TOP 7 unusual US military developments

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

If you think that the military has a little imagination, then you are greatly mistaken. The Yankees have wild ideas up to their armpits, and, moreover, many of them brave military personnel in all seriousness tested and were going to use on the battlefield. We present to your attention the seven partly cool, partly insane and completely failed experiments of the US armed forces.

It is interesting that these are only declassified projects, and how much of everything much more unthinkable lies with the mark top secret

Dove Project

During World War II, Berres psychologist Frederick Skinner received funding from the US Army to create an unusual weapon: a rocket guided by a pigeon. Yes, there is not a single typo in this sentence. The famous behaviorist came up with the idea of creating an unusual bomb while watching the flight of a flock of pigeons.

“Suddenly I saw in them devices with excellent vision and extraordinary maneuverability,” he wrote. The project that followed this idea was as ingenious as it was strange. After special training of pigeons, Skinner placed the birds in a specially designed rocket nose, from which kamikaze pigeons could direct the rocket to the target. Tests showed that the birds were first-class pilots and skillfully coped with their task.

Unfortunately for Skinner, the military ultimately refused to fund such an outlandish idea. And if suddenly the birds see scattered seeds from their own and rush there, and not into enemy territory? Convinced that kamikaze pigeons would never work in the field, the military shut down the project in October 1944.

Camel Regiment USA

Horses were the primary means of transportation for the American army in the 19th century, but things could have been very different. After the US Secretary of War Jefferson Davis imported a herd of several dozen camels from North Africa in 1856, the US Army Camel Corps was founded.

Davis believed that the famous "ships of the desert" would be excellent fighters in the arid climate of the recently conquered territories in the American Southwest, and the first tests only confirmed all these assumptions. Camels could go for days without water, easily carry heavy loads and move over rough terrain better than mules and horses.

The civil war put an end to the presence of camels in the military. The Army leadership lost interest in outlandish animals, and the corps was finally disbanded after the Confederation - ironically, with Davis now in the presidency - seized a base in Camp Verde, Texas, where the camels were based.

Ice Worm Project

In 1958, the US Army embarked on one of the most daring experiments of the Cold War. As part of a top-secret project called "Ice Worm", the Americans have developed a special project for tunnels and storage facilities … in the ice of Greenland. There they planned to hide hundreds of ballistic missiles in order to deliver nuclear strikes if necessary, of course, against the Soviet Union.

To test their designs, the army first built a special camp, a prototype ice base disguised as a research center. This huge icy outpost consisted of two dozen underground tunnels dug out of snow and ice and reinforced with steel. It had living quarters for more than 200 people and had its own laboratories, a hospital and even a theater. And all this was powered by a portable nuclear reactor.

The Ice Worm prototype could have been a technological marvel, but nature has won. After only a year and a half, ice shifts led to the fact that many tunnels simply collapsed. In 1966, the Americans reluctantly closed the project, recognizing it as unfinished.

Experimenting with drugs

Cold War paranoia inspired the military to conduct some highly questionable experiments. Since the 1950s, secret drug research has been conducted at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, the longtime home of the American chemical weapons program.

More than 5,000 soldiers served as guinea pigs for a project that was designed to identify non-lethal chemicals for use in combat and during interrogation.

The unsuspecting soldiers were given everything from marijuana and PCP, nicknamed Angel Dust, to mescaline, LSD, and quinuclidyl-3-benzylate known as BZ. Some were even injected with potentially deadly nerve agents such as sarin.

While the tests provided a wealth of information about the effects of substances on the human body, the military did not find practical use in them. After a public outcry in 1975 and a congressional hearing, drug experimentation was discontinued.

FP-45 Liberator

Soon after the United States entered World War II, it began looking for a way to arm resistance fighters in countries occupied by the Nazis. The result was the FP-45: a small, single-shot.45 pistol that could be produced cheaply and dropped from the air behind the front lines for use by guerrilla forces.

The theory was that the resistance fighters, having received such a weapon, had to use it for a covert attack on the enemy, including to steal weapons. The FP-45 would also have a psychological effect, as the idea that every citizen could be armed with a pistol instilled fear in the hearts of the occupying soldiers.

Between June and August 1942, the United States produced a million FP-45s, but the stamped two and a half dollar "pukalka" never won the hearts of the guerrillas. Allied commanders and intelligence officers found the FP-45 impractical and capricious, while the European resistance fighters preferred the much more serious British-made submachine gun.

Although about 100,000 Liberators did end up in the hands of the guerrillas, there is no indication of how widely they were used. The rest of the FP-45s have since become collectibles, with working models sometimes selling for over $ 2,000.

Flying aircraft carriers

Aircraft carriers may sound like science fiction, but in reality, the US Navy experimented with a pair of airships in the years leading up to World War II. Both were lighter-than-air craft that used helium for flight.

Unlike most airships, these monsters had built-in hangars that allowed them to launch, lift, and store up to five Curtiss Sparrowhawk biplanes during flight.

Aircraft were launched through a special hole in the bottom of the hull, and when "landing" on board the airship could be captured by a special device right on the fly, which clung to hooks attached to their wings.

The Navy had high hopes for using airships for reconnaissance, but both eventually crashed. In April 1933, the first aircraft carrier sank due to strong winds off the coast of New Jersey, and the second fell victim to a storm near California in 1935. The death of approximately 75 crew members forced the Navy to abandon the program.

Railway garrison of peacekeepers

In the late 1980s, the military was deeply worried that stationary missile silos in the United States could become an easy target in the event of a firefight with nuclear warheads from the USSR. To solve this problem, the military used remarkable ingenuity and created a peacekeeping railway garrison: a mobile nuclear arsenal consisting of fifty MX missiles stored in specially designed air force cars.

As planned by the military, the trains were supposed to spend most of their time in fortified hangars throughout the country, but in case of high readiness, they could be evenly dispersed across all two hundred thousand kilometers of US railways so as not to become easy prey for the USSR.

Each of the 25 trains carried two cars with nuclear missiles. By opening the roof and raising a dedicated launch pad, the garrison could even launch rockets on the move. In 1991, President Ronald Reagan disbanded the garrison under public pressure and as the end of the Cold War reduced the need for nuclear protection. One of the prototype railroad cars is now on display at the United States Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio.