Military

People with red-green color blindness can see green camouflage in finer detail. Less distracted by color, they rely on brightness and texture, making concealment easier to spot. Wartime accounts say Allied forces used colorblind soldiers as photo interpreters.

In 1932, Australia waged war on emus — and lost. To stop ~20,000 emus wrecking crops, soldiers brought two machine guns and 10,000 rounds, but the birds split into small groups and outran the fire; one gun jammed. After two months, under 1,000 were killed — the war birds won.

1950s engineer Jerry Pournelle proposed dropping tungsten rods from satellites. Project Thor ("Rods from God") drops 6.1 m × 30 cm rods at Mach 10 with ~11.5 tonnes of TNT energy. Not a nuke, so no fallout — and the 1967 Outer Space Treaty's ban on "WMDs in orbit" doesn't apply.

The USA swapped a Hellfire missile's warhead for six folding blades — the AGM-114R9X "Ninja Missile." It deploys them just before impact, slicing the target with no blast — just a hole in a roof. In 2022 it killed al-Qaeda's Ayman al-Zawahiri on a Kabul balcony.

In 2011, France had to destroy an armored vehicle in a Libyan city. Their fix: a 300 kg concrete bomb — a casing of concrete, not explosives. No blast, no shrapnel; the GPS-guided block smashed the vehicle on impact. The USA had used the trick in Iraqi no-fly zones since the 1990s.

Before World War II, British RAF scientists couldn't crack bomber interception. Commander Grenfell guided fighters by eye, hitting 90% accuracy with the 'gaze heuristic.' This principle later inspired the American Sidewinder missile.