In theory there’s nothing wrong with the idea. There’s also been a lot of work in the field (which may actually pay off in spades in other appications). It may not as practical as other missile defense systems, though. There’s some work being done with laser response systems which may prove much more feasible.
**The OP Title was: What are some other wacky military ideas that never made it? **
Does someone have to defend every wacky idea that never made it?
Spruce goose was feasible but still wacky and never made it.
Star Wars was feasible but the Tech wasn’t available and the public name instantly put in into the wacky category and it never made it.
If we wanted strickly wacky the Bradley Fighting Vehicle would qualify but it did make it. 
The arsenal ship proposal called for a lightly-crewed, low-radar-signature missile platform that could creep up to an enemy’s shore, launch up to 500 missiles at them and creep away.
In a similar vein, the guys at Metalstorm.com have some really cool videos of ridiculous firepower in action. The UCAV video, describing a combat drone with a payload of 14400 40mm grenades, is especially amusing.
One that was actually tried was the B-17 'escort bomber" which was a regaulr B17 with lots of extra guns and armour instead of bombs. It had the problem in that it was still heavy after the other B17s had dropped their bombs (the B17 was rather fast when not loaded down), and that regular fighters with drop tanks started appearing anyway.
The “spruce goose” wasn’t wacky at all. The idea was to make a transport airplane in case the Nazis won 'the battle of the Atlantic" with their U-boats. They didn’t, so the airplane wasn’t needed. The germans had a Gotha converted from a glider that was super huge- no one calls that “wacky” (although it looks wacky, I’ll admit).
Many ideas- especially those on the Allies side- which appear 'wacky" and were dropped were only dropped because there was no longer a need for them.
The USA designed a heavy tank- which was going to be too difficult to transport, but wasn’t needed anyway (you don’t need to go "toe-to toe’ with a Tiger in your tank if you can have airplanes & heavy artillery take it out instead).
The “cruiser sub” with a heavy gun armament was definately one wacky idea that failed. They worked - sorta- in WWI, but were a complete failure in WWII- mainly because of airplanes. The USA built 2 of them, and the French had the ultimate- the Surcouf with an 8" gun!
The Jap/IJN “midget sub” and “sub-borne aircraft” ideas both failed.
I always liked the idea of the “parasite fighter”- carried by larger bombers- the Akron & Macon had their own aircraft for example.
How about wacky tactics? In the battle for Seelow Heights, the Russians pointed searchlights on a nighttime battlefield to blind and disorient the enemy. It didn’t work: the seachlights blinded the Soviet troops instead, and the silhouettes made things easy for the Germans.
I don’t think the bats have been mentioned yet.
http://www.afa.org/magazine/1990/1090bat.asp
“Captain Carr reported tersely that “testing was concluded . . . when a fire destroyed a large portion of the test material.” He did not mention that, in one test, a village simulating Japanese structures burned to the ground. Nor did he state that a careless handler had left a door open and some bats escaped with live incendiaries aboard and set fire to a hangar and a general’s car. Records do not reflect the general’s reaction, but he could not have been pleased.”
It may not be number one, but I’d definitely vote it into the top five most bizarre efforts in the history of warfare.
Grossbottom, please check the OP.
Aftyer that, you might want to check out that thread about describing a superhero based on your username. It’d be a winner.
<nitpick> the German plane wasn’t a Gotha design, it was a Messerchmitt design, more correctly, the Me-323.</nitpick>.
The Japanese weren’t the only ones dealing with midget subs. The Germans, Italians, and British all had midget subs during WWII.
Which were dirigibles. The idea resurfaced after WWII with the Goblin fighter for the B-36.
cornflakes, the Soviet tactic wasn’t a bad one, it was a badly executed version of the British one of “artificial moonlight”.
And they weren’t failures – they worked quite well (although sometimes the users disdn’t get to come home, like with the Japanese mini-subs). There;s an entire book in that series I mentioned on mini-subs.
Funny you should ask… I just started reading The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson. From the review at Amazon:
PS. Also, I heard that the Boomerang grenade never really got past the testing field…
captnkurt
Information Nation
Feasibility depends on which aspect of Star Wars. The idea of Excalibur, the X-ray laser powered by a hydrogen bomb detonation, was pretty wacky. Teller probably only got to the stage of testing it by hiding behind the shield of top secret research, and when it was tested, claimed some lasing was detected, but later had to admit he may have been entirely wrong.
Since Star Wars got less grand in scope and only sought to intercept maybe one missile at a time, it got more feasible. Given the incredible expense to do even that, it seems like the idea of a “missile shield” over the entire continental U.S. sound wacky.
There is an article in today’s San Francisco Chronicle about nutty military projects and they allude as to how some of them are intentionally absurd - the hope is that our foes will see us working on something and they’ll devote huge amounts of manpower and money to work on something that’s nothing more than an elaborate distraction.
They’re still working on it in various forms. Also, depending on whose account you believe, it scared the piss out of the Russkies and hastened the end of the Soviet Union, so in that sense it “worked”, even though it never worked.
The “Brown Note” sound generator.
Possibly…certainly, the Soviets spent a lot of their GDP on missile defence, counterdefense, and detection systems, and given their much lower GDP per person than the US, they could scarcely afford to do so. (They also spent an enormous bundle on their Buran space shuttle development, far more than the US did on the NSTS, and with out a single operational launch to show for it.) On the other hand, a scared-pissless opponent with his thumb on the Big Red End-of-World Button is not exactly a stable strategic situation. Reagan no doubt scared them personally with his “Evil Empire” speech, and given that the last three Premiers prior to Gorbechev were all hardcore ideologues perpetually on death’s door (Andropov in particular) they may have felt they didn’t have much to lose if the US were in fact on the verge of deploying an effective ABM system. Fortunately, both bankruptcy and sanity ensued, but strategic missile defense development is an inherently destabilizing impulse from a strategic and political point of view.
Stranger
What about the wacky idea that if you just kill an evil dictator, then all the people will welcome you as liberators? I heard of a country that actually tried that, but they had almost no spies and knew almost nothing about the country, so when they got there, they were considered the enemy by most of the people, and they never, ever, ever were able to leave.
Wow, that sounds eerily like Iraq. What a coincidence.
I have really come to appreciate how little people inject their politics into GQ. Glad to see you are onboard with the idea.
I think I used to work with one of those guys.
It was hell in there, I tell you.
Dude, talk about a mis-guided missile! :eek:
Tripler
Comrade, send out the dogs! . . . oh sh*t! :smack: