One of the advantages of having a blog is that you have licence to write rubbish if you so desire. I don’t propose to comment on Gordon Brown’s upbeat speech because everyone else is. What it did do was make me think in more detail about the past, and compare what was done them with what I assume has been experimented with, and rejected. I can’t remember whether it was actually in North Africa or Europe that the allies brought out a machine called the flail tank. It was a conversion of a normal tank, to which had been added a double type of jib at the front, which supported the flail, a rotating wire whip, which blathered the ground ahead of the tank, exploding mines. In retrospect I think it wasn’t totally successful.
If you dig a hole, particularly in sandy soil, insert something and refill and level off, there will be air entrapped in the backfilling. Sand bulks, that is to say it entrains either water or air which increases its apparent quantity, and only when it is totally soaked, or totally dry and vibrated, does it have its minimum mass. It therefore occurred to me that one solution to the Roadside Bomb was to have a tank equipped like a water cannon, spraying the roadside heavily with water, ahead of the cannon, in order to expose what would then be depressions. Clearly I’m not an expert in this field, but I have had some success as an inventor. I appreciate that there is a radius in which a bomb can be effective, and this has to be taken into account.
I can only assume that as I have not seen any representation of something along these lines, the MOD has examined it and rejected it as being ineffective. Talking rubbish once in a while can sometimes be an advantage, perhaps it might be in this case.