American Prestige Bonus - The U.S. Military vs. the Environment w/ Gretchen Heefner
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Sep 26, 2025 Gretchen Heefner, a historian and chair of the History Department at Northeastern University, dives into the U.S. military's ambitious yet often futile attempts to conquer extreme environments. She discusses the irony of desert training that led to muddy battles in North Africa and highlights the Pentagon's strategic missteps in Greenland. The conversation unveils how military failures prompted the need for environmental data and examines the toxic legacy of these endeavors. Heefner even connects these military efforts to early NASA plans for lunar construction.
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Granular Materials Sparked The Project
- Gretchen Heefner discovered the project by following recurring problems with granular materials like sand across engineering files.
- That pattern expanded into a wider study of extreme environments (sand, snow, stardust) and how engineers sought to master them.
Desert Training Center Misfit
- The Desert Training Center trained a million troops for a desert war they largely never fought.
- When GIs reached North Africa they found mud, cold, and wrong equipment, not the imagined dry sand battlefield.
Misinformation Drove Environmental Intelligence
- Bad environmental information in WWII delayed operations and fueled a push for global environmental intelligence.
- The Corps of Engineers began systematically collecting terrain data, sand samples, and detailed reports to avoid repeat errors.
