes down to early exposure, to keeping
their interest alive as opposed to trying to
rekindle it in high school or college. As
she says, "The important thing is-like
my father did with me-talk to kids about
possibilities, and then show them things
and play with them in ways that they can
respond."
-Katianne Williams is a freelance
writer living in Massachusetts.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - June 2012