God Bless American Ingenuity

This column from The Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal is a great example of a good idea being put to work by hard-working, efficient individuals without the need for blockbuster budgets.

The Snake Eater

Give our troops the tools our cops have.

BY DANIEL HENNINGER

Thursday, February 8, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
Subject: A case study of how the U.S. got bogged down in Iraq.

Excerpt:

This is a story of can-do in a no-can-do world, a story of how a Marine officer in Iraq, a small network-design company in California, a nonprofit troop-support group, a blogger and other undeterrable folk designed a handheld insurgent-identification device, built it, shipped it and deployed it in Anbar province. They did this in 30 days, from Dec. 15 to Jan. 15. Compared to standard operating procedure for Iraq, this is a nanosecond.

And how is it doing?

On the night of Jan. 20, Maj. West, his Marine squad and the "jundi" (Iraq army soldiers) took the MV 100 and laptop on patrol. Their term of endearment for the insurgents is "snakes." So of course the MV 100 became the Snake Eater. The next day Maj. West emailed the U.S. team digital photos of Iraqi soldiers fingerprinting suspects with the Snake Eater. "It's one night old and the town is abuzz," he said. "I think we have a chance to tip this city over now." A rumor quickly spread that the Iraqi army was implanting GPS chips in insurgents' thumbs.

Hopefully this breakthrough will make a difference.