August 1,
2008: One of the unrecognized lifesavers
in Iraq and Afghanistan is a simple adaptation of an old method of avoiding
anti-vehicle mines. That would be the rollers (heavy barrels that are rigged to
run in front of a tank or combat engineer vehicle, and set off such
mines). The rollers are heavy enough to
simulate the weight of a vehicle. The innovation here was to design a roller set
(SPARK, for Self-Protection Adaptive Roller Kit), that could be pushed by a
truck or, these days, an MRAP (heavily armored trucks). Over 300 SPARK systems
were sent to Iraq, where they detonated over 70 anti-vehicle mines (and
"proofed" thousands of kilometers of road, verifying that the routes were mine
free.) All this saved hundreds of American lives, which means a lot when you
consider that only 4,100 U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq, about half of
them on the roads (mostly from IEDs).
A
customized (for local conditions) version of SPARK has been designed for
Afghanistan as well.
