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."

Re:Shipping

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, they hire a private pilot? Like it says in the article?

Re:IED?

[sarahemm]

Improvised Explosive Device :)

Society: Bound by email chains

[.c]

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 [schneier.com] mentioned it (and the suppressed Cockeyed piece [cockeyed.com]) around this time last year.

Re:IED?

[arniebuteft]

Improvised Explosive Device.

Military also uses VBIED a lot - that's Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Device.

Old news!

[Anonymous Coward]

This was mildly interesting when it was reported about the SAS [thesun.co.uk] ages ago.

Re:This was on The Daily Show 2 days ago

[Anonymous Coward]

To sniff out explosives. Yes, I'm serious.

silly string

[JRturd]

silly string is not only hours upon hours of annoying fun, but also highly flamable...looks like we've just discovered world's greatest weapon, now availabe at the local toys 'r us....i think i've just cut the US military budget by $50 trillion www.popculturepundit.com

Re:This was on The Daily Show 2 days ago

[Qzukk]

Nobody gets attached to the bees, so there's no hard feelings should the bomb blow them up.

Seriously, though http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/11/28/bombsni ffing.bees.reut/index.html [cnn.com]

Re:Government should pay

[rwhamann]

I'm sick of hearing stuff like this - we're not all out there wasting money. As an Air Force member I take the cost of items I request and approve very seriously.

Some of the ideas not so new

[james_orr]

Also, soldiers put condoms and rubber bands around their rifle muzzles to keep out sand.

That particular trick dates back to world war 2.

Re:What do you expect?

[chill]

Zipper(tm) was a trademarked brand for the longest time.

Re:Shipping

[galego]

Simple ... volunteer pilot with plane. From the article I read (on Yahoo!) ...

Marcelle Shriver said that since the string comes in an aerosol can, it is considered a hazardous material, meaning the Postal Service will not ship it by air. But a private pilot who heard about her campaign has agreed to fly the cans to Kuwait _ most likely in January _ where they will then be taken to Iraq.

Home remedies for attrition

[Micklewhite]

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.

inspired by old news

[bukys]

A year ago (November 2005) there was a flurry of military silly string articles (LifeHacker, Schneier, others) all leading back to a cockeyed.com article [cockeyed.com], which quoted a soldier saying they used it for locating tripwires. The site didn't leave the content up for long, but it's preserved at the Internet Archive [archive.org].

Re:Government should pay

[PPGMD]

Why does this always come up when military spending is mentioned. The $10,000 Toilet seat is one of three examples on a submarine designed to prevent seawater from coming up the toilet, they are really expensive because of all the R&D invovled and how few are made. The $1,000 wrench is a wrench made of a non-sparking metal for use around high explosives in the USAF.

Most of the item prices that people go off about are limited production items, and often the costs figure in R&D to bring it upto military specs, and the lowered productivity of the production line because of military auditors and paperwork. GE for example charges 25% more for the same engine if it's going to the military because the auditors slow the line down, and they have to store all the additional paperwork for years longer then would be required for it's civil product. Lockheed Martin for example is still charging the DOD for warehouse full of paperwork just for the F-16.

Re:IED?

[prof pylons]

The police use jargon all the time. If you hear on the radio there's a 10-52, that's no problem. It's efficient communication ...

Apparently [bbc.co.uk] not for much longer...!

Re:This was on The Daily Show 2 days ago

[Vellmont]

I'll bite, how the hell do they use bees?

The bees are trained to sniff out explosives instead of nectar. The article [cnn.com] makes it sound like a similar process to training dogs.

Re:Government should pay

[Squalish]

The soldiers have been using the glow in the dark commercial version at least since house-to-house searches became a 'patrol' just after the invasion. While it may have originated with the special forces, it's been in WIDESPREAD use this entire war, according to enlisted friends' comments years ago. It's a frequent request for care packages - glow in the dark is preferred, but neon still shows up in any light.

Re:New in the war on terror

[cayenne8]

"He led them astray believing that they were protecting american by getting rid of "WMD's" when the real reason they were sent to Iraq is to secure US oil interests in the middle east."

While I debate the reasoning you put forth here (pretty much the whole world's intelligence thought that he had WMD's hidden or was making them)....securing oil interests is NOT the worst thing in the world.

I was listening to a recent George Carlin rant....about being scared at what would happen if the electricity suddenly went out. Never mind the darkness...just what about all the prisons opening up...and all those guys coming out looking for 'entertainment'....etc. I can't find a good link to it now, but, it was recently broadcast on HBO. It sure gave me a nightmare scenario as to what would happen if our energy in the US were to be cut off. Talk about a societal meltdown....

Sure...I know it sounds bad about fighting wars for oil, etc....but, if they didn't and the oil gets cut off, think real hard about what state your life would go to then.

Food for thought....

Re:Government should pay

[djh101010]

By the way: the fact that she chose that particular metaphor indicates the depth to which television has taken over her mind.

How else do you propose she gets updates about what's going on over there?

Re:New in the war on terror

[Mr. Slippery]

Notice how that implies that they were, yet, WMD's? Not the ones we were looking for, but WMD's none-the-less.

A WMD must be, by defintion, capable of mass destruction. The chemical agents Iraq produced had a limited "shelf life" - about 5 years [wikipedia.org]. Anything left over from before 1991 was past its sell-by date by 1996.

The Iraq Survey Group [globalsecurity.org] concluded: "While a small number of old, abandoned chemical munitions have been discovered, ISG judges that Iraq unilaterally destroyed its undeclared chemical weapons stockpile in 1991. There are no credible indications that Baghdad resumed production of chemical munitions thereafter, a policy ISG attributes to Baghdad's desire to see sanctions lifted, or rendered ineffectual, or its fear of force against it should WMD be discovered."

What Iraq had, had the same relation to WMD as the gooey melted mess in the back of my fridge has to a head of lettuce.

We haven't failed in Iraq. Our current offensive is failing but we have not yet failed. But the way things are going, with the majority of Americans complaining about the war instead of supporting it, we aren't far from failure.

BS. The invasion is a failure. We have not achieved any of the (constantly changing) goals cited by the administration. We did not stop or harm Al Qaeda by invading Iraq, in fact we've helped them, giving them great recruiting motivation. We didn't eliminate a threat posed by Saddam Hussein to other nations, because there wasn't one.

As for the idea of creating a stable democracy in Iraq via an invasion, that was doomed from the start. Like trying to scuplt a bust of Pallas with machine-gun fire, it's simply the wrong technique for the job. And redoubling your efforts only makes more of a mess, and makes it unlikely that there's enough left to work with if you did stop and try to do it right.

That the majority of Americans are finally realizing that they've been had is not the reason these goals can't be achived; the reason that the majority of Americans are realizing that they've been had is because these goals can't be achived.

The capacity with which wars may be waged across continents and oceans adds the danger that enemies, keen on our apparent weakness, will be able to swiftly and effectively attack us.

The only nations capable of waging effective war against the U.S. are the nuclear powers. (Neither Al Qaeda, not the insurgents in Iraq, are a "nation", and our conflict with them is not a "war", not a conflict between states or putative states.)

Terrorist groups can hurt us, sure, especially with the possibility of one of them getting a WMD, but no military victory is going to change the motivation of a terroist group.

In September of 2001, everyone knew that we had the world's most powerful military. It didn't help.

And we have an enemy that has no desire but to kill us all. Not to defend or to dominate, but destroy. They are encouraged and their ranks surge with every victory.

Their ranks surge with every innocent killed by Americans. Hell, their ranks surge with every insurgent killed by Americans, since in the eyes of many the insurgents are valiently and rightously defending their home against brutal invaders.

You can't put out a fire by pouring gasoline on it; and when gasoline fails as a fire extinguisher, it is not smart to say, "Oh, we obviously didn't use enough! Pour on more, that's sure to do the trick!"