Cool indeed.

I'm reminded of a story a friend of mine told me about his father.....

Mr. Mitchell served in the Army as a combat engineer during World War II. He and his unit fought their way across France and Germany during the last nine months of the war, fixing bridges, clearing minefields, and so on. By this time, the German forces were in headlong retreat, leaving a fair amount of war materiel behind. Mr. Mitchell, being experienced in demolition, took an interest in the demolition equipment left behind by the Germans, and discovered why (as he saw it) the Germans were losing the war.

The give-away? The igniter the Germans were using for their demolition charges. It was a rather elaborate gizmo, with a wind-up spring-mechanism powering a flint-and-steel spark-maker, like what you find on cigarette-lighters, only larger. Mr. Mitchell guessed that the German igniter probably cost the Germans the equivalent of several dollars to make, and was probably the best igniter (for the purpose) money could buy. The problem was that the money was wasted. He and his men were using packs of matches to light fuses, and if the pack of matches gets wet, so what-- you throw the pack out and get a dry pack of matches that only cost a few pennies to make. If the Germans lost or broke their igniter, they were out a couple of bucks.

The rest of the German equipment was much the same-- very good quality....TOO good quality to use for war. The Germans, besided being badly led, lost the war because they spent too much on it in the wrong way.

I think we suffered from the same mentality somewhat during the Cold War, what with bloated things like Aquila.

Now, just as our businesses have prospered from a "lean and mean" approach, our military can prosper by realizing that our weapons systems don't have to be near-perfect-- they only have to be better than what the enemy has. And modified hobby planes are definitely better than what Al-Qaeda & Co. have, which is precisely nothing.

The proper standard is not "better than what the enemy has". It is "good enough to do the job". And sometimes that requires a bit of sophistication.

I can think of several examples, but I'll pick just one: the fuel cans supplied to the British and German troops during the early fighting in North Africa. The Brits used cheap tin cans that could not withstand rough handling. I have seen estimates that one-third of the fuel supplied to those forces leaked out of the cans and was totally wasted. The Germans used heavy-wall cans that were the right shape for convenient carrying, by a soldier or on the running board of a vehicle. These cans had a fancy bayonet-type lid instead of an inexpensive pressed-metal screw thread. They had a triple handle; the center one could be used by one soldier to carry the can with good balance, and the outside ones could be used by a group of soldiers passing the cans in bucket-brigade style. They were assuredly the best possible can for the job.

And the Allies realized it. So they copied the German design. The British and American ones were no better than the German, but they were good enough to do the job, so they met the basic requirement.

You can still buy new ones today, likely injection-molded out of plastic, but the size, shape and proportions are the same. Today's industrial-supply catalogs still call them "jerrycans", after the nickname the British forces used for their enemies. They were - and under the right conditions, still are - the best item possible for doing the job.