Saturday, December 08, 2012

Green Fail

Eco-friendly warfare is harder than it seems:

The U.S. has found a solution for the problem they have been having, for over two years, with rocket motor problems in their AIM-120 AMRAAM air-to-air missiles (and Sparrow missiles, which use a motor from the same manufacturer.) The solution was to find another supplier. That turned out to be Norwegian ammunition manufacturer Nammo which has delivered 125 rocket motors so far and will soon be delivering a hundred motors a month. The former supplier, ATK, is still fixing the problem it had, which was the result of changing the formula for the rocket propellant several times to comply with environmental regulations. This led to their rocket motors becoming unreliable. It took over two years to sort all this out.

I thought we got carbon credits for killing enemy troops. Apparently not.