perfidy

Loyal readers and minions alike know that in my brief military career I was one of these. It kind of looked like that too, except there were no women (not in echelons below division), no banks of monitors, and rarely was everyone dry. And substitute the cozy bunker pictured for some damp canvas bolted to the back of an M577 and stretched to form a sort of tent, which had the improbable ability to drip cold water on me, wherever I sat beneath it and even when it wasn't raining.

But I digress. I worked for a year for a super guy who had been a Marine in an earlier life and, with his age advancing, decided cushy Army life might be more forgiving to his body. He cared about his people and was a genuinely funny guy. Not in a rubber-chicken way, in a twisted way. We got along great.

At one point, he subscribed to a classified publication produced by some civilian agency or other. Intelligence people spend alot of time reading, usually DoD stuff, the intelligence products you might expect, Army regs, and open source stuff like Jane's books. This pub I'm remembering was dedicated to discussing existing research on and prototype methods for what it called "soft kill", or incapacitating an enemy without necessarily physically destroying his people or his stuff. And it was a hoot.

I don't remember most of them, but they were pretty outlandish even conceptually; actually delivering some of these ideas or devices successfully were pretty improbable. Most of it was little more than banana-in-the-tailpipe stuff. Sure that commie division's independent tank batallion is useless if they can't start the tanks, but it was quite obvious that destroying them with conventional munitions was a whole lot easier than sneaking a specially trained mischief team into their garrison to piss in all the gas tanks. My boss got this pub purely for the entertainment value.

Well, the past is present. The New Scientist via Drudge has a short piece about some interesting soft-kill projects purportedly considered by the DoD. Personally I like the concept of the munition that, once delivered, is irresistable to vermin and would thereby turn the bad guys' position into a big rat place.

But for style, the best one has to be the homo-bomb. Check it out here.