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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."
New slogan? "Iraq: It's a Party Over There!"
Its for the war on iraq!!
If they don't accept it they're TERRORISTS!
:x
You have to love email forwards disguised as news articles.
This has been floating around for years -- I first saw it as a piece promoting British Special Forces ingenuity. Our very own Bruce Schneier mentioned it (and the suppressed Cockeyed piece) around this time last year.
This was mildly interesting when it was reported about the SAS ages ago.
hell, if Lockheed could create something which does the same thing and uses the same mundane process and chemicals, they can charge $5,000 per can, and the government may be interested.
Req. Order #12308-129
Item Description: Can, Aerosol, 12 oz., String, Silly, Camouflage
Quantity: 100,000
Destination: US Army, Baghdad, Iraq
Status: Approved
Comment: Can be weaponized as flame thrower if we purchase optional birthday cake.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
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.
They use dogs with bees in their mouths, and when they bark they shoot bees at you.
It's a devastating weapon.
"Silly String?"
Couldn't we at least change the name to Freedom String-In-A-Can?
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
Because to make sure that the contractors are not cheating the government they would have to spends years and months putting it out for a competitive bids, writing specs, and following regulations.
To give you an example the USMC wanted to buy the software my company produces.
It had tried several and like ours the best. So they wrote a spec that our software fit and put it out for bids.
The request for bid came in a BOX that weighed 50lbs! Mind you this was off the self software that thousands of other people where using everyday.
Fine we did the paperwork and summited a bid at a low price. A competing company then submitted their software for the bid and lied that it would meet the specs. We lost the bid by $50. Of course our yearly support contract was $500 a year less for that number of seats than the winner.
Fine three years latter the other company was out of the business because frankly their software sucked and it started all over again.
We won it this time but the government wasted well over $100,000 on software that was now useless.
There are so many rules and regulations in place to stop abuse that it extremely painful to get anything done.
Back in the late 90s a lot of pilots bought their own GPS and laptops because the Air-Force hadn't installed the integrated mil-spec units yet.
In the 80s they bought radar detectors for the same reason.
This isn't really anything new. Soldiers have been buying supplemental equipment since David spent his allowance and a state of the art sling and extra hard stones.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
It's near-impossible to predict exactly what troops on the ground need before you actually get there. Therefore, American soldiers have always innovated in the absence of the right tool for the job. In World War II, soldiers fighting in France were getting bogged down in hedgerows, which were basically dunes. Aerial photos did not reveal the three-dimensional structure of the hedgerows, so the soldiers were not prepared for such a battlefield. Defending Germans would lay in ambush behind every hedgerow, and American soldiers going over the top of the hedgerows were mowed down by German machine gun fire.
Initially, GIs tried to dynamite the hedgerows so they could attack from a more concealed position. Though this met with some success, it took up too much dynamite. Other GIs tried to drive tanks through the hedgerows, but those got stuck and wouldn't reliably penetrate the hedgerows. Eventually, the soldiers welded on a long metal rod onto tanks. The tip of the rod contained a barrel of explosives that was detonated once the tank shoved the rod into the hedgerow. The "Rhino" saved many American lives by creating a fast and safer way to secure hedgerows in France.
The current administration should be faulted for many things. However, not being able to anticipate Silly String as a precious wartime commodity should not be one of them. I mean, no one would have thought that this would have saved American lives -- and in fact, it was only the innovation of the American soldier that created such a need for a child's toy.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
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.
They do. it has a pair of UV led's at the nozzle exit to make the phosphorus glow get charged on the way out of the nozzle and it looks more like a Mace can than a silly string can.
My nephew brought one home from Desert Storm. the special ops have had this stuff for at least 10 years. It's just that silly string bran is far cheaper.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Using every day objects and the sort is pretty commonplace on the battlefield. Back during the Napoleanic war soldiers used to piss down the barrels of their guns to clean them out. In World war I, allied soldiers brought bathtubs with them into the trenches, and would launch them with catapults into the enemy trenches. The Germans and Turks had developed completely different bathtubs at the time, and were terrified of the Allied tubs. This always led to a horrendous panic in the German trenches, which would almost always be followed by a push across no mans land by the allies. It's said that the Dardanelles could have been taken, had Churchill been provided with adequate bathtubs. During World War II allied soldiers brought white makeup along with them so if they ever got caught they'd paint themselves up like mimes. When the Germans tried to question them and saw the white makeup they just let them go, knowing that there'd be absolutely no way they could get a mime to talk. Then during the Korean war soldiers made good use of old coffee grounds. Since the North Koreans knew soldiers always drank a lot of coffee, if they found old coffee grounds they assumed there was a base near by and retreat. In the first Iraq war American soldiers used to bring soccer balls along with them. At the outbreak of the war almost all of Iraq's soccer balls were destroyed in a freak smoke stack toppeling. When ever the Americans got in a serious fire fight, they'd just lob their soccer ball into the frey and all the enemy soldiers would just stop and try to get it, which usually ended quite badly for the enemy. Unfortunatley Iraq was able to build up a tremendous stock pile of soccer balls since the first war, so the strategy doesn't work any more.
It's quite remarkible how such common things can prove to be so useful. I think it's overall a great testimant to human ingenuity in time of war.
I don't own a snook, and if I did I wouldn't leave it cocked.