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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.
they FEED people.
Some people in this world really do need shooting though
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.
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.
Now, now, he's just acting out because he's afraid these bullets will help the cops find the bodies.
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.
Unless the plant is native to the area, keep it out. Last thing we need is another kudzu or similar plant spreading like wildfire.
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.
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.
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Of course, getting enemy combatants to hang around the impact area of US military training ranges might present something of a challenge . . .
No, these are bio-engineered plants. We're gonna spread American know-how (and RoundUp resistant genes) anywhere that they don't love freedom.
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
Concrete.
Ceramics.
Glass.
Walnut shell.
Wood.
King Arthur: A duck!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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 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'
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).
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
No danger in practicing with something different than in production?