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Should the US Air Force Bomb Forest Fires? (popularmechanics.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Mechanics: Earlier this summer, the Swedish Air Force dropped a laser-guided bomb on a forest fire to help suppress the flames. Now there's a proposal for the United States to do the same, using the might of the U.S. Air Force to fight America's raging forest fires via bombs and sonic booms. F-15 Strike Eagle Weapon System Officer Mike Benitez, writing in War on the Rocks, proposes using B-1 bombers stuffed to the gills with bombs to battle wildfires on the American homefront. The idea here is to snuff out fires the way you'd blow out birthday candles at the base. In Sweden, the shockwave from a single bomb snuffed out flames within a 100-yard radius of the impact point. So, Benitez reasons, why not load up a heavy strategic bomber with up to 84 bombs and do some serious firefighting?
Benitez chose the B-1 for his hypothetical scenario not only because of its bomb-carrying capability, but for the same reason the heavy bomber became a close air support platform of choice in Afghanistan: its long range translated into persistence over the battlefield, enabling the big bomber to hang around above friendly forces and bomb the Taliban for hours. The B-1 could do donuts in the skies over a wildfire as firefighters on the ground work out the best way to tackle it. The B-1 wouldn't carry just any bomb, either, but ordinance that was designed for firefighting. Most bombs use a steel casing that fragments into deadly shrapnel, but this would be unnecessary (and dangerous) when fighting fires. A firefighting bomb would use a combustible casing that would disintegrate on impact. Ideally the bomb would use a thermobaric warhead, one that kills via overpressure, as it generates even more powerful blast waves than traditional high-explosive bombs.
Benitez chose the B-1 for his hypothetical scenario not only because of its bomb-carrying capability, but for the same reason the heavy bomber became a close air support platform of choice in Afghanistan: its long range translated into persistence over the battlefield, enabling the big bomber to hang around above friendly forces and bomb the Taliban for hours. The B-1 could do donuts in the skies over a wildfire as firefighters on the ground work out the best way to tackle it. The B-1 wouldn't carry just any bomb, either, but ordinance that was designed for firefighting. Most bombs use a steel casing that fragments into deadly shrapnel, but this would be unnecessary (and dangerous) when fighting fires. A firefighting bomb would use a combustible casing that would disintegrate on impact. Ideally the bomb would use a thermobaric warhead, one that kills via overpressure, as it generates even more powerful blast waves than traditional high-explosive bombs.
Kill everything, kill everything, bomb the living bejesus out of those forests.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Posse Comitatus Act (1878) bans military action (by the army, navy, air force, or marines) within the United States without prior congressional approval. The coast guard and national guard are not covered, though, so that's a back door (and why the coast guard is often involved in no knock raids, etc, that are no where near water).
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This is how they turned out some of the oil fires in Kuwait after Gulf War One. They packed barrels full of C4 and suffocated the fires out by displacing the oil as fuel with explosives to choke off the fire.
Forest fires have much more spread, so you would need something like a MOAB (Massive Ordinance Air Blast) or several of them strategically aimed and timed to detonate at the same time around the fire to quench it.
I thought a better solution would be to basically bulldoze the hills that are on fire with mountain-mover equipment. The large bucket in front of a huge tracked vehicle would smash the combustibles under the ground and stop the fire.
Ideally the bomb would use a thermobaric warhead, one that kills via overpressure, as it generates even more powerful blast waves than traditional high-explosive bombs.
A lot of these fires are near habitation. You can't just go dropping bombs anywhere. The Swedes were able to bomb their fire because it was on a bombing range.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Why not? California does give the US Federal Government more in taxes than any other state, by a lot!
Oversimplifying and collectivizing people is what made the annoying orange be the president in first place, and what makes the far left be so fucking lunatic (as is the thing that makes the far right be fucking lunatic as well).
So better start to treat people individually or get plowed by the "exception".
You have to remember that 1% of the US population is still 3.4 million people, and many simplifications made by both sides assume that groups of like 10% don't actually exist.
Also 30 meters is great but it is basically pissing in the wind for fires this size. The fire front from the Mendocino complex is over 45 km. The Carr fire, that I was evacuated for is currently about 24 km. (And this is after its ~50% contained)
Those are huge walls of fire. We’d need an order of magnitude more than is suggested to really make a strategic difference.
Look at the MODIS 1km FRP footprints back from a few days ago and see how many Megawatts per Sq KM these things were emitting. It was insane.
Wikipedia is illegitimate. "History" isn't required, but even there you are wrong. These fires have a probability of occurring in a given area (based on observed past, i.e. history), and that probability has been elevated due to climate change and that change has been verified by observed increased frequency in wildfires in disparates areas with the same climate. You know, statistical analysis? Time series analysis? Do you know what these words mean?
You mean the 500+ wildfires across the entire western US region were started by a single arsonist, or was it a vast "arsonist conspiracy"? Were those same arsonists able to secure air travel on a supersonic jet to travel from California to Portugal several times per day during the 46 C extremes?
Yes, preventing fires is how we got into this mess in the first place. But if we just let the fires burn, then enough will burn at once to cause climate effects. Not so much because of the carbon release (although that is an issue) but because of the loss of forests. So now we're committed to fighting these intense fires, to slow down the rate of loss.
If we're going to use ordnance in relation to forest fires, we should invent tree-planting bombs and/or missiles. Maybe we could create some kind of tree-planting javelin made out of bamboo (for renewability and biodegradability) that could be dropped in immense numbers from these bombers. When it impacts and penetrates, a weighted ring made of stones and glued together with food for the tree slides down the shaft, permitting the tree to push it open at the top. At the bottom, the bamboo helps protect it from wild pigs, which have become problematic across most of the continental US, and Hawaii. The stones condense water at night. The tree food dissolves before the trunk of the tree grows appreciably.
Last time I looked into it, though, even that is worthless. Replanting does little to hasten regrowth, as absurd as that sounds, because nature has already evolved mechanisms for handling that part of the process. What does help is preventing the soil from washing away in the mean time. So maybe we cluster-bomb the land... with soil-retaining nets.
Or maybe the whole idea of fighting fires with weapons is dumb... but the idea of bombing them is definitely dumb.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I was under the impression that forest fires are natural in a healthy forest, and in fact some trees need forest fires to germinate properly (the cones are heavy with resin, the heat of the fire causes the cone to fully mature and then go to seed after the fire has passed.)
Also, by preventing fires the deadwood that would normally be burned accumulates, to the point where when a fire inevitably starts you get a torrentially large fire instead of the typical small fire (of a healthy forest).
And so one way to prevent large forest fires is to frequently start smaller fires, to clear out the accumulating deadwood.
I'm not a forestry expert, so I'm asking the question: has that explanation (and rationale) been disproven?
If it hasn't, is there some reason why smaller "management" fires aren't periodically set?
Is this a California thing?
How about bulldozer drones?
They could get up close and friendly with flames.
Have you seen the movie killdozer?
I think people don't quite understand the magnitude of some of these fires. A few years ago I was on the ride out team for a charitable organization that operates a camp in the wilderness. On the day of our fire evacuation, the fire for into an old burn and proceeded to consume some 5000 acres in under 2 hours. The fire sent a plume some 50,000 feet into the air. We were about 6 miles away and the best way I have to describe this is watching a nuclear bomb going off in slow motion. It was the most awe inspiring spectacle I have ever seen.
Anyhow, the only thing that the Airforce could really help with in these situations would be for the Air Mobility Command to turn some of their transport fleet into VLATs (Very Large Air Tankers) to help protect structures and people, and guide the fire. Directly attacking it is futile.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
The fire would go out but only for a while. It might work if there were firefighters ready to place water on what remains after a bomb is dropped. But with all the built up heat and partially burned wood, a normal forest fire would just re-ignite after a short period of time. After it re-ignites, it would quickly grow to be the same size it was before the bomb.
This sounds too dangerous and not nearly effective enough to warrant doing. The one possible exception is is there was critical infrastructure about to be burned that had to be saved. Some bombs with a lot of firefighters could be a good combination. But realistically, the firefighters could also do it without the bombs.
Fires are natural part of the ecological cycle. Developed countries putting them out early for nearly 100 years is what's causing more fires to occur - the buildup of vegetation (dead and live) means more fuel for new fires. The ecosystem needs fires every now and then to clear out dead brush (release the elements and chemical compounds they contain back into the ecosystem), and clear room for new plant growth (which supports different species than old growth). If you're not gonna let loggers thin out those trees, then you gotta let fires thin them every now and then.
Forest fires happened for hundreds of millions of years before man arrived on the scene, and they never burned the entire Earth to a cinder. Leave them alone to do their thing. If they're threatening buildings, that's a sign that you need to build a bigger firebreak around those buildings. Not a reason to put the fire out.
If you've ever been to a military base, you might have noticed that everybody isn't just sitting on their ass all day. They are doing things. Which shows you that they are allowed to do things, inside the United States.
The Posse Comitatus Act says the Army and Air Force can't be used for domestic *law enforcement*, except as authorized by the Insurrection Act and certain other situations, including enforcing federal law (see Little Rock 1956).
Firefighting isn't law enforcement, so no Posse Comitatus issue here.
Originally it applied only to the Army. Later, the Air Force was added. There is no law applying it to the Navy or Marines, only policies put in place by those services.
Fires are an incredibly important part of the ecosystem. Areas that have forest fires have greater biological diversity, healthier plants, and yes, some seeds even require the heat of a fire in order to germinate. This obsession with stopping all fires at all costs is hurting the environment.
Doesn't work if the material is too hot. Once the oxygen comes back, if the fuel source is still hot enough it just bursts back into flames. It's not like an oil/gas rig when the material is coming out in an unignited stream, and then hitting the burning part to ignite. In those cases the explosion breaks the stream and when it succeeds there's nothing left hot enough to reignite it. Part of the reason why have to remove some of the parts before they attempt it or the hot metal will just start the fire back up.
Now trees don't move into the fire, rather the fire moves to them. Those glowing hot pieces of wood/charcoal are still glowing hot even after the explosion, so they are both a source of fuel and heat, all it needs is oxygen.
There might be situations where it can potentially help, but a widespread fire has the nasty habit of just going back and reigniting fuel if conditions allow. (Uphill, downwind, etc.) So you are going to want to get a damn near perfect spread so there's not spots left that can reignite the whole mess again. Of course carpet bombing can provide quantity, but accuracy isn't part of that equation, for that you need smart bombs, either Laser or TV guided.
Now here's the other part of this mess. Using real munitions is VERY expensive. If you add smart bombs to the mix, you've multiplied the price by many times! Sure the warhead is expensive, but the guidance unit is so much more expensive! As in you can buy a new Tesla for the price of one of those guidance units.
Then there's all that talk about a combustible case for the warhead. Hey, great idea! Except there aren't any, and that would be an expensive thing to build. Did you know that STEEL case of a warhead serves the purpose of confining the explosive so it can build up a higher pressure so it's a high order explosion instead of a low order explosion? So unless you want to increase the number of bombs you have to use since you've very dramatically decreased the power of your explosive, that combustible casing has to be able to withstand the same kind of forces the steel one does. If you didn't know, that's not sheet metal those things are made out of. A blacksmith could cut sword blanks out of those things if they had some empties to play with. Not an oversized and insane anime or video game sword, just a regular historical sized one. (I'm not sure if the weight of an empty warhead casing is public info or not, so I'm not going to bring up specifics like that)
So again, some situations may be able to use explosives, but most of the time it's a champagne in solid gold goblets kind of price tag to go with it.
The special non-steel cases don't exist and somebody would have to develop them. There's a ton of issues with that idea.
I see Saloomy brought up bulldozing. Yes, they do a lot of that to try and make firebreaks, but you again can't build those everywhere. It takes time, there are only so much equipment even available, and they have time limits to make it, and that's assuming the fire doesn't shift direction. Even then, there's always the problem that fires can and do jump firebreaks at times. Those burning bits get carried on the wind and can ignite a multitude of other fires on the otherside of the break. When some idiots from the OSI ignored multiple rules and did something really stupid, they burned down a lot of the forest that was on base. That area was used for wargames and training. The road between the bomb dump and the burning woods was acting like a firebreak, and for about an hour before they pulled us out my crew was driving around in our truck with all the fire extinguishers we could get our hands on chasing down the burning embers floating across on the light breeze.
With a big fire, there's always a breeze, they are big enough affect the weather and create their own thermal updraft column.
Anyway, not dissing the posters here, just spreading some knowledge.
It's more complex then that. Originally the impetus to fight fires aggressively (starting post second world war) was to appease the lumber barons. This led to 50 years of fuel building up in the forests. Combine this extra fuel with climate change, and we're long part where "Let it burn" is a viable option in many cases. The fires now are far more intense and damaging both in terms of economic damage and environmental damage then they would have been historically.
The only real solution, at least in the Pacific Northwest, is an aggressive program of late season prescribed burns to consume the fuel at a lower intensity, which better reflects historic fire patterns.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
How long before the first ent wedding gets accidently bombed?
You really can't talk meaningfully about trends by examining individual events in isolation.
Climate change is neither necessary nor sufficient for the kinds of fires we are seeing. However, in places prone to wildfires, wildfire is a seasonal phenomenon, and the lengths of fire seasons over the last forty years has increased by 19%, and the area burned in fire seasons has more than doubled. Wildfires are only possible when three factors are present: fuel, ignition sources, and dry weather. While the acreage and number of fires *might conceivably* be due to increased fuel or ignition sources, the lengthened fire season is pretty obviously correlated to prolonged dry seasons.
It's probably meaningless to ask whether anthropogenic climate change "caused" any particular fire or set of local fires, because such fires could happen in a steady state world, or a cooling world. The more narrowly you look in space and time the less meaningful the question is. But the overall global, multi-decade trend to more area burned and longer fire seasons is a different kettle of fish.
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No.... ignorance, stupidity, tribal mentality, and worthless fucking liars...made the orange asshat president.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
I would expect this to actually work less effectively the larger the bomb is. The reason is that the force of the bomb is distributed through a spherical volume proportional to its yield, but the fire is spread over a two-dimensional surface. So area of a given level of destruction goes up as the 2/3 power of yield.
This is why gigantic bombs are largely impractical. In most cases they're less effective than a equivalent weight of smaller bombs. MOAB weighs as much as 43 Mark 82 500 pound bombs; it has as much H6 as 97 Mark 82s, but destroys an area equivalent to 21 Mark 82s.
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This doesn't work by depriving the fire of oxygen. It works exactly like blowing out a candle. When you blow out a candle you're actually providing it with *more* oxygen, but the fire goes out because you're physically moving the flame away from its fuel. .
The interesting thing about a flame is that the actual combustion happens outside the wood. The heat radiates back to the wood and causes combustible compounds on the surface to volatilize. This is how the flame sustains itself: it's a chain reaction. Physically move the zone combustion away from the fuel and the process stops.
So what will happen is that within a certain radius the fire will go out, but the hot wood will continue to smolder and may well rekindle if there's any wind. You couldn't just drop a bunch of bombs and hope for the best, you'd have to be prepared to go in to fight smaller fires. If some of the bombs are duds this could be even more exciting than normal.
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The person calling someone an idiot is a shameless outright liar with a political agenda, big surprise. (No, California doesn't have a shortage of firefighting water like you read on twitter either.)
I see the controlled burn notices and the plumes of smoke every spring, and they've been increasing in frequency in recent years as the fire danger has grown. Here's a source from 9 months ago noting that California's controlled burns have doubled in the past 3 years and is now 31 square miles of controlled burns a year: https://weather.com/en-CA/cana...
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It's fairly easy to protect major cities from forest fires with such tactics, and for the most part we're successful at that -- with the occasional spectacular failure like Fort McMurray. It's nowhere near as easy to protect thousands of little mountainous villages of 10 houses each... and they add up to a whole lot of people, people who will not move to a city voluntarily.
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Let's research how to make better fire-fighting foam. The foam would be cheap, easy to apply (ex: wouldn't get clogged up in hoses), and wouldn't mess up the environment.
And there should be two options of how to package the foam:
1) The standard, self-contained way to package it, which I guess uses an aerosol spray to shoot the foam out of the container. This way is simple, but when you transport the foam to the fire, you have to carry the water that's in the foam.
2) A dry foam powder, which mixes with water fast and easily. So you would carry the dry powder to the fire, and combine the powder with a local water supply, such as a river or a water pipe. Then you'd shoot the water/powder combination at the flammable bushes or whatever, and it would expand into foam when it hit the open air. Something like that. This way is more complicated, but you don't have to transport the water.
Concussion bombs could be a fast way of containing a wildfire, but are any currently available military bombs suitable for this application? The MOAB is an effective large airburst weapon, but they cost $16 million each and the USAF has a total of about twenty in inventory. We may be better off developing a special low-cost airburst device specifically for the job. These could be stored on military bases near fire-prone areas.
Yes, the military high explosives do leave residues at a very low level. Tests of this (where they explode munitions in piles of snow) show that "on average, 99.997% or more of the RDX and TNT was consumed" (used Sci-Hub to read). So a few grams of a mildly toxic material that breaks down fairly quickly in low concentrations. UXOs would simply be disarmed and removed since these are precision bombing operations though know exactly where they are.
The fire retardant that is used in fire bombing is Phos-Chek. Which consists of "include ammonium polyphosphate, diammonium phosphate, diammonium sulfate, monoammonium phosphate, attapulgus clay, guar gum (or a derivative of guar gum), and trade secret performance additives". The Phos-Chek is dyed red in part with iron oxide. the ammonium phosphate fertilizers are used in ABC fire extinguishers as well.
And in this report we read: "Fire suppression chemicals have minor toxicological or ecological effects and, as a result, do not generally harm terrestrial ecosystems. Major impacts, suppression chemicals have on the environment, may be through the adverse effects on water quality, and subsequently to aquatic ecosystems. Retardants may encourage eutrophication and, in some cases, contribute to fish kill when applied on watersheds, or if accidentally applied directly to water bodies."
About what you'd expect from spreading fertilizer.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
"Why not bury the houses while you're at it, the wildfires would pass right over them."
That may be a viable solution in some cases. But people like windows.
"Houses tend not to be built on extreme grades, "
It doesn't take much of one to make those solutions unworkable. It doesn't take much of a hill to give fire a boost. Fire likes to go up hills. People like to live on hills to get views.
"Why risk lives and worry about number of firefighters when extinguishing aircraft can be drones?"
It takes large aircraft to fight fires, and we are hesitant to put those under computer control and then send them over populated areas. It takes action on the ground to fight fires with any kind of precision. If you were to rely solely on bombs then only when fires were already large could you hope to extinguish them without doing as much damage as the fire.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Not really. The natives used to set fires every year in northern California. This worked great. There were redwoods from point sur to Canada, and healthy oak forests inland of that. They moved around, so this worked for them. Then white people showed up and started building homes and towns in the middle of these forests, and passed laws preventing setting those fires, and that's how we got where we are today.
Where is that? Well, because of those habitations we cannot tolerate uncontrolled burns, so we use controlled burns. Problem is, we don't have enough personnel to have enough of those to actually control the problem. We also don't have enough budget to have more personnel and equipment, and even if we did, there's a limit to how fast we could train people.
One solution might be to just stop protecting homes, in favor of uncontrolled burns. Any homes which are in danger of burning would be constructed to burn without consequence for any who do not live there, and make getting out with one's valuables the exclusive responsibility of the residents. Until we have the technology to manage undergrowth without fire, we need to live in expectation of its occurrence. Maybe robotics will eventually produce cost-effective clearer/chipper machines which can do the job, although that sounds like a horror movie waiting to happen.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Detonation vs deflagration. Meerling is simply wrong. A strong case hasn't been required since deflagrating black powder was replaced by real detonating explosives. For nitroglycerin, TNT, PETN, HMX, RDX and so on - a baggie will do. Yes, I've worked with high explosives. Numerous examples exist of a simple block of C4 or other explosive being used with just a blasting cap. Plenty of brisance to involve the whole mess before it breaks up when you use HE with detonation rates of a few km/second.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
I bet somebody from the US Forest service is calling somebody at NOAA asking "So...how did you guys finally deal with people asking you to take care of hurricanes with Nuclear weapons?"
Firefighters with TBI. Do not want.
Seriously, ground crews work too close to water drop zones for this to be safe with explosives. The procedures needed to clear the area and verify that personnel were at a safe distance would take too long. People can't move quickly through dense forests. So this would really only be useful for inaccessible terrain.
Have gnu, will travel.
Yes, but that does nothing with respect to fire season *length*, which is what makes that an interesting metric.
Anyhow you get both under AGW models: more intense rainy seasons and longer dry seasons.
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