Silly String Goes to War Against IEDs

Luban Doyle writes "In an age of multimillion-dollar high-tech weapons systems, sometimes it's the simplest ideas that can save lives. Which is why a New Jersey mother is organizing a drive to send cans of Silly String to Iraq. American troops use the stuff to detect trip wires around bombs, as Marcelle Shriver learned from her son, a soldier in Iraq."

Comments

Poor Choice of Icons

[DumbSwede]

OK call me overly sensitive, I usually am against Political Correctness, but this is a serious issue. DEADLY serious.

I'm glad this low tech method of booby trap detection is being used. My nit however is in leading the article with the "It's Funny, Laugh" icon.

There is a humorous element in using a humorously named children's toy for sure, but I still chafe at the juxtaposition of the Monty Python foot with something that is in actuality so far removed from humor.

Re:Poor Choice of Icons

[TheJasper]

OK call me overly sensitive, I usually am against Political Correctness, but this is a serious issue. DEADLY serious. You are overly sensitive. Almost all humor is based on pain/humiliation in some form or another. There are certainly exceptions, but very often humor is used to laugh at serious things. DEADLY serious things. Just think about it. Here is you're highly trained soldier creeping around with his night vision goggles, instant communication with HQ, live satelite imagery being fed to his pda. His grenades have an IQ higher than we do. he steps up to the door of a house. he carefully opens it. Then he sprays the house with silly string. It's Funny, Laugh.

Re:Government should pay

[montyzooooma]

"Why isn't the government providing the tools the military needs. Additionally there should be a significant discount if they make a nice large contract"

Or more likely you'd see the birth of the $100 can of silly string in camo colors as approved military issue.

Re:Government should pay

[Lord_Slepnir]

If Lockheed did make it, it would be glow-in-the dark for night time use, would be packaged in such a way so that it didn't explode (throwing shrapnel everywhere) if it got punctured, and would use a chemical so that the cans wouldn't explode if they heated up to 120 degrees in the Iraqi sun.

And yes, there would be a steep price tag because there would be a very limited volume (only 140,000 troops in Iraq), and they'd have to recoup R&D costs. Different rules apply in the military.

Re:IED?

[SnowZero]

I'm sure they once called these "booby traps". What's the obsession with acronyms?

When's the last time you referred to memory as Double Data Rate Random Access Memory rather than DDR RAM? If you work with something every day, you tend to shorten things. You also define terms more specifically than general usage (RAM vs memory).

An IED is a booby trap consisting of a rigged Device containing a large amount of Explosives in a fairly jury-rigged fashion (i.e. Improvised). It's not uncommon to find multiple anti-tank mines stacked together or even unexploded bombs. When talking about risks and countermeasures, it pays to be specific. Just like you wouldn't refer to large artillery as a "gun" when describing it to someone else, because it is too imprecise without qualification. A "gun" could be anything from a pistol to a 155mm howitzer. This is the same reason Lawyers define a bunch of "useless" jargon and acronyms; They can put a precise meaning on it for their purposes. Now, the military does have a huge number of acronyms, and maybe more than are needed, but it is just as specialized an occupation as practicing law.

Now, IANAL and I did not RTFA or GP, but AFAICT, we are now a nation of acronyms, especially TLAs. If you don't like it you can STFU while I LMAO <JK>.

Damned if you do...

[alexhmit01]

And if the officers sent in a requisition, and someone pushed it through, I can see the headlines:

Pentagon spends millions on children's toys
Military awards no-bid contract for toys
Millions of cans of toys bought, unable to track
Military fails to provide tools to troops, uses toys instead

You are 100% right about the edge of irregulars being able to use whatever works. However, clearly our troops are just as smart and figured out how to improvise, and away go the cans of silly string. So it's being done voluntarily by people on the home front, so what, that just makes them wonderful patriots. What is with the statist notion that it is only okay if it goes through taxes and government procurement.

The biggest problem is that we have two generations of reporters that believe their job is to undermine the government, and that that is an example of freedom of the press.

Take the body armor issue... Our troops have some older body armor, and there is a dispute as to which ones to replace. If the government replaced EVERYTHING, we'd be screaming about waste from throwing out our perfectly good 2 year old body armor that we spent billions on. In addition, the guys in the cities don't want the bulkier armor, and were refusing to wear it, so the Pentagon, sick of the bad PR, REQUIRED the use, even for units that didn't want it.

The anti-government press goes beyond reporting problems so that they can be fixed, and tries to play gotcha with our government. So government officials play CYA, instead of doing the right thing. It's a HORRIBLE mess, and it will take more than an emergency requisition of silly string to fix it.

Re:New in the war on terror

[mpoulton]

It should be noted that protection of foreign economic interests of the United States is a valid, publicly acknowledged function of the US Armed Forces. Defending US citizens from attack is not their only function.