April 26, 2008 | Published by Foreign Policy In Focus

Standing in the student section of Penn State’s Beaver Stadium during football season always felt like witnessing a war unfold before your eyes. First the band would enter, marching in military-like formation and literally drumming up support from the crowd, while the cheerleaders would start up the most boastfully imposing chant in all of college sports: “We Are…Penn State.” Then our four-star general, Coach Joe Paterno would run on the field flanked by his army of All-American linebackers and various other defensive backs, ends, and tackles because offense was always second to a strong defense in JoePa’s book. Even as a student, during perhaps the bleakest years of an otherwise dominating half-century of college football, I knew Pennsylvania State University was just as likely to be called “Linebacker U” as Penn State.

Yet, upon recently returning to my alma mater four years after my graduation, I noticed that Beaver Stadium isn’t the only building on campus where a strong defense is revered. Just down the street from my old college house is a nondescript industrial park that is home to The Institute for Non-Lethal Defense Technologies (INLDT)-one of the fastest-growing departments under the umbrella of Penn State’s Applied Research Laboratories (ARL).

Despite the generic name, ARL is one of the U.S. Navy’s top civilian research facilities, as well as Penn State’s single largest research unit with well over 1,000 employees (including students). It was founded in 1945 to advance Navy technology in areas such as acoustics and vibration control, hydrodynamics, propulsors, torpedo defense, and other naval related paraphernalia. While this sort of research is still being conducted, there’s little doubt that the focus has shifted to non-lethal weaponry [...]