An Adaptive Military

Fire of Liberty

The Christian Science Monitor has a great article by Scott Baldauf demonstrating the main reason why we have an all-volunteer military. If you follow the reasoning that as long as folks continue to enter the armed services on their own accord, they're generally more happy at what they do and are more than willing to use their skills to do some awesome things. While putting their lives on the line for this nation is the most awesome testament, these soldiers have also become quite ingenuous in developing tools that ensure the lives of soldiers in the field. In fact the soldiers stationed at Qalat Forward Operating Base in Afghanistan have developed a cheap and safe tool for sweeping the roadways free of IEDs that dot the unpaved roads in Afghanistan. After seeing countless soldiers being injured and killed by these dangerous devices, the guys in the motor pool came up with an idea of turning the frames of damaged humvees into a trailer that goes in the front of the humvees at the head of a convey thus providing a line of safety between the soldiers and these deadly bombs. While its not a state of the art fix that folks in the US imagine that we have or should have, it shows that our soldiers can adapt to what they're handed and do a pretty darn good job in making it work effectively. This junkyard solution also has other added benefits as well, just read a sample of what the soldiers told the Christian Science Monitor about this engineering oddity:

The minesweeper may help slow a trend in adding heavy armor to Humvees. In recent years, Army motor pools have been customizing lightly-armored Humvees, adding inch-thick panels of fiberglass to door panels and fenders to protect against shrapnel and small arms fire. On paper, this makes sense, but on the battlefield, this added weight can be dangerous.

"We want to be careful here; the Humvee was not designed to be a tank," says Capt. Thomas Anderson, a military spokesman in Qalat. "They were designed to be maneuverable. You can't sacrifice that in this terrain. On long-range missions, you cross a lot of rivers, and the last thing you want is to get stuck in a riverbed or a snowbank."

Aside from our budget on the military and the all-volunteer aspect, this can do spirit and American ingenuity are the main reasons why our military is second to none. So ya'll keep up the good work and thanks for your service.