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Whenever a war like Afghanistan ends, a financial problem drives a country into the next war. The companies that build the weapons take a massive revenue hit because a country at peace doesn’t consume many ordinances.
But this time, thanks to climate change, there is effectively another conflict doing far more harm. That is the war to mitigate the fires on the West Coast and the weather events e.g., floods, tornados, and hurricanes on the East Coast of the U.S.
What if we took this military capacity and built “weapons” to fight fires and floods? Today we use repurposed military vehicles for this kind of service, but weapons designed for one type of conflict aren’t necessarily ideal for another.
A shift in focus of military manufacturing from killing people to alleviating disasters could also address many large companies’ problems with employees objecting to military contracts. If the efforts were switched from predominantly taking lives to saving them, the efforts should be more palatable.
Let’s talk about some of the inventions that could be used to make us all safer, switching our focus from harm to help this week.
We’ll close with my product of the week, arguably the coolest Tesla-like electric-powered hydrofoil boat that’s trying to transition boating away from fossil fuels.
Fire Mitigation
This is the third consecutive summer that I haven’t truly enjoyed living in a resort community due to the smoke from wildfires. Our home has never been at risk, but the smoke is so heavy some days that they say it is doing lung damage in line with a pack-a-day cigarette habit. One day the smoke was so thick that I couldn’t breathe outside. We’ve lost entire towns to fires that got out of control and couldn’t be contained in time.
Yet, we have developed various weapons systems that have advanced to identify enemy groups over broad geographic areas. Suppose we could use the identification technology that we currently use to find terrorists and mission it to locate forest fires before they have time to grow aggressively. In that case, we should be able to respond more quickly.
We often use reconfigured air tankers to drop water from fires. Still, these tankers take a while to get into the air because their crews need to be called up, so they can’t be maintained in a fully-ready state. There are also risks associated with weather, drones, and other pilot distractions that can lead to crashes.
The Boeing Stingray Drone is an air refueling drone that could be converted into a rapid response flying vehicle for fire elimination. The Stingray is designed against an aggressive military specification; it should be able to resist adverse weather. It has no crew, so it can get into the air more quickly. A drone’s loss of life is minimized, meaning it could fly in conditions a typical air tanker could not.
Another solution is to repurpose the new military drone swarm; so instead of dropping explosives, it drops fire-extinguishing bombs. One company already makes these. I have several in my garage because they can be very effective against small fires. Check this out: