explosive charge creates a shock wave in the Stingray’s water reservoir, propelling the water outward at a rate of speed high enough to slice through a roadside bomb. In other words, it’s not a matter of water fizzling a bomb into futility. The Stingray destroys the bomb through the force the water carries. No pump-action necessary.

“The fluid blade disablement tool will be extremely useful to defeat IEDs because it penetrates the IED extremely effectively,” a Sandia project manager boasted on Friday. “It’s like having a much stronger and much sharper knife.” Thousands of Stingrays have already arrived in Afghanistan. where IED attacks have risen substantially in the past year.

Over the last decade, the rise of the improvised explosive device — the cheaply-made insurgent weapon of choice in Iraq and Afghanistan — has yielded a correlative rise in unconventional tools to disable it. One proposal called for electrocuting the bombs. The Pentagon’s lavishly-funded anti-IED task force urged the military to place radio jammers in troops’ backpacks to block the bombs’ remote detonation frequencies; outfit their trucks with devices to activate the bombs’ tripwires from a distance; and make plentiful use of bomb-disposing robots.

But as bizarre as the Stingray might seem, its bomb-soaking principle recalls a tactic the British used against Irish Republican Army explosives, according to the Associated Press. And it’s also been put to use in Iraq, where “Big Mikes” — water jugs packed with C-4 to shoot aqua at 26,400 feet per second at an explosive — were part of the ordnance-disposal toolkit. Sandia has spent two years souping up the 70s-era technology for today’s IED threat.

In Afghanistan, the effort to combat roadside bombs has focused more on finding and fighting the networks that build the bombs and less on taking out individual bomb-planters or zapping the devices outright. Two anti-IED task forces in Afghanistan, known as ODIN and Paladin, recently shifted their operations toward aerial surveillance and forensic bomb-detection as part of the military’s broader shift away from simply killing insurgents. The Stingrays might help fill the gap between attacking IED networks and disabling the bombs they plant.

One reason why the Stingrays could be a promising anti-IED tool: the materials insurgents use to construct roadside bombs in Afghanistan are a lot less durable than steel. According to a top officer in Task Force Paladin, Army Maj. Paul J. Sechler, the bombs that troops most often encounter steer clear of metal as much as possible, in order to evade the metal detectors that began streaming into Afghanistan in 2008. The pressure plates that tell the bomb when its target is right on top of it are often made of materials as flimsy as plywood. Sometimes the only metal the bombs use to carry an explosive charge is a layer of aluminum foil from cigarette packets. If a hydro-blade can slice, dice and chiffonade steel, it should be able to make short work of wood.

See Also:

• Blimps, Bots, Beams Enlisted for IED Fight
• IED Solution: Fry ‘Em
• High-Tech Army Team Turns From Killers to Airborne Spies
• Secret New Sensors Sniff For Afghanistan’s Fertilizer Bombs …
• Drones Surge, Special Ops Strike in Petraeus Campaign Plan …
• U.S. Military Learns to Fight Deadliest Weapons
• CSI Afghanistan: It’s Not About Fingering the Bad Guys Anymore …

Authors: Spencer Ackerman

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