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Silly String Goes to War Against IEDs

Posted by samzenpus on from the silly-to-serious dept.

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."

2 of 460 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Government should pay by Lord_Slepnir · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

  2. Damned if you do... by alexhmit01 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.