Editor, Daily Nexus,

Larri Gregg’s editorial last week (“Unexpected Campus Missile Projects Shock Student,” Daily Nexus, Feb. 8) unfairly groups all defense projects together as “weapons” and as tools of George Bush’s policy, when nothing could be further from the truth. Unlike Larri, I know off the top of my head what two of her “missile factories,” Raytheon and FLIR, produce: infrared cameras. These are the same cameras used to find people crossing the U.S. border in the dark, help luxury cars to avoid accidents in fog, find energy leaking from buildings, help weather satellites track hurricanes and help the Santa Barbara Fire Dept. locate victims in buildings.

Perhaps Larri should name a few of the projects the “war on terror” is funding at UCSB: systems to locate bombs under clothing, technologies to make microchips faster and use less power, a system to help burn victims heal faster, a handheld device to locate broken bones and shrapnel, wireless networks that carry HDTV and a method of making the Internet faster by using light.

In the future, when Larri doesn’t want to support the military-industrial complex, she should stay away from her “missiles.” It seems the U.S. military funded the development of the Internet, global positioning satellites, flat-panel displays, hybrid cars, cell phones, computers, airplanes and – most importantly – research universities in the United States.