The federal government has no legitimacy left to spend. What will they do, move me to a closed-air prison from an open-air one? If they send me conscription papers, I will return to sender.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZmUfUBqE-s

That isn’t a joke, by the way.

1. Don’t open any letter from Selective Service. You mustn’t break the seal.
2. Black out the mailstream barcode and write “return to sender” on the face of the envelope.
3. Put it back in the mailbox.

And don’t ever take any paper from anyone you don’t know.

I wonder what some think war actually is.

This is going to be one helluva learning curve for the West. No, you don’t have to sign up. You don’t have to deploy. It’s deploying to you.

No, no particular care or fuxx are given. We give the fux we can.

Later, if you make it home or to a hospital far enough and resourced enough to care, they may..

But commonly available video footage of the Ukraine front lines do not show any particular care being given on concussive trauma by artillery crews.

We can’t do OSHA on the battlefield. But people can and do make a living SELLING THE GOVERNMENT the OSHA solutions.

The sealed helmet concept would be nice for the lab, the factory, etc.

Why don’t you try running around and doing the labor a gun crew does or any soldier in a war zone and come back to us on the sealed helmet concept?

This reminds me of the individual soldier air conditioning unit, a largish can sized apparatus with hoses that went under the body armor to cool us off in our body armor, it’s great if you can just stand there — my platoon tried it.

Ain’t gonna work so well in combat.

Then there was the Robbie the Robot suit for gunners…yes, that was real too…

Then there’s the truly horrific spectacle of soldiers NOT WEARING THEIR SEATBELTS, a favorite peeve of that most peevish of creatures our Sergeant Majors.

Then there’s the safety belts so we can be seen…

THIS IS WAR!! SAFETY FIRST.

Are there any other experiments you wish to conduct Doctors Strange?

As for using artillery instead of infantry…we just got a refresher course on that one in Ukraine, but you’re welcome to lead by example. As it happens we need infantry. Lots.

And lots more.

In fact, it’s not even entirely clear that wearing a modern helmet is better than wearing no helmet at all. See “Factors Contributing to Increased Blast Overpressure Inside Modern Ballistic Helmets” at:

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/10/20/7193

To summarize: A bare headform was tested alongside a few headforms wearing combat helmets, including the supposedly rifle-rated ECH and the “AirFrame” — a helmet marketed as one that “can reduce the damaging effects of explosive blast waves.”

Surprisingly, the bare headform performed best by a slight margin, and the “AirFrame” exhibited the worst performance of all by a considerable margin. (!)

Blast wave performance will improve when it’s added as a requirement to military helmet specifications and rigorously tested for. But, despite blast injuries accounting for 88% of all head and neck injuries in OIF/OEF, I wouldn’t hold my breath. The military has a history of optimizing helmet performance for the wrong things.

…A light sealed artilleryman’s helmet would probably be a good idea, though. (Or even a coif-like hood — for soft body armor does a good job at damping blast waves.) I ought to try and pitch it and get those darpabux.

Perl and his lab colleagues recognized that the injury that they were looking at was nothing like concussion. The hallmark of C.T.E. is an abnormal protein called tau, which builds up, usually over years, throughout the cerebral cortex but especially in the temporal lobes, visible across the stained tissue like brown mold. What they found in these traumatic-brain-injury cases was totally different: a dustlike scarring, often at the border between gray matter (where synapses reside) and the white matter that interconnects it. Over the following months, Perl and his team examined several more brains of service members who died well after their blast exposure, including a highly decorated Special Operations Forces soldier who committed suicide. All of them had the same pattern of scarring in the same places, which appeared to correspond to the brain’s centers for sleep, cognition and other classic brain-injury trouble spots.

Granted, they didn’t come to much of a conclusion, but they laid out the problem.

This is very true:

“Helmets (e.g., Advanced Combat Helmet), are typically designed to protect the wearer from head trauma due to projectiles rather than blast exposure and may sometimes even amplify blast exposure”

The solution — such as it is, and if indeed a “solution” is required — probably lies in the adoption of a sealed helmet for artillery and heavy weapons crews. Something to prevent blast waves from making contact with, and flexing, the human face and skull. (See also: Skull Flexure from Blast Waves.) EOD techs are already issued such things, but they expect big blasts. An artilleryman variant could be much lighter.