I was searching WoK for some reference articles on ‘desert pavement’ and found a paper in Human and Ecological Risk Assessment (2008, 14:919-946)1 with a methods section that was quite different from the ones I am used to:
‘The focus was a testing program at Cibola Range that involved an Apache Longbow helicopter firing Hellfire missiles at moving targets, that is, M60-A1 tanks’.
Helicopter, missiles and tank in one sentence. Impressive.
1 DOI assigned but not functional.
That’s not a paper. That’s the screenplay for Rambo: First Blood Part 2.
One of the big names in ecological risk assessment worked for the US military. I guess they’ve had a long-term worry about the effects of highly explosive munitions on fluffy rabbits.
Raf, I can’t access the paper – does it say who funded this
testosterone partygroundbreaking (ha!) research?Alas, I can’t access the paper either.
Raf, did they do everything in triplicate? I wonder how much each tanks costs that gets destroyed by a hellfire missile? It’s got to be more than your typical R-01 grant allotment.
The research was funded by the U. S. Department of Defense Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program and the U. S. Department of Energy.
The article hypothesized that tracked vehicle movement causes soil disturbance, and thus hydrological change, potentially affecting mule deer and desert vegetation. The authors found no significant risk to vegetation growth and survival or mule deer abundance and reproduction.
Fluffy rabbits are a liability. In the nineties, Belgian military officials once blamed the destruction of several hectares of heath vegetation on on a burning rabbit1!
1 (source in Dutch)
Hmm, the term “strategic environmental research” worries me a bit!
I am amused that this is published in Human and Ecological Risk Assessment. I’d say that a brace of Hellfires from on high qualifies as both kind of risk.
P.S. Don’t show this to Grant, he’ll get all misty-eyed about the weaponry.
Interesting you mention RPG. We could revise his earlier manuscript that has similar methods:
“The focus was a pest control program at Awatere Range that involved firing .308 Winchester rounds at moving targets, that is, feral boars.”