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May 24, 2005
OK, My Mind Is Officially Blown
As someone who musically came of age in the seventies, Steely Dan was and remains one of my all time favorite groups. They always featured suberb players, not the least of whom was guitarist Jeff "Skunk" Baxter. Now I find, through Outside the Beltway, that Baxter has embarked on a second career as an expert consultant on terrorism and defense issues.
Baxter joined his first group at age 11, was one of the six original members of Steely Dan, and concluded his first career in 1979 after a long and successful stint with the Doobie Brothers.
His defense work began in the 1980s, when it occurred to him that much of the hardware and software being developed for military use, like data-compression algorithms and large-capacity storage devices, could also be used for recording music. Mr. Baxter's next-door neighbor, a retired engineer who worked on the Pentagon's Sidewinder missile program, bought him a subscription to an aviation magazine, and he was soon reading a range of military-related publications.
Baxter began thinking hard on such topics as how to adapt existing systems to unforseen threats. He drafted a five page paper on converting the Navy's Aegis anti-aircraft system to an anti-missile system, and gave the paper to his friend Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA). The rest is history--Rohrabacher took the report seriously, passed it along up the ladder, and now the Navy is planning to outfit at least one ship with just such a system. And Jeff Baxter, armed with top security clearances, has a growing pile of defense industry job offers.
I guess it's never too late to change careers.
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