Angry Planet - How a 'chicken gun' keeps U.S. warbirds aloft and other strange tales

Episode Date: July 28, 2016

When the United States Air Force tests a new aircraft it needs to make sure it won't crash should a stray bird slam into the plane's side. Thankfully, the military has an artillery piece with a 60-foot barrel that hurls chicken more than 400 miles an hour. The chicken gun allows the military to make sure no stray bird will foul up its expensive jets while they're mid-flight. If you think the chicken gun is weird, it’s only the tip of a strange and fascinating iceberg.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' News. Are there currently any people making use of military maggots, medicinal military maggots? I just wanted to say that. That was all that question was about, really.

What would soldiers need kitty litter for? And why does the military consider flies to be a mortal threat? And what? For heaven's sake, is a chicken gun? This week on War College, we're talking about some of the we're talking about some of the weirder aspects of outfitting an army and the science of keeping soldiers in the field. Matthew Galt had to take on the sole hosting duties because I was called away for breaking news. But I think this show is fantastic.

Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Matthew Galt with War is Boring. We're talking today with Mary Roach, who is a science writer. Her newest book is Grunt, The Curious Science of Humans at War. Mary, thank you so much for joining us. Well, thanks for talking to me. So you've previously written about corpses, the afterlife, sex, the elementary canal. What drew you to the military? Well, I'm always writing about the human body and somewhere and nothing. A few years back, I was reporting a story in India on the hottest chili pepper in the world, arguably hottest chili pepper. The Indian Defense Ministry I learned had weaponized the chili pepper, which appealed to me. I thought that was a fascinating twist on an otherwise kind of straightforward food type of story. So I went over to the lab where they'd done that. And I, while I was there, learned about a bunch of other projects. They were working on a leach repellent, a leach repellent. I found that kind of kind of fascinating. So that kind of planted the seed here that there were, there were facets of military research that had never occurred to me that, you know, it's a, don't get coverage.

It was this sort of a broader, more esoteric undertaking than one might imagine. And so then when I got home, I started looking into it a bit. And, you know, that's sort of how I went down that road. I don't have any background reporting on the defense industry. I'm not a tech writer. It was definitely the human side of it that interested me. So that's how it happened. How had they weaponized the chili pepper? Basically, it was like a pepper spray. It was just only a homegrown kind of locally sustainable version of a pepper spray. It was a powder that they put in a sort of a, it would just sort of explode. It was an exploding chili powder just for dispersing a mob, you know, your typical non-lethal weapon rather than a spray.

It was an explosion. But alas, the chili pepper bomb was, the powder was prone to mildew. So it didn't last well in the storehouses in India. So it never went anywhere, but it was just a project. They made some prototypes and they didn't. I mean, you don't see it used much. Speaking of strange weaponry, I really enjoyed the anecdote that you open up the book with. Can you tell us about the chicken gun?

Yeah, sure, the chicken gun. The chicken gun, it's a heavy artillery piece that fires thawed out, defrosted supermarket chickens, and it's firing them at pieces of jets like the canopy, you know, the wind, the wind screen or the wing or whatever engine, to be sure that whatever component of the jet or plane is going to withstand bird strike, bird strike being you're in a plane or a jet and you hit a bird, which sometimes brings down a plane. more often it just causes a lot of damage, but sometimes it does cause a plane to go down. So the chicken gun fires these chickens, and there's a tremendous amount of work that went into the chicken gun. There were people advocating that you use actual birds or people saying, no, we need to build a simulated generic bird,

but there's a lot of discussion on what do you use, which bird and what shape and would it have wings and what would you do? And in the end, they went with something that would be reproducible and cheap, which is a supermarket chicken, which is a weird choice in that chickens don't fly are never being hit by planes. Kind of a worst case scenario, the supermarket chicken. Do you have any idea what the rationale was behind using a supermarket chicken? Was it just that that was the easiest thing to find? Yeah. I think that it's just easiest to have a stockpile of frozen chickens rather than to have, to have, live chickens and then slaughter them yourself and

yourselves and load them in. I think it was just easier to have a frozen chicken that you thaw out. But it's not ideal because there's also the there is the feathered bullet phenomenon, which is kind of what sounds like it's a small bird that if it hits the right way can pierce a canopy in a way that a larger bird like a turkey vulture would not. so it kind of, we could then hit the pilot, the feathered bullet phenomenon. So, of course, a supermarket chicken does not simulate that possibility. So whatever you do, it's a bit of a compromise.

But that's science for you. It's full of compromises. Well, it's, you know, you do the best you can to approximate a situation that is quite varied. I mean, there's all different kinds of birds that hit planes and there's different, you know, materials that they're hitting. So you're trying to create a one-size-fits-all approach in testing. All right. So what was the favorite thing that you discovered while you were researching in talking to people? A favorite thing that I discovered.

Well, this was when I was reporting it a couple years back, they were just starting to do the, they were doing some cadaver work working out which arteries to reconnect to transplant a penis. And that was, I mean, I had no idea that was underway. And it was, you know, for me, because stiff was. my most popular book. It's always, I'm always excited if I could bring some cadavers into a book for the stiff fans who always are clamoring for stiff too. So that was a surprise and fascinating to be there working out how it's done, the very first efforts. You're kind of touching on one of the things that I think was really fascinating about the book. I don't think people realize

how much military science is a precursor to civilian science. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know it's particularly in the medical field, whether it's transplants or prosthetics or emergency trauma care, like tourniquets. And, you know, I mean, you've got a window of a couple of minutes if someone's bleeding from an artery, a large artery, or if their lung is pierced and the pressure's building up outside the lung, air is filling up that space outside the lung. And I mean, you've got to get in there, like relieve the pressure, put on an occlusive bandage, do it fast. So in terms of doing surgical procedures on the run or in the air, there's been an amazing amount of work done in those areas. And also the Navy's always looking at developing vaccines for, they're looking at one now for norovirus, for ETEC, which is a form of E. E. coli that causes pretty bad travelers diarrhea. So there's a lot of, and dysentery and diarrhea used to kill, you know, four times as many troops,

bullets and bombs in the 1800s. It was, I mean, that's how you, that's how you were likely to die in, in combat was from disease, not from somebody else's gun. Right. The subtitle of one of your chapters is, I think, I may butcher this, but diarrhea is a threat to national security. Yeah, that's right. I have that subhead because I specifically talk to people in special operations.

And they're the ones that aren't eating on large bases. They're, where the food these days, unlike 100. years ago, the food is safe and the water is treated. But if you're a special operations person who's out in a small village in, say, Somalia, trying to blend in with the local population, you're eating goat that's probably not been refrigerated as well as it might. A lot of flies, water that is not up to the standards of an army base or the United States. So there's a tremendous amount. I mean, the rates of diarrhea during the peak of the Iraq conflict for 77% of deployed personnel had diarrhea, 40-some percent bad enough that they sought medical help. At 32 percent,

this is a statistic that really gets me, 32 percent had a situation where they couldn't make it to a toilet on time. So, you know, and the rates are far higher in special operations. So I was interested just in talking to some of these guys about that. And I say, I'm a you know, a threat to national security. I mean, it's a bit of an exaggeration, but there, you know, there's scenarios where if you're, you know, you're doing a special operations mission and you're hit with extreme gastrointestinal urgency, I mean, you just have to keep going. You know, it's sort of a matter of life or death and you, you know, if you're going in to clear a compound or to kill somebody or whatever it is that your special operations people are doing, there are small

units. Nobody's going to cover for you. Once the mission starts, you keep going. So you can imagine and severe cramping and diarrhea being a pretty awful thing to have happened. So I was over in Djibouti at Camp Lemignet with a diarrhea researcher who was testing a one-dose regimen, a much faster treatment for bacterial diarrhea. What other kind of stuff are they looking at to combat diarrhea? This may sound inane or embarrassing, but are there combat diapers? Like, it seems like that would be an easy way, an easy kind of solution. Well, there are combat diapers, but that term applies to not to anything for diarrhea, but for a, well, blast diaper is a better, more commonly known name.

That's for, if an IED goes off, it's a protection against, mostly against the blast of dirt and debris that's traveling at very high speed and hitting you. So that's an add-on body armor component. But diapers, no, nobody's wearing diapers. there are some people that, like before a high-risk critical mission would take emodium, like just to shut, which is, you know, you don't really want to be taking emodium if you don't know you're going to need it. But that's something people do. The special operations people that I talked to said, you know, you'd pack a bunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and you use Ziploc bags. And then the Ziploc bag, and they bring kitty litter.

because it's very absorbent. So if you have to go, you use the kitty litter. He said, you know, there's enough requisitioning of kitty litter that there was someone in Special Operations Command was like, why are we requisitioning kitty litter? What is going on? But you would put that in the bag that you used for your peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and that becomes you're in the field or in the hole or wherever you are, a toilet. I really enjoy how kind of gross this conversation is.

This is not our normal war college phase. and I'm kind of loving it. So let's keep this going. I want to talk about flies. There was way more information about flies in this book and flies pertaining to the military than I ever thought possible. So can you tell us a little bit about

how flies can be detrimental and also sometimes a positive on the battlefield? Sure. Well, flies, when you look at a battlefield from 100 years ago, you had a bunch of people out in a field open pit latrine, a mess tent that wasn't well screened, no refrigeration. So this is a setup for

huge numbers of people getting serious food poisoning because the flies, being flies, they land on the stuff in the latrine, the crap, they get it on their feet. The fly is called a mechanical vector. It picks up pathogens on its feet, and then it goes over to the food. It lands on the food, and now it inoculates the pot of beans or whatever you're making with these pathogens. They're then sitting in the sun because there's no refrigeration unit. So they're multiplying in an exponential rate by the time the food is served a few hours later. Everybody's getting hit. So diarrhea, dysentery, food poisoning, cholera, that's why so many people died.

That's why there were such huge numbers of deaths in conflicts before you were on a place that had a dining facility that was air-conditioned where you could seal it. There are no flies. Now there's no flies. it's not an issue on a big base, but it used to be a huge issue. So flies were, you know, in World War II, there were units. In North Africa, the flies are particularly aggressive in the desert. And it was such a problem.

Also bodies, you have bodies, you know, that's another flies landing there and, you know, laying eggs, etc. That was, you know, dead bodies are also contributing to the issue. And so they started having fly control units, like soldiers specifically dedicated to fly control. There was one battle, the Battle of El-Almain, I may not be pronouncing that right, in North Africa and World War II where they had a fly death quota.

Everyone had to go kill every day. I think it was 50 or 100 flies. It was that much of a problem. The upside to the fly. This is something that came out in World War I. There was a surgeon named William Bear

who was part of the expeditionary forces in France. And he noticed there were a couple of soldiers who were brought in who'd been lying out in the field in the brush and they were brought in with big big wounds the wounds were as wounds will be when you're lying out in the open they were infested with maggots and bear and his staff cleaned out the maggots thinking you know this is horrific it's going to cause infection and we cleared out the maggots he noticed that there was this healthy pink tissue growing there was absolutely no infection. And he saw this over and over and began to suspect that the maggots,

they perform a natural debridement. That is to say the maggots selectively eat dead tissue. They don't want to eat live tissue. They want to eat the dead tissue. And that is what debridement is. You're getting rid of the dead tissue to make way for the living tissue. The dead tissue, it doesn't have a blood supply, so bacteria can set up housekeeping because the immune system isn't going to be blood getting to the dead tissue. So it encourages infection. So you want to keep the dead tissue out of there. You want to get rid of it. And De Brideman is done surgically, more typically, but the maggots do a lovely job of it.

And the maggots, maggot therapy is still used today. You can get a prescription for maggots. There's a company called medical maggots. There's a Medicare reimbursement code for maggots and dosage and little cage dressings to keep the maggots where they should be and not have them stray. So it's used mainly today in diabetics. who get these foot ulcers that are very slow to heal, and the maggots encourage healing. They seem to fight infection, too, maybe by secreting something,

it's not entirely clear exactly what they're doing, but they prevent infection. So the maggot has kind of a dual role in the military. Are there currently any people making use of military maggots, medicinal military maggots? I just wanted to say that. That was all that question was about, really. I don't blame me. I like saying chicken gun and I like saying medical maggots. There's a lovely military entomologist at Walter Reed. Well, he's no longer there. He's moved on. But when I was reporting the book, he was there. George Peck, a big booster of maggots, a man who loves the maggot with all his heart. He was trying to, he was advocating a return to using maggots because with some with IE, particularly with IED injuries, it's a buried explosive. So it's blasting.

this dirt and debris, which is full of bacteria and fungi, and it's blasting that deep into the wound. Kind of the tissue is blown away from the bone. This dirt gets in, and then the tissue comes back down. So it's very hard to keep the wound from being infected and to get all of that stuff out. So he was advocating a return to maggots, but it's an uphill battle because maggots are, let's face it, kind of gross. And if they escape, they want to go pupate and become flies and nobody wants flies in a hospital setting for all the reasons that I was just talking about before, they can spread infection. So there isn't much use of maggots in, certainly not in the field. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, bribement is done surgically. And that's much faster

maggots. It takes days. You have to change the maggots. You only got to leave them in a few days because otherwise they want to go pupate somewhere and they want to leave. So you've got to put in a new batch so it's time consuming and you have to have people who know how to do it so it's it's not easy to set up a medical medical maggot therapy program it's mainly in clinics for diabetics and and you know and it it's they're great because you the alternative sometimes is amputation so the people who have the maggots are pretty you know because you'd think they'd be kind of horrified but they're in fact happy to have a possibility of saving the limb at the moment medical maggots are a little bit more trouble than they're worth.

For your typical injury where you can go in and just surgically remove, just sort of like, you know, they're going, they're very tiny and so they're with their little mandibles. They're very thorough, but it takes a long time, whereas you can just go and like cut the heck out of those stuff and, you know, just sort of do a broader, blunter approach surgically than you would

with maggots. I'm going to change tracks here just a little bit, as much as I am enjoying talking about maggots. You and me both. You encountered a lot of kind of bizarre, baroque military bureaucracy in this book, and I felt like you were grinning as you were describing the titles of these reports. I'm trying to think of the specific examples, like the 417 page report that's all about sweat. And I think that most Americans think of the, you know, the Pentagon's bureaucracy and they see it as a negative. And this is the first time that I'd ever seen, I ever felt like maybe all this research and this thoroughness and this, you know, like all the different conversations that were had that they had to have to come up with the chicken gun, right? It feels like this stuff is actually getting us somewhere.

And I was wondering what your thoughts on that were. Yeah. I think that when you start to look into what actually happened, what lies behind the 400-page document, you start to see that there are reasons beyond just the fact that the military is a large lumbering bureaucracy, which is true. But there are, you know, like with the chicken gun, like just the amount of time it took to figure out, you know, what is the best thing to use and how do we build a system to launch the chickens and how do we mimic the exact, you know, the exact impact that you would have. You know, is the bird going, you know, does the bird flying in the same direction as the plane? In fact, it is, and that's part of the problem that the bird is, they both take off into the wind.

Just like you start to realize there's a whole world of science involved in how a plane comes to hit a bird. And so it sounds like just how dumb is that? Just throw a chicken at a plane. And what is the big deal? Why do you need to, it's like, why do you need to go through all this trouble? And why was so much time and money spent? But then like anything else, when you start to study the phenomenon, you see that it's really complex. And in order to make something that's worth making, you have to factor in all these things.

And that appeals to me as a raise. That's just the amount of, all the complications that lie below something that seems just simple. And, you know, because nothing's simple when you kind of get into it. Like earplugs. You think ear plugs are simple. Yeah. Like ear plugs, exactly. You think, yeah, like hearing loss in the military, you figure, well, okay, there's loud noises, there's bombs and there's guns firing.

So give them some ear plugs. What's the big deal? In fact, it's when you're in the military, you know, situational awareness is a big deal. while you want to be aware, is somebody charging a rifle near you? Is there an SUV coming up behind you on a street on gravel? If you can't hear that because you're wearing hearing protection, lest there be a firefight that breaks out, you're now, you're risking your life. You're in danger. So most soldiers would rather save their life than save their hearing. And the other thing with loud noises in the military, you know, setting aside transportation noises, which are significant,

helicopter and troop transport vehicles. The things that are really loud, that really damage your hearing are not things you can prepare for. You can't, you can't go, okay, there's going to be some, if you're the one initiating, sure, you could prepare for it, but things tend to start happening abruptly and without warning. And you're not going to go around with earplugs in all the time because it's or ear cuffs over your ears because it's hot and uncomfortable and because you can now can't talk to people and hear what's going on on a foot patrol you're walking far apart because of the killing radius of a grenade you know everybody has to be separated less one grenade take out three people instead of one so you're far apart you want to be able to converse with somebody so there's a lot of

reasons why soldiers don't want to just be wearing earplugs all the time and for that reason you know they're often, they're not wearing them when a bomb goes off or when a firefight breaks out. And then they end up with hearing loss. Because with a bomber or a rifle, the decibel level is high enough that a split second exposure can cause hearing damage. Whereas in a helicopter, you've got, you know, you've got some time. You can be exposed without incurring any hearing loss. But something as loud as a bomber or a rifle will cause, you know, one exposure can do. it. So, hey, so it's kind of a conundrum. That's why they're, they've got these very cool things

called T-CAPs, tactical communication and protection system, which is incoming noise. It knows whether if it's loud, it dampens it, and if it's quiet, it amplifies it. So, and it's like having bionic hearing. It's pretty cool. There's also a mouthpiece for wireless communication between members of the unit or a helicopter overhead or someone back on base. So it'd be great if everybody had those right now. Not everyone does, you know, special operations. of course, has those. So, yeah, it seems like it'd be pretty straightforward. It's loud, there's loud noises, give them hearing earplugs, but it's not that straightforward. Right, because it's the, that loss of hearing seems to be the soldiers that experience it.

That's the thing they miss the most, even if they have other injuries. That's what, yeah, someone, someone mentioned that to me that it was because it interfered with his ability to talk with his family, to, you know, to be in a restaurant and have a, a conversation. Just, you know, it doesn't have to, you don't have to be deaf. Just to have a moderate hearing loss is incredibly frustrating and it stays with you. Changing tracks again. Like you said, people want you to write stiff two. And you got, you got the opportunity to learn kind of about the autopsy procedures for the American military. I was wondering if you would tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, I was at the Armed Forces Medical Examines.

system, the morgue in Dover where all of the bodies of soldiers are killed, and soldiers and Marines are killed in overseas. They come in there and they're autopsied, all of them. And what is interesting is that they're autopsy with all of the medical, life-saving emergency care treatment in place. So, you know, whether it's a tourniquet or an intra-ausius IV or an airway, So all of that is left in place. And then what happens is every month there's something called a combat mortality conference. And at this teleconference, which takes place, well, it's a teleconference, so it takes place virtually. You have the people in Dover, the medical examiners who did the autopsy, and they are talking case by case with the bodies on the screen on a slide.

There's the medical examiners who are talking to the emergency. providers, the, you know, the medics or the Navy Corpsmen or and or the hospital people who did the care when they arrived at the hospital. And they talk about, you know, the equipment, was it used properly? Was it placed properly? Was there anything that could have been done differently? Just giving them feedback right away to say, you know, this is what happened with this death. This is what we saw when we did the autopsy. So it's kind of a great example of the feedback. getting directly to where it needs to go, rather than waiting to write a paper that will then be published two years later in an emergency medical journal. It's a way to just get the information

to the people who need it quickly, which is a great model for the military, because a lot of times there's just is this disconnect between the men and women who are doing the fighting and getting injured, and then the policymakers and the people back in the U.S. who need to know this information. You know, how do you get the information to the people who can really use it? So that's what I was reporting on that program, which is called Feedback to the Field. All right, Mary, I've got one more question for you. Yeah. How did writing this book change the way you viewed the American military?

Well, I had a sense, because I'm an complete outsider to this world, I had a sense of just the military as this monolithic entity. And as happens when you step into any kind of research into something. whether it's the chicken gun or the military, you begin to see how complex it isn't that there's all these separate facets of it. So I was in a world of people who I admired tremendously, the people who are the scientists, the medical people, and the researchers who really, you know,

they're trying to do something good and they're doing it within a frustrating bureaucracy and sometimes things move too slowly and there's miscommunication. But they themselves were really impressive, smart, funny, dedicated people. So they are kind of my sense of the military now. And so, you know, I'm not a fan of war

and I'm less of a fan of war after this book. But I am a fan of these people and the work that they do. So I have a lot of respect for them. So, you know, I guess you could say in that sense, I have a much better feeling about the military than I did going into the book. All right. Thank you so much for talking to us, Mary.

The book is Grunt, The Curious Science of Humans at War, and it's pretty incredible. Well, thanks so much. I really enjoyed talking to you, and I appreciate the opportunity. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of War College. We've started to hear from some people with podcast ideas, and we're going to see what we can do to actually make the episodes. You can hit us up with your own ideas or other comments on Twitter. We are at War underscore College. We'd also love it if you'd make us a regular part of your week by subscribing to the show. We're available everywhere your favorite podcasts are sold, iOS or Android.

War College was created by me, Jason Bealt, and Craig Heedek. Matthew Galt co-hosts the show, but that undersells all the work he really does. This week's episode was produced by Bethel Hopte, whose ears are so sensitive. She thinks I'm shouting right now.