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

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.

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?

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.