Richard DeLauer

Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering from 1981 to 1984, the Pentagon's top R&D official during the Reagan-era defense buildup. Matters to this vault as Robert Cooper's boss and the official Cooper consulted first in building the case for Strategic Computing: per Roland & Shiman's institutional history, DeLauer was "particularly exercised by the Japanese Fifth Generation." Per Cooper's own 1993 oral history (CBI OH 255), DeLauer was also the person who recruited Cooper back into government service in 1981 — a detail that session's primary read corroborated independently of Roland & Shiman's account.

References

• claim-cooper-privately-doubted-fifth-generation-threat-used-as-lever
• Capture: 2026-10-11-does-robert-coopers-own-account-memoir-oral-history (recruitment detail; not yet carried by a dedicated claim-note — the transcript passage was described, not quoted, in the capture's entity-candidates notes)

Log

• 2026-10-13: added as a hub, promoted from a repeated-but-undecided candidate (first flagged 2026-08-02, not promoted then). Promotion test: real, named decision-maker in the SCI funding story (recruited Cooper, was Cooper's reporting line, independently described by two separate sources — Roland & Shiman's interview and Cooper's own — as personally invested in the Japan question), recurring across two captures two months apart.