Prairie Dog

This sort of initiative has become more hi-tech over the centuries, but soldiers have been driving technological innovation since the dawn of time:

Sapper Engler, a 31-year-old Calgary man, found himself driving with his fellow soldiers in armoured vehicles over the dusty roads of Kandahar, where every bump could trigger an explosive device. He also found that, while military life offered its share of excitement, he was bored when he was away from his computers for too long.

Blessed with both smarts and a healthy sense of self preservation, Sapper Engler decided even before coming to the war zone, that he needed to make the trips less dangerous. He set out to create a robot that, when perfected, will be able to roll over the Afghan terrain and look for objects planted by the enemy.

...

"I foresee [the Prairie Dog] as a cheap multipurpose robot that is not just going to be able to go out and look. ... You are going to be able to put it on sentry duty and make it do multiple tasks for you," Sapper Engler said.

"Because it has a GPS, it can drive around the perimeter of the camp and check things out and if it sees something it doesn't like, it can e-mail someone and send a picture of it."

The testing of the Prairie Dog and the other remote-controlled bomb detectors has so far been confined to the airfield but Sapper Engler said he hopes to try them out on real Afghan terrain.

Once the military decides which model best suits its needs, it will be professionally manufactured and put into service.

"I felt that this has to be put forward," Sapper Engler said of the Prairie Dog. "It's really not that complicated, and I knew I was going over [to Kandahar] so I said I am going to do this. ... And the response so far has been very positive."

Think of the ancient siege engines, the great naval vessels, medical advancements, or even something as simple as Roman roads: all military driven.

Sometimes the soldier is the one scaling the technology back down to front-line utility, rather than relying on a bureaucratic process that produces something with more bells and whistles than are really required to do the job. A USMC Corporal provides a prime example:

When he joined the Marine Corps in 2002, Cpl. Joshua W. Dale never thought he would be using his welding experience to defeat insurgents in western Iraq.

The 23-year-old section leader with A Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, brought his ideas to life by inventing a breaching bumper for a Humvee in his mobile assault platoon.

The breaching bumper is mounted on the front of the Humvee and resembles a large arrowhead made of thick steel. The bumper is used to do one thing – tear through anything that gets in the vehicle’s way.

“We needed something on our Humvees to assault through barriers, like locked gates and low brick walls,” said the native of Silver Street, S.C. “This bumper will go through just about anything.”

...

In order to take the ideas from the drawing board to the shop floor, Dale was going to need time away from his platoon – something he wanted to avoid.

It was only after breaking his foot while performing maintenance on his Humvee that Dale found some time to bring his ideas to life and start on his project.

“I drew up blueprints myself and despite not having the right supplies and tools, I made it work,” said Dale who spent several years welding before joining the Marine Corps.

Sometimes, "just good enough" is what's needed, if time and lack of hassle is of the essence:

“Yesterday, I was “outside the wire,” patrolling with the 2nd Platoon. We came upon a possible IED in the middle of the road, and stopped all traffic to check it out… trying to figure out if the cardboard box in the middle of the road is merely a windblown piece of trash or a bomb planted there to kill us!

A young private in that platoon has one of those radio-controlled toy cars. When they find unidentifiable debris in the road, E.S. sends out his little RC car and rams it. If it’s light enough to be moved or knocked over, it’s too light to be a bomb, so we can approach it and get rid of it. If it’s heavy, we call EOD. At night, they duct tape a flashlight to the car.”

Necessity being the mother of invention, and life-and-death soldiering situated precisely at the pointy-end of necessity, stories like this aren't really surprising to me. What's surprising is that we don't hear more of them.