When the US mil­i­tary began tak­ing mas­sive casaul­ties to IEDs in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, the ever-​​and-​​always tech­no­log­i­cally minded DoD looked to pro­cure the lat­est hot-​​topic (and expen­sive) anti-​​mine toys. The Air Force insisted that their sleek fighter jets could be used in a mine-​​detection role, while the Army and Marines ordered thou­sands of new MRAPs for mine detec­tion, con­voy duty, and road clear­ing.
Sometimes it helps to look back­wards instead of for­wards. Enter the Rhodesian Pookie, an ugly lit­tle con­trap­tion that helped clear roads and high­ways dur­ing the Rhodesian Bush War of the 1970s. The Pookie was invented as a response to the influx of Soviet mines, by way of ZANU and ZIPRA black lib­er­a­tion move­ments, into the Rhodesian the­ater. With it’s light weight evenly dis­trib­uted over wide Formula-​​1 rac­ing tires, the Pookie car­ried noth­ing more than a slanted, v-​​shaped armored cab for a dri­ver and a large mine-​​detector cen­tered beneath the vehicle’s under­car­riage. Only five were ever con­structed, but despite small num­bers, Rhodesian Pookies cleared thou­sands of miles of deadly mines, sav­ing untold civil­ian lives.
Of course the Pookie would have been dec­i­mated in mod­ern Iraq or Afghanistan, where radio con­trolled IEDS –not mines– ruled the roads. But that’s not the point. The Pookie, though inad­e­quate for today’s fight, was a fine exam­ple of an easy mil­i­tary solu­tion to a com­plex mil­i­tary prob­lem.
Such is the les­son inher­ent in its design and deploy­ment, best illus­trated by DaVinci’s an old maxim: sim­plic­ity is the ulti­mate sophis­ti­ca­tion.
–John Noonan

Some things you just can’t change.

Remember when the Pentagon got all up in arms after pic­tures of cus­tom nose-​​cone art fil­tered into the main­stream media dur­ing the inva­sion of Iraq (and some in Afghanistan)?

God for­bid the troops have a lit­tle fun with the idea of putting war­heads on the fore­heads of the “butch­ers of Baghdad”…wouldn’t want to offend any­one, huh?

Well, here’s a sim­i­lar lit­tle piece on a far more, shall we say, “lethal” nose cone…or blast door…or…oh, come on, you get the picture:

At the back of what looks like an enclosed porch of an unpre­ten­tious ranch house near Wall, South Dakota, a steel-​​runged lad­der leads down a 30-​​foot con­crete access shaft. At the bot­tom, a mas­sive, eight-​​ton steel-​​and-​​concrete door is painted the red, white and blue image of a Dominos Pizza box, with a slightly altered phras­ing of the chains famil­iar promise: World-​​wide Delivery in 30 Minutes or Less; Or Your Next One is Free. But in this case the Next One is a Minuteman II inter­con­ti­nen­tal bal­lis­tic mis­sile (ICBM). For almost three decades, the house was the Delta One Launch Control Facility (LCF) for ten Minuteman mis­siles armed with nuclear war­heads. The mas­sive blast door was designed to ensure that the under­ground launch con­trol cen­ter sur­vived a nuclear attack.

Welcome to the mor­dant, jin­go­is­tic and occa­sion­ally crude but rarely before seen world of blast-​​door art.

Like the gar­ish and cheeky illus­tra­tions etched across the noses of World War II air­craft, these images in launch con­trol cen­ters across the United States tes­tify to the bravado of the men (and, from the mid-​​1980s onward, women) of what has been called Americas Underground Air Force. But they also reflect the some­times sur­real pres­sures faced by two-​​person mis­sile crews on 24-​​hour duty alerts, wait­ing for a call to turn their mis­sile launch keys and per­haps end civ­i­liza­tion as we know it. Youre sit­ting there wait­ing for the mes­sage you hope never comes, says Tony Gatlin, who painted the Dominos homage as a young deputy flight com­man­der at Delta One in 1989. Thats a pretty screwed up way of look­ing at the world.

Now an Air Force major and deputy direc­tor of staff with the 100th Air Refueling Wing, based at the Royal Air Forces Mildenhall Base, in England, Gatlin was struck by the sim­i­lar­ity of Dominos deliv­ery time and that of his mis­siles. One went with the other kind of well, he dead­pans. Gatlins paint­ing is one of only a few the pub­lic can see, fol­low­ing the trans­for­ma­tion in 1999 of the Delta One con­trol facil­ity and the nearby Delta Nine mis­sile silo into an his­toric site by the National Park Service (NPS). Under the terms of the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty between the then-​​Soviet Union and the United States, many Minuteman mis­sile sites have been deac­ti­vated or destroyed. 

(Thanks to CM for the gouge)

– Christian