Military Grade Cookies

[gothick]

Someone just posted a link to this in a Different Place (as opposed to an Other Place):

MIL-C-44072C/MILITARY SPECIFICATION/COOKIES, OATMEAL; AND BROWNIES; COCOLATE COVERED (pdf)

It's just so amazing, and you can feel the sheer weight, depth and history in the organisation that must exist to produce such a document. Absolutely stunning.

In other news, I've just been to a wedding reception (good), and was accompanied by an urban fox for a hundred metres of my crispy, frosty journey home down the harbourside (fab.)

Comments

[andre-powell.livejournal.com]

Ok so you may think this is a load of baloney and stuff but consider this perspective.
You need to have a specication to provide to a contractor to make sure they give you the right thing. The food produced for the armed forces (either theirs or ours) has to kept in storage for a shed load of time before it might be used. It has to have exactly the right kind of stuff to ensure that when you find yourself in a battle field environment that you are going to be able to keep going. If you don't specify exactly what you put in the food then you die not from hot high speed lead but from malnutrition.
If you still think that point of view is silly then consider the Captain Scott expedition.
They had a shed load of food supplies but it was the wrong stuff. It was Pemican if I remember correctly which was stacked to the gunnels with protein but had sweet fa vitamins. Thus they had severe problems with malnutritian. If you read the document they may a big case about Vitamin A and C. They also ensure that the level is not degraded by the process.

I can remember that when I was doing stuff we were told that we should consider what would happen if we were on the battlefield using the kit. Wouldn't we want us to have made a bloody good job of it as it was possible ?

So it goes for Chocolate Brownies as it does for a Milan or Javelin, get the bloody thing right because if you haven't you may have just killed the person who is trying to protect you.

I remember there is a scene from the West Wing (I don't watch it normally but I caught this one). Some politico was complaining to a Naval Officer why the hell are they paying $300 for an ashtray to go on a submarine.
He takes the ashtray the he had on his submarine and smashes it. It breaks into little bits like a windscreen, ie no sharp shards. The last thing you want to be flying around in an explosion is nice large shards of glass.
I think the politico got the point.

Just to drive the point a little bit closer to home, in the late 70's there was a cost cutting programme in the Royal Navy. The jumpers had to be made from Nylon or a high Nylon mix to make them cheaper.
So along come the Falklands Campaign, Type 42 destroyers are being sunk and there are huge fires. A lot of the Naval staff had horrendous burns because their jumpers melted into them. Wool would have charred.
Generally Armed forces do things for a reason, politicians get in the way because they have no fucking idea what it is like and just see pennies being spent.

On a lighter note if you think we being British have not got to the same levels of assumed sillyness consider BS 6008.