Chippewa Valley to get $46 million in defense spending

Chippewa Falls, Wis. - Area high-tech firms could receive a total of $46 million from the federal government for military research and development as part of the House-approved 2007 defense budget.

Secured by Democratic Congressman Dave Obey, the allocations still need approval from the U.S. Senate and President Bush in meetings slated for late this year.

Small Tree Communications, a provider of enterprise networking solutions for the Mac OS X, could receive approximately $6 million in additional funding to develop advanced command and control technology to speed up battlefield communications. The technology will employ a tactical bandwidth booster, an aggregator that allows wireless senders in the field to send data back to headquarters in a stream instead of individually.

As part of the 2006 federal budget, Small Tree received $3.4 million to make battlefield communication technology. "Small Wisconsin companies, like Small Tree, have a history of providing the nuts and bolts - or their high tech alternatives - that our military needs to keep running smoothly," Obey said in a statement. "From supercomputers to better food packages, the high-tech companies in the Chippewa Valley are providing a lot of that technology."

Corky Seeber, president of Small Tree Communications, said advanced technology solutions will continue to play an integral role in the success of U.S. military forces across the world. Using Apple's G5 platform, Small Tree develops networking products such as InfiniBand, 10Gb Ethernet NICs, 802.3ad Link Aggregation software, multi-port Gigabit Ethernet, and optical Gigabit Ethernet cards. A gift that keeps on giving

The bill also contains several other allocations to businesses with Wisconsin ties, including:

• $15 million for research and development work in advanced supercomputers by CRAY, Inc., the Seattle-based supercomputer manufacturers with an engineering and development center in Chippewa Falls.

• $5 million for a wireless digital communications system being developed for the Army by Rex Systems, Inc., a Chippewa Falls manufacturer of defense and civilian electronic components and networked computer systems.

• $5 million to help Silicon Graphics, Inc. continue to develop a high performance supercomputer at the Naval Research Laboratory's Center for Computational Science. SGI, which employs 340 people at its Chippewa Falls manufacturing plant, is based in Mountain View, Calif.

Other projects that would be funded under this allocation involve advanced plastics, specialized battlefield beacons, pilot training simulators, and biological protection suits.

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