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US Military Seeks Biodegradable Bullets That Sprout Plants (newatlas.com)
The Department of Defense is looking at ways to clean up the hundreds of thousands of training rounds used by the U.S. army. It is putting out the call for the development of biodegradable ammunition loaded with seeds that sprout plans after being discharged. New Atlas reports: At military facilities across the U.S. and indeed around the world, a huge number of rounds are fired for training purposes, ranging from low-velocity 40 mm grenades, to mortars, to 155 mm artillery rounds. All of these feature components that can take hundreds of years to biodegrade, and falling onto the ground in such great numbers means that finding and cleaning them up is no small task. But left behind, they can corrode and pollute the soil and water supplies. So the Department of Defense has put out a call for proposals through the Small Business Innovation Research agency that solve the problem. The DoD describes the solution as a naturally occurring biodegradable material that can replace those used in current training rounds. It imagines that the biodegradable composites will be capable of holding bioengineered seeds inside (a technology it says has been demonstrated previously), that won't germinate until they have been in the ground for several months. Then plants will sprout from the discharged ammunition that actively remove soil contaminants and consume the other biodegradable components. Also imperative is that animals are able to safely consume the plants.
I've been sprouting plans my whole life - it never fixed a thing!
Never happened. True story.
they FEED people.
But this and other ideas like it will end on January 20th.
couldn't we just not shoot people?
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To avoid trashing the environment, they need to use plants that are native to each local area.
That's a lot of different types of rounds to keep track of.
You are pretty dumb.
There's nothing wrong with cutting costs and reducing pollution. These rounds aren't being made for killing people. You might as well be arguing that they shouldn't train recruits with "fake grenades" at first because fake grenades don't kill anyone.
What a great game ... sproutin' good guys and bad in the 90's. :) I think GOG.com has a re-mastered version? If they do, I'll probably lose a couple of weeks to that when I pick it up.
I don't know of any material with a density suitable for behaving properly as a projectile that doesn't contain toxic metals. The high-gravity-compound plastics have metal filler.
In what way does making biodegradable training bullets "misunderstand" the horrors of war? I'm missing the logical leap here...
I don't respond to AC's.
the probelm,
The army fires lots of training rounds that are a concentrated health and enviromental hazard
the US military solution expensive biodegradble seed bullets
The practical solution.
Dig down 20 feet and pour 3 feet of renforced concrete, in roughly a hill bunker shape. pour dirt on top. Fire away for a year. once a year dig down to the concrete and put all the dirt into a giant sifter and sorter. collect all the bullets, and metal them down for reuse.
They are training rounds fired on training fields. this is easy.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Now, now, he's just acting out because he's afraid these bullets will help the cops find the bodies.
I thought that by definition the bullet was the metal part at the end of the casing. They are talking about 40mm+ ordinance. The 40mm m781 practice grenade is a plastic casing around a chalk core. I would have thought biodegradable plastic would have been relatively simple, and chalk isn't exactly what I think of as a pollutant.
Did you hear that great big whooshing sound? Yeah, that. That was the sound of "training rounds" going right over your head.
Or more likely right through your head. Which is easy to do because it's apparently empty.
You generally shoot targets rather than people during training.
Unless the plant is native to the area, keep it out. Last thing we need is another kudzu or similar plant spreading like wildfire.
Summary and TFA say this is for rounds used for training. The military is pragmatic enough that they'll use more effective conventional rounds when they actually have to kill people and break things for real.
I always did wonder, when seeing those dramatic clips of special forces teams training by shooting pop-up plywood terrorists in a mock urban environment, who's the poor slob who has to go through and sweep up all the spent shell casings and bullet fragments to prep the place for the next training session.
A bullet is a bullet is a bullet.
No, it's not.
I go to the bullet store
And then you sit down spend time reloading your spent brass with those bullets? Never mind. You have no idea what you're talking about.
I mean this literally
Oh, I get it now. Another person who doesn't understand what the word "literally" means.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
It's more complex than that smart guy,
Breakin' shit and killin' people requires lots of practice.
The regions where troops train need to be actively maintained or they would become useless wastelands unsuitable for training. Believe it or not there is a finite and getting smaller number of places for this to happen. Those "Stupid green" things, if not paid attention to, will degrade our ability to be the best at the breakin' shit and killin' people. It's called Sustainability, look it up.
They train at facilities long term. They are the ones that have the clean up the mess or it pollutes the water that they drink. It has caused issues in the past IIRC.
Because if it's not, then it must be the last stunt of a bunch of Obama appointees who know they're about to be handed their walking papers.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Bullets are antiseeds, plant one and watch someting die.
Why do you post a variation of this on every story?
Now I've heard everything
We don't just want you dead, we want you pushing up daisies. Literally.
Totally stupid. Like someone else said, the role of the military is to kill people and break stuff. Nothing else. Not nation building, not inventing environmentally friendly ways to kill. The goal should be to use the military sparingly, then when you do, use the most effective tools to do the ugly but necessary job.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
You are pretty dumb.
And so are you...
Look, realistic training is necessary for our troops, that means firing ammo that is "like" the real thing in weight and performance at least some of the time. Sure, you don't have to fire high explosive rounds or drop real 1,000 lb bombs that are going to go off all the time, but you do need stuff that's close to real from time to time.
I seriously doubt we are going to find a cost effective way to plant trees in mortar shells or wild flowers in target practice rounds. I'm all for not doing harm if we can manage it, but I'm also NOT for these do good green types that advocate the military doing hugely expensive "green" projects that don't really help anything and cost way too much.. (Like that "renewable fuel oil" mess the Navy did a while back that was millions of dollars of waste for a very little bit of fuel).
So the original poster was right... Keep the purpose of the military straight in your head and dump all the nutty parts about environmental awareness and green technology being part of their mission. They are there to break stuff and kill people while avoiding having others break their stuff and kill them and us. To hell with planting trees or saving the environment if we are not here to enjoy it because the bad guys won the next war.
So THAT's where they keep getting these ideas...
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
The Army knows from history just how badly the environment can be devastated by combat, or in this case by being used as a training range. Small parts of northern France have been sealed off since the end of WWI as the Zone Rouge both because of the huge quantity of unexploded ordinance and the amount of other toxic materials in the ground, and it may take up to 700 more years before some parts become safe to use. In fact, there are two small pieces of ground where soil samples are up to 17% arsenic, and 99% of all plants that sprout there die. They're trying to find a way to prevent creating more dead zones by using practice ammo that's not made of toxic materials, and I think that's a Good Thing.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
is part of a healthy and balanced diet.
The unofficial
... the bullets can't be used just anywhere because the plants would be as invasive as the fucking assholes who use them.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Of course, getting enemy combatants to hang around the impact area of US military training ranges might present something of a challenge . . .
Maybe it was the whores of wars.
Doesn't make much sense, but neither did s/he.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
You're not in the military, so ...
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
You probably don't end up with thousands of spent bullets on your property every year. That's a lot of lead. Most people use less than a thousand bullets a year, so it's much less notable a problem. Seed bullets are a good idea for training...if they act just like real ones for training.
I have noticed this, as well.
The user, "Anonymous Coward," (and who in hell is that, anyway?) has a way higher post count than all the rest of us combined.
Does the bastard (or bitch, as may apply) ever sleep?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Then plants will sprout from the discharged ammunition that actively remove soil contaminants
The plant cannot degrade heavy metals, it can only concentrate them. Be sure to not eat that plant, or animals that ate it.
How lazy can the military get?
The now want bullets that can sprout "plans"!
So what if the bullet doesn't kill or hit? The enemy can just take our plans and run away!
All because the officers could not be bothered to do any planning themselves!
He would have had a field day writing these into some sort of dark satirical sci-fi story.
Mostly random stuff.
Right ++++ good.
Jeez. Training requires using materiel in the same manner you would on a battlefield.
Training a sniper with shells 75% of the weight the would normally have is pointless.
Ditto many other disciplines.
I'm sure there are some exceptions, in C&C roles for war games, deployment is the important thing and mortar crews etc can compensate for "green ammo".
But by and large - this is nuts.
When I read the title I thought of the scene in The Fountain when Hugh Jackman drinks from the tree of life. It's at 8:30 here.. But then I read TFS.
Yep. They do. Their annual ammunition buy is currently about 1.8 billion rounds a year, and essentially all of this gets used in training.
How many rounds do they use in actual combat operations? At the height of the Iraq War the U.S. expended only seventy two million rounds a year in combat. How many were they expending in training each year at that time? 1.1 billion rounds! The rate of training ammunition expenditure has since gone up, and is now 1.8 billion rounds. Before 9/11 the military had a less intense training regimen, they only expended 350 million rounds a year, but that was still five times more than the rate of expenditure in Iraq.
People are always astounded (incredulous, really) to learn that ammunition used in war these days is just round-off error in training ammo purchases.
So, yes, not having to clean up one or two billion casings a year would be a big benefit.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Right +++ agree too. We had Chuck Norris in on our software project too. First thing he did was get us coding straight in the production environment. No point fighting the bugs in a fake environment.
Don't know why steel-cored bullets can't be collected with something like Mr. White's electromagnet truck.
If you are on a training range and the rounds aren't overwhelmingly landing into a small well defined area, it's a far bigger problem than non biodegradable ammo.
So when Saudi Arabia gets nuked by Iran or Israel and we've used up the Alaskan Emergency Reserve to fuel trust fund babies' SUVs and Ferraris, you consider it a waste to know exactly which branches of our Military are going to be up shit creek without a gas can when all Hell breaks loose?
they sprout Onions
Table-ized A.I.
That ALL Metal comes from the Ground. Right? ... Its not "Pollution" LMMFAO! (Liberal Thinking)
You are pretty dumb.
And so are you...
Oh my, it's the dumberer complaining about somebody else. What a revelation.
Look, realistic training is necessary for our troops, that means firing ammo that is "like" the real thing in weight and performance at least some of the time. Sure, you don't have to fire high explosive rounds or drop real 1,000 lb bombs that are going to go off all the time, but you do need stuff that's close to real from time to time.
Which would be a useful rebuttal if ANYBODY EVER SAID that their intention was to NEVER have ANY real materials expended.
But you'll note that the only absolutes are coming from the people saying "OMG OMG OMG, this would never work, NEVER NEVER NEVER, it's all PC-Bullshit" and other such mendacity.
The argument that Chris Katko made was that there's nothing wrong with cutting costs and reducing pollution. It'd be hard to argue otherwise. Even times where you say "We can't cut that cost" it's because there is still something else wrong with it.
I seriously doubt we are going to find a cost effective way to plant trees in mortar shells or wild flowers in target practice rounds. I'm all for not doing harm if we can manage it, but I'm also NOT for these do good green types that advocate the military doing hugely expensive "green" projects that don't really help anything and cost way too much..
That's nice, but you may want to know something. Actual real ammunition and shells are FUCKING EXPENSIVE. So is the clean-up. Spending some money on research is thus competing against a very high standard anyway.
Really, there is a reason we do have fake grenades, and even dummy rounds. Because it's better to practice without that crap going off on you. Save the live-fire exercises for special times.
(Like that "renewable fuel oil" mess the Navy did a while back that was millions of dollars of waste for a very little bit of fuel).
Because a research project is expensive, huh? Now ask yourself how expensive it would be if they didn't prepare in advance.
So the original poster was right...
You haven't made one substantial argument to demonstrate that they are right to oppose any substitution of munitions at all. . Zero. None. Sorry, I know you hate facing reality, most of your type do, but you didn't actually rebut the premises involved.
Keep the purpose of the military straight in your head and dump all the nutty parts about environmental awareness and green technology being part of their mission. They are there to break stuff and kill people while avoiding having others break their stuff and kill them and us. To hell with planting trees or saving the environment if we are not here to enjoy it because the bad guys won the next war.
Well, don't worry, this will be done by a private company anyway. Just like the fuels. That's how the government works. That's how the military does things.
Don't like it? Too bad. You're dumb anyway.
The only way we are going to get a piece of ground so thoroughly polluted is to nuc the damn place. We didn't manage to make that much of a mess in WWII.
This entire scenario sounds ludicrous. Biodegradable firearms casing? Bullets? Seeds? As part something that gets heated to several hundred degrees and several thousand PSI? The seed part seems the most bizarre. Just fly over the ground with a C130 full of seed sacks and toss 'em out the back. Easy peasy.
They'd do better to figure out how to make ammo out of magnetic metals (steel is, if not biodegradable, eminently degradable via dependable 'ol redox reactions). It's going to be closer to brass and lead than biodegradable plastic or even ceramic. If you are too impatient to wait for things to rust away, drive a big tank dragging a magnet and pick up all sorts of things.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
"You may like to read: ... Donald Trump Wins US Presidency"
No. Don't remind me.
Table-ized A.I.
Captain Planet had this totally beat. . .
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
I don't know of any material with a density suitable for behaving properly as a projectile that doesn't contain toxic metals.
Actually platinum would work well; it's twice the density of lead and chemically inert. Cost might be an issue though.
they're working on adding daisy seeds to future live rounds, so Americans can finally once again understand what the term 'pushing up daisies' means, in regards to combat and firearms specifically :)
There was an Indiegogo campaign to create the Flower Shell: shotgun shells that would spread seeds when fired.
https://www.cnet.com/news/for-extreme-gardeners-shotgun-shells-full-of-seed/
https://laughingsquid.com/flower-shell-lets-you-plant-seeds-with-a-12-gauge-shotgun/
The website for them (flowershell.com) is defunct, though, and the Indiegogo page has been taken down. All the Youtube demo videos are gone, too.
The local skeet range covers a portion its costs with recovered lead. The majority is from range fees and selling targets, but collecting lead is profitable.
Every two or three years (depending on metal prices) they scrape the top six inches of soil off and centrifuge out the metal. Shuts them down for about two weeks. Apparently their is a company that roams around, providing this service.
Rifle ranges aren't that tough to cleanup. Artillery ranges on the other hand, spread the metal further and thinner.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
That's what PFC's are for.
I don't know of any material with a density suitable for behaving properly as a projectile that doesn't contain toxic metals. The high-gravity-compound plastics have metal filler.
Ecomass is apparently a tungsten/polymer composite that was designed to meet current U.S. Army specs for nontoxic training ammunition. It of course has Tungsten powder in it which is somewhat toxic, however it is bound with a polymer, and is not nearly as environmentally toxic as lead. About the only compounds that you could use that would be less toxic would probably be Bismuth (which is used as a lead replacement). Of course you could also use silver, gold, and platinum, but that would be some mighty expensive bullets (of course even tungsten is very expensive compared to lead ~15x).
Every day a large amount of blood is drained from animals in the human consumption chain, and is already used in numerous applications including farming and gardening. Dehydrate it, pack it down in a modified giant pill press, then coat with a seed mixture and a sabot jacket of some kind and bingo, you got yourself a biodegradable, environment-friendly eco-shell ready to spread flowers and beauty with pin-point accuracy at up to 15 miles range.
Plus, everyone knows blood makes the grass grow.
UID of the beast, you can't stop me.
OT skit
"A retreating army always leaves ... gifts." That is in my mind ... don't know where.
But I would venture that this is a GREAT BIOTERROR weapon, i.e. invasive plants!
Actually the idea could be that we would explode millions of munitions in LEO (Low Earth Orbit, very low) and the invasive mutant seeds would rain down on the opponent. In 3-years the opponent is up to their arm pits in Kudzu! Can't take a piss or a shit without bumping into the stuff.
IT'S A PERFECT SOLUTION!
"Quit screwing around with these stupid "green" things when it comes to the military."
98% of all ordnance is expended in practice, and a small number of test ranges absorb most of this firepower. THIS is why green ordnance is a good idea.
Instead of fixing the problem: going to war.
ABORIGINES, n. Persons of little worth found cumbering the soil of a newly discovered country. They soon cease to cumber; they fertilize.
I don't see the newsworthiness in this; it's been done before, just manually. The only advancement here is automating the process.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/52/Flower_Power_by_Bernie_Boston.jpg
/s
You're shouting common sense into a deep, dark chasm of stupidity. You should know by now that any time a story mentions sustainability, there's going to be dozens of shit-drizzlers who only know that they're supposed to be agin' it.
And every time a story has anything to do with the military, the comment section will be full of anonymous no-dick keyboard kommandos who think playing COD4 and hassling women on Twitter is "fighting the war back home" and thus qualifies them as experts in all things war-fighting.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Pornhub has made the local skeet range obsolete.
You are welcome on my lawn.
There's nothing wrong with cutting costs and reducing pollution. These rounds aren't being made for killing people.
Actually they may kill people. By planting seeds and growing plants on a live fire training range they are potentially hiding unexploded ordinance. Making it harder to recognize and increasing the likelihood of accidental detonation.
"They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks"... and their bullets into plant seeds!
That's what PFC's are for.
Once upon a time. PMCs do that now so that the PFC are freed from such maintenance and support tasks and are available for deployment overseas.
Since this is for training, yep, it's not shooting people.
That said, the sprouting seed idea would be kind of fun for war. You shoot people, and then they push up daisies.
Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare IRL
Coming Soon to the training ground.
TFS says the bullets also have seeds inside. How horrifying can it really be when your enemies are literally pushing daisies?
There's nothing wrong with cutting costs and reducing pollution.
No, but I have a STRONG suspicion that these bullets will not "cut costs" and will be significantly more expensive than their old versions.
I have no issues going green when there's a financial incentive to do so (ie, LED bulbs over their lifespan are now far more cost effective than incandescent - I'd use them even if energy saver bulbs weren't mandated).
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
You can bet, the only thing this will do is put our military in danger. The purpose of the military is to kill people and break things. It's just that simple. Quit screwing around with these stupid "green" things when it comes to the military.
As usual, the flowers & beads decked SJWs modded you down, even though what you wrote is correct. What they overlook is that none of our enemies - ISIS, the Iranians, the Syrians, even the Russians bother about any of that stuff. You won't see bullets decompose and sprout plants.
This program is pretty much on the lines of glutein free MREs, transgender commanders and so on. We should export the SJWs who gave us this to Raqqa, so that they can train ISIS on how to get these things. Maybe work on biodegradable swords for them that they can use in their beheadings, and so on.
Thankfully, in 2 weeks, the Obamanation will be behind us, and such programs can be the first put to.... biodegradable bullets of their own. So that no more cash is wasted on such things when we're scratching our heads on the $20T debt.
Zardoz is going to be pissed when he finds out that someone is building guns that shoot seeds and makes new life to poison the earth...
Someone already thought of this. Check the link for one real-world test and a lot of discussion on the matter.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Citation Needed.
Sorry, had to scratch that itch.
Here's an early prototype...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
Just use watermelon seeds. They're easy to obtain and anyone can shoot them!
Then plants will sprout from the discharged ammunition that actively remove soil contaminants and consume the other biodegradable components. Also imperative is that animals are able to safely consume the plants.
Wait a minute, how is this plant supposed to absorb the soil contaminants, and still be safe to eat? The contaminants still have to go somewhere.
> I would have thought biodegradable plastic would have been relatively simple, and chalk isn't exactly what I think of as a pollutant.
Yep, some of the hippy places serve drinks in biodegradable plastic cups made from corn. In function they are indistinguishable from the popular red Solo cups - not noticeably brittle and prone to breakage or anything when I played with them.
Need we say more?
There's nothing wrong with cutting costs and reducing pollution.
I have no issues going green when there's a financial incentive to do so (ie, LED bulbs over their lifespan are now far more cost effective than incandescent - I'd use them even if energy saver bulbs weren't mandated).
so not polluting water is no financial incentive? what will your children drink?
+1 for being the only person in this thread to spell ordnance correctly.
Right +++ agree too. We had Chuck Norris in on our software project too. First thing he did was get us coding straight in the production environment. No point fighting the bugs in a fake environment.
You want codes? I know all the best codes. The man code. The Davinci Code. Tax code, which we'll get rid of. I know codes.
By planting seeds and growing plants on a live fire training range they are potentially hiding unexploded ordinance.
Troops are very rarely sent into the impact areas of live fire ranges. During training, the only place I ever advanced over ground where explosive ordinance was fired was Twentynine Palms. I believe the Army does the same at Fort Irwin. Grass isn't going to grow in either of those locations.
In addition to concealing ordinance, the other problem with grass is brushfires that can trigger detonations. But if the ground is fertile, weeds are going to grow anyway, so I don't think these seeds are going to make much difference.
A plant that will both sequester toxins and be non-toxic? I'm not sure how well that's going to workout, and yes I know toxic compounds can be broken down into non-toxic compounds, but mankind leans more in the direction of DDT, dioxin, arsenic, mercury, and others that have a way doing environmental damage.
So what if the bullet doesn't kill or hit? The enemy can just take our plans and run away!
Oh I'm sure an IRL comicbook villain will show up with a version that not only kills, but the botanical gardens grow from the victims body.
I see a lot of people getting all bent out of shape at the absurdity of the concept of this SBIR topic. I am not a ballistics expert, so I can't comment on that, but please realize that the DoD funds 100s of these grants every year. Most of these, if they are phase I, are very small in scope - $100k - 200k. This is enough to pay a small team working part time to do a feasibility study, create a mock up, or develop a non-working prototype. It's a cheap (for the military) way of bouncing an idea off the wall.
In addition most SBIRs never make it past phase I development. In all likelihood, less will be spent on this program than is spent on a couple of hours of one of the training exercises they are talking about greening up.
LED bulbs over their lifespan are now far more cost effective than incandescent
You can now buy 60W replacement bulbs for about 50 cents. At that price, they pay for themselves in just a couple months of typical use, which is 1% of their lifespan.
US Military were too late to the game.
On the 4th of January I watched the announcement of a seed gun.
You can see the video here.
[Rent This Space]
How the fuck are you going to have a beloved mighty military if you don't have tax, you stupid fucking post?
So instead of lead contamination we'll introduce new exotic and invasive weeds all over the world. Nice going assholes.
Oh how nice. Kill a few bad guys, and save the environment at the same time.
Might be okay for practice grenades perhaps, but can "green" bullets reproduce the weight and flight path of bullets used in war? If it doesn't then you might as well be running around shouting "Bang" for all the good it does you. If your practice bullets don't go the same place your real bullets do, you'll be shooting in the wrong place.
Dry foods such as pasta and sugar have shelf life measured in years. Pasta can get a slight off taste after a two years or so but it's still edible for five more years.
I would guess these cups similar - just keep them dry.
The key words above that you missed are "training rounds". Without those words it does sound insane, but with them - oh just read the summary.
But think about it, those plant could be carnivorous and enjoy the taste of freshly cooked human flesh. Or instead of plants, the bullets might contain deadly fungi spores which consume the body and then infect the central nervous systems of the living and control them for nefarious purposes.
Not a lot of that stuff in a mortar shell, artillery shell or grenade (and this isn't about the cartridges, those are easy to collect).
Artillery tends to go a long way and new gunners apparently tend to have less than pinpoint accuracy. That stuff is going to be spread out over miles by both design and less than perfect aim.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNEYzySYFAQ
Dude, ScentCone, the guy literally posts a similar comment in almost every story.
You might as well be talking with APK or Dr. SBAITSO.
That said, for most people, they do have little care or concern about the ammunition they purchase, like their gasoline, they just get what is offered.
The military, on the other hand, gets what it wants, whether it be JP-7 or PGU-14/B.
Maybe we can have a war on climate change with these rounds, at least if we can find a way for contractors to make money.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Sprouting ammunition developed by the DoD (Department of Death) was an important plot device in Tim Schafer's renowned adventure game Grim Fandango (1998) . It is rather strange how reality takes after fiction, I wonder if there are Grim Fandango fans at the DoD.
packing viable seeds in with biodegradable shell casings seems like a terrible idea from a biodiversity/bioinvasive ecology perspective. The bullets packed with these seeds would undoubtedly be used worldwide without care for native species.
I can see they're trying to greenwash as hard as they can, but seems like someone missed a couple lectures in environmental studies.
Planting a garden would be so much more fun.
Cyanide & Happiness has already invented a seed gun.
This doesn't sound cool at all. And that's why it shouldn't be done. It is literally a concern of the military that things sound and look cool. What kind of military shoots flowers for ammunition? Biodegradable maybe... But no flowers please.
Projects like this are usually what they call 'greenwashing', mainly motivated by PR. On the other hand, a lot of small arms ammo is used for practice rather than actual combat/fight so it is a sensible idea to look for alternatives. Maybe no good solution turns up but 'something better than current' can be found.
*puts sunglasses on* ... pushing up daisies.
YEEAAAAAAAAH!!!
They have an opinion and they feel like it is as valid as opinions from experts.
I think that AC is just laughing at Trump's style of speech.
Brings a whole new meaning to making someone push up daisies...
Seems like the scene from Academy Award-nominated 3D animation movie Cathedral will come to life - corpses springing out trees ;-)
Of course, plants don't grow unless humans specifically put them in the ground, which is fortunate for your point there.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
I have no issues going green when there's a financial incentive to do so
lol. Was going to comment on that but I think it stands on its own.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Errr....this effort is for TRAINING. So if you are killing people during your training, you are doing it wrong.
Yes, but the military must also include the costs of cleanup in those normal rounds used for training. The price comparison must be fair. Given the current financial climate, no matter what President Tweety says, the military is under pressure to cut costs. Were it not for the long lead times on new weapon systems, the F35 would have been cut long ago.
^This.
I don't trust atoms -- they make up stuff.
Flower Power by Freddie
... when he shot the stag in the head with the cherry kernels, right between the antlers. A year later he saw the stag again with a beautiful cherry tree growing out of its head.
They should hire him.
It will teach commandos how to hitch a ride on a cannon shell too.
Get these rounds.
Commit murder.
Hide body for several months.
When found - no bullet, just an odd tree growing out of their chest...
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Uh-huh. So, uh, when this training in "close to combat" conditions is taking place, with live ammunition being fired to make sure it's as real as possible...who are they shooting at? Trees? Cardboard cut-outs of brown people? Archery-like circle targets? Friendly American soldiers with slightly different coloured shirts or armbands?
Are these the enemies they face in real combat? No? So if the fucking things they are shooting at in training are not even remotely representative of the things they're shooting at in real combat, the only thing you're worried about is if their bullets are a couple grams different to real ones? But no, let's shit all over the idea because "fuck those greenie hippies", who gives a fuck if we spend billions on real bullets fired at thin air, that then goes on to contaminate soil and drinking water, and maybe kills a few hundred civilians.
On the other hand, it sounds like it's just a way to try and make hippies happy, which they never will be when it comes to the military. It might even become more trouble than it's worth, because if you really want to satisfy the hippies then each base would have to have it's own seed-ammo so as not to introduce non-native plants.
It's an interesting idea, sure, but I think it's going to end up being more trouble than it's worth. Besides, the idea of soldiers shooting flowers into things is... I want to say 'gay', but that's not fair to homosexuals so I'm at a loss.
..wow. We're finding ways to not harm the planet's biodiversity and survival IN THE PROCESS of killing each other. If this isn't proof that wars are not designed for resource "borrowing", I don't know what is. Go Manifest Destiny v2! /humor
Know what happens to a military firing range when a base is shutdown and transferred or sold back to the local economy?
Millions of dollars in cleanup of a hazardous waste site due to the hundreds of thousands of lead bullets in the ground.
A training round with reduced or even zero lead content would go a long way to eliminate those costs in the future.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
The "kill people and break things" is a catchy thing that Rush Limbaugh always says. I'm no fan of Rush, but think he often has a point on this topic. However in this case, you have to look at the baseline. The military now spends money cleaning up current and former bases that could be spent on killing people and breaking things if they had a less-polluting method. Even better if it also cleans up existing pollution. In short, if this works it might make them better at killing people and breaking things.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
this isn't about being eco warriors.
this is about bean counting.
99% of all military ammunition is used in training on firing ranges.
that's a lot of lead to leave laying about in the environment, a lot of hazardous waste sites that will require future and expensive cleanup.
yes the seed idea is pretty far fetched.
but the idea of reducing the amount of lead the military needs to clean up is a good one.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
A lot of that is written as to sound shocking, but a 1:14 war:training ratio is damned good. It's pretty routine for some people to take 90-150 rounds just to qualify (and never fire a shot in combat.) I would have expected the number of rounds fired in combat to be significantly lower with only 1.1 billion used in training.
You would have many volunteers that would come out to clean up the range.
Artillery ranges on the other hand, spread the metal further and thinner.
Yes, but that metal is mostly soft steel, that isn't that problematic from an environmental standpoint. OTOH it isn't that lucrative to collect either.
Fun fact, the difference between a live and training artillery shell is only the heat treatment of the shell itself. The hardened shell of a live shell burst into approx 50000 sharp fragments (155mm shell), while the soft training version bursts into dozens/hundreds of large dull fragments. (This according Bofors). Notably, the type and amount of explosive is the same in both versions.
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They're targeting ammunition of 40-120mm. That is not small arms.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
We could always do what the Soviets did. Use steel core ammunition.
Gilding metal over a steel core would give us acceptable ballistics, enhanced penetration and eliminate the need to clean up any lead.
to put flowers in the rifle barrels anymore.
So, yes, not having to clean up one or two billion casings a year would be a big benefit.
.
They've got plenty of manpower. There are caseless prototypes. If they really cared, they'd have caseless rifles by now.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
can they make them grow red poppies? that would make the most sense.
Bloody hell, why can't the damn Yanks just stop shooting and dropping bombs on everybody? Now they want to spread invasive plant species too.
I guess that means that if our Soldiers go to war the enemy will be quite literally pushing up daises
The casings are the easy part to clean up. A bag attached to the rifle can do that. The bullets on the other hand... Brass is nowhere near as harmful to the environment as lead is.
It seems the industrial military complex has discovered the 60s. Next they'll be using the VW microbus as our future tanks. Complete with stoned soldiers smelling of patchouli.
I think this is talking about the actual bullet, not the casings, those are significantly easier to clean up (they land next to the gun).
Prepare in advance? Between shale and cracking coal as a worst case scenario, the US has enough oil for nearly the next millennium.
Elemental lead has a negligible effect on the environment.
this is nuts
It's what happens when "environmental marketing studies" (or some such) is confused for actual environmental engineering. In any case, someone ought to explain to these dipshits that bullets are designed the way they are for a reason and if they want biodegradable bullets (the seed part is both retarded and irrelevant), they're going to need entirely different guns. .. who [hopefully] would've explained
Dunno how that last sentence fragment survived my editing; sure it wasn't there when I hit submit. Bad week to quit coffee again, perhaps...
Yep. They do. Their annual ammunition buy is currently about 1.8 billion rounds a year, and essentially all of this gets used in training.
How many rounds do they use in actual combat operations? At the height of the Iraq War the U.S. expended only seventy two million rounds a year in combat. How many were they expending in training each year at that time? 1.1 billion rounds! The rate of training ammunition expenditure has since gone up, and is now 1.8 billion rounds. Before 9/11 the military had a less intense training regimen, they only expended 350 million rounds a year, but that was still five times more than the rate of expenditure in Iraq.
People are always astounded (incredulous, really) to learn that ammunition used in war these days is just round-off error in training ammo purchases.
So, yes, not having to clean up one or two billion casings a year would be a big benefit.
Brass or steel isn't toxic.
More importantly, I want to have a ready supply of actual real combat ready bullets ready to fight a war. Otherwise we would have to spend months and months building up a supply chain and industrial capacity to produce and distribute real ammunition.
We should assume that two million enemy soldiers could just show up one day to fight and won't give anyone any time to write a memo about how we need to start making enough real bullets to fight a war. If we can fight with the same bullets that soldiers target practice with then that gives us the same supply chain we would need to defend ourselves in a war.
Training a sniper with shells 75% of the weight the would normally have is pointless.
I could see the appeal for biodegradable bullets and if they worked just as effectively even using them in combat but I find the idea that they be required to host live plants rather strange and limiting. It would make much more sense to pursue biodegradable bullets optimized for biodegradability and effectiveness than adding a third optimization of needing to host a plant. The more things you optimize for the less you're going to be able to optimize each criteria.
No danger in practicing with something different than in production?
But that would make too much sense. Gotta pollute the world with Frankencrops. So ethical. Much Wow. So Facepalm.
Of course, plants don't grow unless humans specifically put them in the ground, which is fortunate for your point there.
Silly straw man, the point is that more is not always better. Such rounds would constitute a lot of additional seeding.
The same way they used to do it in olden times...pillage!
Just another day in Paradise
I'm hoping this develops into BB pellets at some point. Could make gardening or spreading grass seed a lot more interesting!
How many years away do you think that is? Do you really believe we'll still be running everything on dino fuel by then???
Just another day in Paradise
Not a thing in the article about cutting costs, so can we toss that distraction aside please?
Where would these bullets with seeds be used? The article talks about plants, but doesn't indicate anything about the type/size of them. I'm imagining an apple orchard sprouting up in the middle of the rifle range.
Just another day in Paradise
Replying to my own comment...
Duh...please disregard the first sentence. I was thinking about the cost of the ammo itself, and not about the environmental cleanup that was mentioned.
Just another day in Paradise
98% of all ordnance is expended in practice
Come to think of it, probably 98% of the remaining 2% of ordnance is cover fire, or whatever terms the military uses for "doesn't kill the target" (IANA military strategist), and might as well plant trees too.
If we're still flying aircraft by then, we're going to be flying them using something with very similar chemical composition to what we use currently. Even if it is just temporary energy storage, it is very convenient energy storage for that task.
Like that "renewable fuel oil" mess the Navy did a while back that was millions of dollars of waste for a very little bit of fuel
That was for logistical reasons, rather than environmental. Local sourcing of supplies is always preferred over having to ship it halfway across the world.
into the Third Life!
Cool!
Yeah, I realized as I posted that I was not using the right words. I ment 'basic ammo' .
So, what will we call these new items?...best suggestions win the internwebs.
Tofu Tomahawk missiles?
Soylent shells
Green grenades
Bio-bullets
Just another day in Paradise
Couldn't you just recover and recycle ferrous bullets using magnets?
Why don't they just fill the artillery with pennies and have homeless people pick them up? Problem solved.
I thought plans were hatched, not sprouted?
Try Googling about this, and you find lots and lots of people actually expressing shock, astonishment, and incredulity. Recently Alt Right sites were pushing the notion that DHS training ammo purchases, again larger than Iraq combat expenditure (not as large as the military purchases), was proof of an Obama plan to impose martial law in the U.S. because it couldn't possibly be needed for training.
So yeah, a lot of people find this shocking.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
The military already has its own production facilities sufficient to supply any actual war. But they have not expanded them to keep up with the escalating consumption for training, and so have been making large ammo buys from outside sources. This "green" training ammo would be additional production capability for training, having no impact on war readiness.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
did they start out in need of shooting? Were they born that way? If not, what made them that way? If they were just born that way is it OK to abort them once science is sufficiently advanced to identify them (anime nerds, see Psycho Pass).
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Not a thing in the article about cutting costs, so can we toss that distraction aside please?
Nope, it is an important factor, but good on you for spotting your error. Have to commend you on that one.
Where would these bullets with seeds be used? The article talks about plants, but doesn't indicate anything about the type/size of them. I'm imagining an apple orchard sprouting up in the middle of the rifle range.
If you read the article, for this initial grant, you'll also note that they're referring to munitions that one would not be using on the rifle range.
I mean, the British do have a rifled cannon on the Challenger 2, but really, it's not the same. This will be out on large, open areas, not a controlled one.
Besides? Apples? Your first thought? Man, you know too little of farming, but have probably been exposed to way too much American Folk mythos.
How lazy can the military get?
The now want bullets that can sprout "plans"!
So what if the bullet doesn't kill or hit? The enemy can just take our plans and run away!
All because the officers could not be bothered to do any planning themselves!
So is that the real story to how they got the death star plans?
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Firing ranges on military bases aren't anything like those WW I battlefields in France. But still the number of bullets, fragments, and yes, unexploded ordnance, can be quite astounding.
Years ago contractors actually paid good money to get to go out to the berms (piled up dirt walls) behind rifle and pistol ranges, to dig out and screen the tons of pistol and rifle bullets. Copper and lead: both good scrap sellers.
The artillery ranges are different: they can be quite dangerous because of the duds on the surface and shallowly buried. Nobody wants to dig up duds :-)
Good point, someone above: are the seeds going to sprout plants that become a pest or menace in themselves?
I wasn't trying to suggest that the damage was, or was likely to get as bad as those battlefields. I just wanted to remind people that the damage adds up over time and gave the most extreme example I knew of. I've been at Ground Zero in Nagasaki, and it's safer there than in the Zone Rouge because the radiation level has dropped so much over the years.
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Are you saying you had trouble with your...Type...ing?
*puts on glasses
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
The water that comes out of a water treatment plant where they already deal with lead contamination.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?