They say that there are events that happen during your lifetime so momentous that you never forget where you were when you heard about them. For me, the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001 is undoubtedly the biggest one. Having visited Manhattan a number of times and those iconic buildings too, it was a staggering event to witness and made all the more poignant because I was working for Lucent at the time – a US organisation that had much of its heritage in New Jersey and many employees in New York state and the surrounding region.

When the news came through, I was with some colleagues at a coffee bar in the Lucent UK HQ getting an early afternoon drink. I remember us rushing back to our desks to access the online news sites which were struggling under the weight of demand but already showing early images of the first plane strike. As the events unfolded it became clear that friends and relatives of the company’s employees were caught up in it directly and that brought the impact and suffering closer to home.

I was reminded of the aftermath of that tragic day when visiting the Bell Labs website today looking for the background on the stories its parent organisation Alcatel-Lucent is making at the GSMA World Congress.

Bell Labs has a section on its site headed ‘Government Research’ which makes specific reference to military communications, homeland security and the intelligence agencies. Although I was only ever on the periphery of this research operation and its developments related to 3G, I have always followed its developments with interests as it has had a profound effect on our world historically (the transistor, lasers, solar cells, DSL, Comms Satellites, cellular networks) and will no doubt do so again.

In the weeks and months following 9/11 it emerged that Lucent engineers had been instrumental in supporting and rebuilding communications networks and rescue efforts around ground zero during and after the events and I was also aware of US Government contracts being awarded to the company for homeland security efforts. I left the company just before the 2nd Gulf War broke out in 2003 and it’s clear that Bell Labs research and development activities have been targeted towards military needs over the last 6 years as the US has waged unconventional wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have relied increasingly on advanced technology to confront a persistent and determined enemy.

While my general belief is that the Iraq war, in particular, was ill-judged and generally badly executed there seemed little doubt that we would have to confront the Islamic fundamentalists somewhere, somehow as history shows the danger to society as a whole of ignoring such twisted beliefs. Besides the horrific consequences of war on many levels, a subsequent benefit is the advancement of technology and the positive impact that can have elsewhere in society.

One can only guess at the purpose of the long range, high resolution laser based radar research that it openly publicises on its website that continues a tradition of Bell Labs radar innovations used in warfare as far back as the World War 2. But the fact that the US has been battling an enemy adept at hiding in difficult terrain and disguising itself amongst civilians and has seemingly been increasingly successful at picking out individuals using unmanned drones, possibly illustrates how some of this development is being used.