Toy Weapons

When is a toy not a toy? How about when you turn a radio controlled toy car into a device to detect and destroy roadside bombs? The Washington Post has an article that covers all kinds of efforts underway by all sorts of different companies to meet the need for ways to detect and disable Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). And yes, the proposed solutions include beefed up toys.

Robert Pervere's fight against insurgents in Iraq started with an Emaxx monster truck from Debbie's RC World Inc. in Chesapeake, Va., a $335 toy that he turned into a weapon for U.S. troops against roadside bombs. The 24-year-old engineer replaced about 80 percent of the toy's plastic parts with aluminum, fastened two small surveillance cameras to the top and made room for an explosive that could blow up suspicious objects from hundreds of feet away.

"I get paid to play with [radio control] cars," said Pervere, who helped build the prototype for Applied Marine Technology Inc., a Virginia-based defense contractor that has said it expects to begin receiving military orders in September. "This has been a very rewarding project, working on a tool that's going to be out the door saving lives shortly."

American ingenuity. There is nothing else quite like it in the world, I think. The companies involved in the efforts to help solve the problem range from tiny little companies to monster defense contractors. The solutions range from ultra high tech to almost primitive. But the idea is not to get a single "silver bullet" solution but  rather a range of tools troops can use.

Now, a Pentagon agency with a $3.3 billion budget and a staff of 300 has a mandate to focus the defense industry on the problem. The undertaking has attracted not only the country's top weapons makers but also dozens of small businesses like AMTI, all pitching a science-fiction gallery of possible solutions.

Lockheed Martin Corp. has established a corporate team with $22 million in internal funding, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post, that is looking for "best of breed" technology, including ways to study attack patterns. International Business Machines Corp. has a system it says will create a digital image of often-traveled roads and alert soldiers to changes that could indicate bombs hidden in trash, rocks or animal carcasses.

General Dynamics Corp. is pitching a laser-based system adapted from Israeli technology that it says could burn away trash often used to conceal bombs and disable the devices. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is studying whether there is a way to sniff out bombs with electronic polymers that mimic a dog's ability to smell. Octatron Inc. of St. Petersburg, Fla., is touting a low-tech approach: — a 14-foot, 5-pound high-strength pole that the company says soldiers can use to place explosives next to suspected bombs from a distance.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has a toy car of its own. After hearing complaints from soldiers that robots operated by wireless controllers were unreliable and subject to radio interference, Livermore came up with one attached to a 1,000-foot tether.

"This may not be super-high science, but it seems to be useful," Milton Finger, a senior scientist at Livermore, said of the lab's $200,000 research project. "It sounds trite that we're using toys, but it's more than that."

The defense industry's response to the roadside bomb problem mirrors in some ways the response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, with many companies, such as Lockheed and Northrop Grumman Corp., establishing internal units to go after the market.

So far the threat from the bombs is outrunning the technical creativity of U.S. industry, and the Pentagon now views the bombs as a long-term problem. The search, Pentagon officials say, is not so much for a silver-bullet solution as for a wider set of tools that troops can use.

Read the whole thing, it's quite interesting.