BOCA RATON, Fla.-Jeff Baxter wastes little time getting to the heart of the matter: "The first question is always, 'What is this all about? How do you go from being a rock guitar player to the dark side of the military intelligence community?'"
Baxter is a founding member of Steely Dan, a former guitarist in the Doobie Brothers, and today is a respected consultant to the Defense Department. There is a connection between those careers, according to Baxter, and it's the type of linkage credit unions must be able to see in order to make connections themselves, Baxter told CO-OP Financial Services' THINK Conference.
First, the answer to that question. During his musical career Baxter spent a great deal of time designing instruments and interfacing with computers, while also reading defense and military magazines, where he followed technology. As the result of a connection Baxter had with the editor of Jane's Defense Weekly, he began exploring the question of whether S band radar used by the Navy's Aegis system, could be used to "track reentry vehicles," including missiles.
Using data calculations provided by another friend at MIT, Baxter ended up writing a paper on the issue that he gave to a congressman, and which found it's way to the Defense Department. Before long, the man who plays the guitar solo in the hit "Take Me In Your Arms," was working as part of the Strategic Defense Initiative.
Baxter also participated in war games, including one in which he acted as Iran/Iraq in a war with the U.S. that Baxter's team won. "We didn't shoot anybody or sink anybody," Baxter said. "We found the Achilles' heel of the U.S. We won, and did so in ways some generals and admirals still don't understand."
Baxter extolled the insights of one of his "heroes," Col. John Boyd, a military strategist whose books he highly recommended. "His kind of thinking is what I would propose an organization like (CUs) would benefit from," said Baxter. "His concept was creation and destruction. Most people look at problem solving in a straightforward way. That works to a point. But what happens to the synthesis piece, when you take all the little pieces. You need to look at problem solving from a non-linear point of view."
What CUs need to be, said Baxter, is more like jazz quartets. "Musicians improvise," observed Baxter. "It's very simple. What is jazz? It takes a theme of melody and chords, sets out that theme as a problem, and each member of the quartet then goes and interprets that problem. Each person spends time melodically developing that theme, called soloing or improvising."
