Stupid tech is almost as much fun as useful tech, at least for someone like me. When you spend a couple hours each day reading tech blogs and news stories, the strange stuff really brightens the day. Take this torpedo, for instance. Named the Reusable Unambiguous Swimmer Warning Vehicle (fairly ambiguous name, no?) this thing seeks out enemy swimmers (?!?) and then tracks them. That’s right, it tracks them, following behind and reporting GPS coordinates back to some central computer.
So I have to wonder, the point? Wouldn’t echo-location do just as well? And once you have these alleged terrorists/triathlon enthusiasts pinpointed under water, what then? Send the GPS powered attack robots after them (okay, if those existed I would be much more serious about these torpedoes)?
Perhaps the most mind-blowing part of this whole thing are the comments from Jim Pollock, project manager for the Integrated Swimmer Defense Program at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center (again, ?!?). Pollock says the torpedo is, “a candidate technology for a solution to deterring swimmers. It’s not necessarily a solution that the Navy has picked at this point.” I’m not one to get alarmed about orange threat levels and terrorist attacks coming to a city near me, but the fact that our naval defense research dollars are going toward crap like this has me more concerned about national security than ever before. It’s like they polled a bunch of ten-year-olds for good defense ideas. “How about missiles that hunt swimmers and then…swim with them? Yeah!!!” Yikes.
Source: Gizmodo
