DIY Ordnance Disposal With An RC Truck

kpw10 writes "My company, Tackle Design, put together a do it yourself ordnance disposal robot for use by one of the partners in our company, currently serving in Iraq. It is a very simple solution costing only about $1,000, but it performs the same functions as the super-expensive robots issued by the military. We looking to see if we can get more of these devices over there - particularly as the treat of IEDs seems to be on the rise. We're also looking into including more advanced cameras and other types of sensors including explosives detectors (MEMS and SAW based) as well as RF detectors."

Comments

Hardly Special

[RobertTaylor]

RC Car + Wireless Camera?

Whats the groundbreaking part of this? That they shipped it to Iraq!?

Depressing

[pyat]

Does anyone else find it depressing that US services personnel seem to be increasingly buying their own equipment?

I had already heard stories of soldiers' families investing in flak-jackets/body armour to give them additional protection, and i believe i recall even from Gulf War I that soldiers were bringing their own GPS kit.

Now they're putting together their own, affordable, bomb-disposal robots. I admire the initiative, but deplore the circumstances that make it necessary. Especially since the fact that a soldier/marine and his/her family can invest in the equipment means it is relatively inexpensive. If many soldiers buy it, it's *probably* useful too. So how come the government doesn't provide it?

Putting on a cynicism hat, i wonder if it is because they'd rather spend high-margin-megabucks on a few robots from InsertHugeSupplierHere, than divert a fraction of that to buy larger volume cheaper alternatives.

Major's logic, sergeant's logic

[panurge]

The people who go on about military procurement are clearly all desk pilots. If the armed forces had to wait for procurement to solve problems, the war would be long over before anything happened. Remember, defense departments are always fighting the last war.

One senior military analyst, whose job was precisely to find out why equipment did not perform as expected, described it to me as major's logic and sergeant's logic. The Major says, we do it by the book. The patrol goes out and the sergeant says, we'll do it this way, lads, because the official way doesn't fucking work. Then he reports back to the major that the mission was accomplished and everything went by the book. And the major, if he wants to be a colonel, doesn't ask stupid questions. The hard bit is to get through the official chain of command wall to find out what really happens on the ground, investigate the good bits, and turn them into an official solution.

Faced with a choice between certainly getting killed and trying something that might save you, armed forces everywhere become inventive. People bleating on about "No RF near potential booby traps" miss the point. The people on the ground are likely to have a pretty good idea of enemy capability. They might be wrong, occasionally, but that is better than having being dead most of the time. War is not a computer game, and it is not played according to neat rules by any of the sides involved. The hard bit is to strike the right balance between discipline and flexibility, and this must change from conflict to conflict.