popular logistics

[singlepic=167,320,240,,left] Sharon Weinberger reports at Danger Room that DARPA is attempting to synthesize or simulate the canine nose. We understand that it certain circumstances call for miniaturization - concealment, portability and risk limitation all make dog-and-handler teams, plus their needed transportation and support, relatively unwieldy. We’re reminded of General Patton’s admonition that “A good solution applied with vigor now is better than a perfect solution applied ten minutes later.” We can have new human/canine teams ready to go in a matter of months, depending on the particular specialty (debris search, explosives search, general guard work). In addition to time spent raising and selecting canine candidates.

In the long run - a successful simulation of canine olfactory capability - would do very well at airports, and other security bottlenecks. But let’s not plan around having this capability any time soon. Let’s plan around technologies in hand. As someone who has to cop to liking Star Trek quite a lot, I still had problems every time the Enterprise (or Voyager, etc.) crew made a big scientific or engineering breakthrough on the fly - in hours or minutes, without experimentation, getting it right the first time. Technology takes false turns, rethinking, and redesign.

Link to the excellent Sharon Weinberger’s piece on DARPA and dog noses at Danger Room. (and thanks to Sharon for giving us an excuse to post the cute dog photo).

Got a question about this the other day; here’s what I know - we’ll add some more information later:

1. An exploding manhole cover is  a predictor of nearby manhole cover explosions. But not necessarily adjacent holes. So if there’s a problem with one - great caution about all area manholes is indicated. 

2. They’re very heavy - and they’ve been measured going as high as 400 feet vertical. After that, they descend (32fps squared, less  drag). Do the math.

Here’s one resource

“How Exploding Manholes Work,”  by Kevin Bonsor, on HowStuffWorks.com

Paul Rega at Project Disaster has posted a primer on IEDs - anyone and everyone involved in emergency response - especially those who are not in law enforcement or the military - if you know nothing about explosives, know this much:

Improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, are booby traps–disguised or hidden devices–activated by victims or detonated remotely or on command. IEDs have been used since World War II and more recently in Chechnya, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

IEDs are intended to incapacitate or kill and to create intimidation and terror. They are used in unconventional warfare and by definition can be made with almost any type of material and initiator. These “homemade” devices employ pyrotechnic or incendiary chemicals and can be made in combination with toxic chemicals, biological toxins, or radiological material. Although IEDs can be found in varying sizes, functioning methods, containers, and delivery methods, they share a common set of components: some type of explosive fill, an initiation mechanism, a detonator, a power supply for the detonator, and a container. Although the press sometimes refers to them as roadside bombs, IEDs can be in packages, carried in vehicles (“car bombs”), or worn by suicide bombers.

Two or more IEDs may be detonated by coupling, linking one mine or explosive to another so that when one is detonated, the other goes off; rolling, setting off an unfuzed explosive after a mine-clearing roller has passed over it, by means of a second, fuzed device, which detonates the first one when it is underneath the clearing vehicle; boosting, stacking buried mines atop one another, with the deepest device being fuzed, helping reduce metal detection and increasing the force of the blast; sensitizing antitank mines, removing the pressure plate or spring to reduce the pressure required to set them off; and daisy chaining, linking mines to other explosives with trip wire or detonating cord.

IED configuration affects the velocity of explosion and the type of damage: low explosives must burn in a confined space so that the gas formed causes an explosion; high explosives generally must be detonated by a shock wave of considerable force, usually from a detonator or blasting cap.

To detect a victim-activated IED requires recognition of the initiating object as a booby trap. The enemy wants the unwary or distracted person to interfere with the object to set it off by touching or picking it up. IEDs have been found in tires, garbage bags, fire extinguishers, barrels, and dead animals.

Threat indicators include the theft of explosives or of chemicals used in making explosives; the rental of self-storage space to store explosive apparatus; deliveries of chemicals to residences; the purchase, rental, or theft of a large van or truck; or the addition of heavy-duty springs to a large vehicle to handle heavier loads.

Noah Schactman on the cycles of innovation and counter-innovation between insurgent-placed IEDs and coalition forces, in Danger Room:

Radio-controlled bombs used to be the biggest killer of American troops in Iraq. Now, they’ve been rendered all-but-useless. Good news, right? Like so much else in Iraq, it’s not quite that simple.

Since the Iraq insurgency began, mobile phones, garage-door openers, and remotely-driven kids’ toys have all been used to trigger improvised explosive devices from afar. In response, the U.S. military has cobbled together an arsenal of radio-frequency jammers, to interrupt the deadly signals before they can set off the bombs. At first, the jammers had all kinds of troubles. Each type of jammer would only cover a relatively small slice of the spectrum. And they’d drive friendly radio and robots haywire.

But those problems have largely been fixed, troops across Iraq report.  The newer jammers have effectively killed off radio-controlled IEDs in major chunks of the country.

The explosive cat-and-mouse game continues, though. The American have built up high-tech bomb-stoppers. So the insurgents have gone ever lower-tech than before. They’ve largely turned towards so-called “command wire” IEDs to attack U.S. targets.

Pairs of insulated copper threads, some not much thicker than a hair, are buried under the Iraqi dust, and strung out for as long as a kilometer. At the end, an insurgent triggerman waits – sometimes in a buried bunker. It’s a more crude approach to killing, of course.  But, barring a lucky find of wires, “there’s no way for us to defeat it,” says one bomb technician.  And those wires are getting attached to bigger and bigger bombs.

[picture above, of a  cement-mixer-turned-shaped-charge. From Danger Room]

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Do away with one problem, and you now have to cope with the blowback from your success.
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Anyway, command-wire bombs aren’t the only IED threat over here. “Pressure plate” weapons, triggered by the smallest stress, are also in vogue here. Some are even shoved into brown ration packets, and left by the side of the road. Insurgents continue to use passive infrared sensors — like those used in burglar alarms – to sense changes in heat, and trigger a bomb accordingly. Many Humvees here are equipped with a flash-type device that can prematurely set the trigger off. But there will surely be a counter to our countermeasure.

Schachtman is on the money. The relative positions of the two forces don’t appear to make it likely that either side will have a distinct advantage with any longevity.

There is one way to deal with a problem of this sort: it’s to make a majority of the local population identify with soldiers, make them believe that the soldiers are acting out of a desire to protect them. That delicate opportunity slipped out of our hand in 2003, and it’s been moving away from us since.

GoodMagazine reports that that Denmark-based ARESA has conducted successful field tests with its genetically modified Thale Cress, for use in land mine detection.

Thale Cress, also known as Arabidopsis thaliana, commonly called arabidopsis, or mouse-ear cress, has a short life cycle - six weeks from germination to mature seed.The ARESA modified Thale Cress is very sensitive to nitrogen, which is a component of the explosives in land mines, and emitted in tiny amounts.

Photo (Aresa) by Henrik Freek; via GoodMagazine.

The Thale Cress

has been genetically modified to provide a natural warning in the presence of land mines. Thales cress is inherently sensitive to nitrogen dioxide, a chemical byproduct of land mines. The Copenhagen-based biotech company Aresa tweaked the weed’s genes so that its leaves would turn from their natural green to bright red in the presence of latent explosives. Field tests have thus far been successful, meaning traditional methods of human and canine mine detection may soon have a less dangerous alternative.

From Ben Jervey’s post in Good Magazine .While there are good reasons to have reservations about the genetic modification of plants, until and unless the powers that have been responsible for placing land mines start removing them, this seems an excellent technology.

Ben Jervey is also the editor of GreenAppleGuide.