Just Add, Umm, Water

An anonymous reader writes "The US military has devised a way to ensure its troops in battle need never go hungry - with dried food that can be rehydrated using dirty water or urine. Bleh, but lightweight bleh." The original New Scientist story is available too.

Comments

If I understand correctly...

[ResidntGeek]

... Troops in battle are going to stop, drop their weapons, and pee on their food for a quick dinner?

Water

[mabu]

I wonder how many millions of dollars were spent on this mostly useless technology? Creating food with dirty water or urine is irrelevent. A soldier can last much longer without food than he can without water. Most people will die within five days if they don't get water. If you don't have access to clean water, you're in much worse shape. Lose 12% of your water and you're dead.

Re:Water

[JustDisGuy]

It isn't useless technology - an army marches on its belly. And RTFA - they don't actually piss IN their food, they piss ON the PACKAGE the food is in, and a membrane similar to that in a reverse osmosis unit extracts the water from the liquid used to re-hydrate.

What they ought to do NOW is put the technology in the public domain, and donate a couple of million pouches to the Red Cross. I wonder how reusable the membranes are, and whether they could be used to create clean water once the ration was consumed?

Sure, it may sound gross

[Judg3]

But if it helps you to survive a few days longer, that could mean the difference between life and death - you'd be able to ration your water reserve longer and still be able to eat.

Though I wonder why they didn't make the filter finer to filter out the urea.. Would it cost to much? Be to large?

But

[l810c]

What if you don't have to piss? You can't drink water to make you piss, because you don't have any.

I'm not letting someone else hydrate my food.

Cheap Clean Water?

[Alphanos]

Just how effective is this filter at cleaning water? If it is cheap enough to be mass produced for soldiers' food, then it would be incredible for humanitarian purposes if it cleans water well. Many parts of the world cannot easily clean their own water.

Dirty water or urine?

[bobhagopian]

As disgusting as it sounds to rehydrate a meal with urine, at least it's "clean" (in the sense that you won't get sick from it).

But dirty water? If you're in the middle of Iraq, I suspect the water may itself pose a health risk. I can't drink the water when I visit third-world countries, and I'd certainly be worried if our troops were exposing themselves to disease.

Better?

[Johnny Mnemonic]

So if you use urine, does it taste worse? Or better?

and how is there any net difference?

[SuperBanana]

Yes, and by using the clean water you have for drinking instead of for rehydrating field rations, it lasts that much longer, and therefore, you do too.

Would you mind explaining to me, Private Genius, how there's a net difference in water intake between those two scenarios? If you pour a cup of water to rehydrate your meal, you're also drinking it.

I agree with other posters- this invention is the stupidest thing I've ever heard of and a colossal waste of money.

MREs and dirty water

[Infonaut]

MREs are certainly not haute cousine. But I ate a lot of MREs back in the day, and they taste pretty damned good, particularly when you actually *need* energy. Most of the time when Americans eat, it's out of habit, not because we truly need the energy. But when you've been running around doing Uncle Sam's work in the jungle, desert, frozen tundra, or wherever, an MRE hits the spot.

MREs have gotten steadily better over the years. The first meals were pretty bad. I remember dehydrated chicken & ham loaf (I'm not kidding) with horror. But by the early 1990s they were really good, and they've continued to improve over the years.

Just ask anyone who had to endure C-rations. They'll tell you about truly crappy combat rations.

As for the US Army's attempt to come up with a way to use dirty water or urine, the primary goal is to allow soldiers to use dirty water. Don't get too wrapped up in weird urine scenarios. Believe it or not, much of the world drinks water that's hazardous to the health of Americans. Delivery of potable water is a major constraint on the American way of war. We put immense logistical effort into making sure our soldiers get bottled water. This contributes to our outrageously bad tooth to tail ratio, and it makes the military more beholden on civilian contractors to provide logistics support.

Americans have shown time and time again that we prefer to win wars with logistics, and our enemies know this. Any flexibility, however small, that allows us to reduce our logistics dependency is good in my opinion.

Re:MREs and dirty water

[Lord Kano]

Just ask anyone who had to endure C-rations.

Way back when they used to include cheap cigarettes with the C-Rats. I guess that was to help you forget about the awful taste of the food.

If you go even further back, the US Army fed troops beef that was rotten when they bought it. Some troops dies, but Hormel made tons of money off of it.

LK

Re:MREs and dirty water

[dmaxwell]

The first half of the book was an extremely effective exposé of the meatpacking industry as it was at the time. I have my doubts about it these days as well. It was also intended to highlight the exploitation of cheap immigrant labor.

The second half of the book is harder going. Mr. Sinclair's cure for all this would be socialism; the variety described would be lot closer to Marxism than the variety practiced by Western countries. At the time it wasn't associated with totalitarian brutality but there was suspicion of it just the same. It sounded great if you were the exploited labor. It sounded creepy if were even the slightest bit above that station. It doesn't seem like much has changed.

Sinclair himself said: "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach,"

The book WAS pretty much the reason for the Pure Food And Drug act.

Is there a difference?

[iamdrscience]

So now MREs taste like piss instead of tasting like shit? I'm not sure which is preferrable to be honest.

Water, Water, Everywhere . . .

[Dausha]

Okay, here's a reason why the US Army would like to reduce the amount of water consumed by soldiers. It seems people are under the impression that soldiers haul all their own gear and consumables. Not quite.

We use vehicles to accomplish the logistical feat of transporting soldiers, equipment and water. The US Army calculates that the average soldier consumes something like five gallons of water daily. No, not just for drinking--hygiene, cooking (i.e., field mess facilities), etc. This figure increases for desert operations, for obvious reasons. Considering that five gallons of water is 40 pounds, and considering that a division comprises something like 10,000+ soldiers, then we are looking for something on the order of tons of water required daily. What's more, most of that water will need to be purified. So, the goal here is to reduce the burden on the military's logistical infrastructure by having the soldier consume less water. Sure, it's probably an expensive experiment that will be met with failure.

What's interesting is this is not the first time there's been a *big* experiment. In the '40s, when we were fighting another crazy ideology or two (fascism, national shintoism), some nut thought that we could train our soldiers to consume less than the required amount of water--especially for desert operations. The idea there was to reduce the burden to the military's logisitical infrastructure by having the soldier consume less water. What's disappointing is this: the human body requires a minimum amount of water to operate. The Army learned that lesson by watching dozens (I've heard as many as hundreds or thousands, but that seems a tad high) of soldiers died disproving the experiment. I think the loss of human life was more expensive than the loss of a few tax dollars. Besides, I think the government wastes money in several other areas that should be reined in first.

Filtration is pretty effective

[billstewart]

Peter's posting is the first technically interesting comment I've seen here, because it differentiates these filters from the more common type.

Basic filtration is a fairly well-solved technology - campers can buy yuppie-priced water-filters that can turn pond scum into nice clear safe drinking water as long as the problems are bacteria, giardia, dirt, etc. rather than soluble chemicals, and they help on some of the chemicals as well. They won't fix overdoses of salt, or heavy metals, and most of them won't help much with nasty organics like pesticides, but they can solve most of the world's basic safe drinking water needs in places that have dirty fresh water. The issue is making them in appropriate quantities and price ranges.

Y2K paranoia was a great excuse to go buy camping gear :-) Water filters, propane stove, etc.

Inelegant

[danharan]

It seems there is a different filter for each ration. And it's not a great filter, either:

Hydration Technology of Albany, Oregon, which makes the membrane, says soldiers should only use urine in an absolute emergency because the membrane is too coarse to filter out urea.

The body will not find this toxic over the short term, says Ed Beaudry, an engineer with HTI, but rehydrating food this way in the long term would cause kidney damage.

So... why not give every soldier a really good filter that both filters out urea and can be reused?

Of course, the army is not necessarily known for trying to find low-cost solutions...

Re:Weird

[Master of Transhuman]

If you're in a military situation where you are so chronically short of supplies that you are in any danger of starvation, you have worse problems than starvation.

As the US military will discover in Iraq in due time.

The combat situations today do not devolve into long-term sieges like Massada. Starvation is not an issue.

OTOH, it is unlikely that anybody is going to have to pee on their MRE to use it when, as the article states, dirty water is quite adequate. And as I said, nobody is going to have to worry about long-term kidney damage because they aren't going to be doing this sort of thing for more than a few days, if that, before they either get killed by the enemy or are relieved.

LRRP, Rangers, Special Forces and SEALS are the only people likely to have to be in situations where the only access is to unclean water or no water. And again, this is unlikely to last more than a few days until their missions are accomplished or they're dead.

Now, in Iraq, where our patriotic morons are bunkered down in bases surrounded by an entire nation of enemies, when the mass national resistance starts in the next 6-12 months, they are going to find themselves without water, food, fuel, or ammo. But again, they are going to be evacuating the country hanging from helicopter rails rather than peeing on MREs.

Osmotic potential

[DarkMan]

The problem with a separate water filter is that you need some means to force the water through the filter. (The stuff you don't want is too big to get through).

A typical standalone filter uses gravity, and it very, very slow. (note that the typical crappy 'water filters' desinged for tap water don't cut it for swamp water).

Practical reverse osmosis filters use pumps to generate a pressure difference to make the thing work in sensible time. That's a power requirement, and more weight.

The trick that's being used here is to use something that's dessicant to pull the water through. Normally, not that useful, but when you eat the dessicant afterwords, that's a net gain of water.

In other words, it's the dried food that pulls the water through. This is a robust, lightweight and fast solution.

The other clever part is to ensure that once the re-hydrated food is eaten, it's going to be water neutral, or better. Some foods require more water than other to digest, and that should be a design plan. Still, even if not, if it doubles the length of time a canteen lasts, that's a huge bonus.