cially useful as our students will be young officers in
an Army engaged in nation building in undeveloped
countries. These officers may be deployed to conflict
zones where communities lack clean drinking water
or proper sanitation facilities. By educating these fu-
ture officers about household scale drinking water
filters and appropriate outhouse design, we are equip-
ping them with skills which may gain them the trust
and approval of village elders seeking to improve the
lives of their villagers. Thus, low tech solutions such
as sand filters, clay pot filters, disinfection by boiling,
and gravity fed community water systems give stu-
dents an arsenal of solutions appropriate to the tasks
they may be engaged in as young Army officers.
Other engineering sequences offered at the Acad-
emy also consider environmental issues. These se-
quences include the systems engineering sequence,
which takes any issue and solves it using a systems
approach, and the civil engineering sequence, which
has been designed to focus on solving infrastructure
problems including drinking water and sanitation in
order to promote nation building. The roughly 200 ca-
dets annually who graduate with the environmental
engineering three course sequence, plus those cadets
who studied environmental problems as systems or
civil engineering sequencers, take a specific skill set
and mindset with them into the Army. These officers
seed the Army with basic engineering design process
skills and an environmental ethic honed by thoughtful
academic work.
Cadets majoring in the Environmental Program
Each cadet must choose an academic major in the
fall of his or her sophomore year. The Academy offers
36 majors, among them environmental engineering