He and his men had encountered something they could not explain: buckets of urine hanging from the trees. The regimental commander and his intelligence officer exchanged looks as they silently acknowledged that we were firing artillery (at $250 a round) at buckets of urine all over Vietnam."
[snip] for the rest, see <http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/3379C496-BA09-4CDE-A93E-2B36DCF7F36E.htm>
...
Leigh Meyers enhanced this with:
The device was a vial full of bedbugs or fleas with a mini mike/xmitter attached. I don't believe it was ammonia the bugs reacted to, I'm pretty sure it was butyric acid < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butyric_acid >. When the bedbugs smelled human they started jumping around and the special forces op over the ridge with a pair of headphones on would call in...artillery?
They were calling in million dollar F-111 strafing/Napalm raids & B-52 bombing runs on buckets of piss, dirty clothes, and an occasional unlucky water buffalo.
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This is fascinating.
I don't think it's an example of competing technological levels (with the 'simpler' winning) so much as an illustration of a little understood aspect of technological life: hacking.
In the fevered imaginations of media personalities hacking is exclusively something bad people do to wreck and ruin our peaceful lives
-- the 14 year old who "hacks into" the school system to change grades and the email phishing scammer gathering account numbers through 'social engineering' are two year round favorites.
But hacking is not a moral failing; it's an active, engaged approach to complex systems.
In my experience there are two, key elements:
1.) a desire and ability to learn the behaviors and contours of a complex system (not necessarily a computer system...it could be the way your local motor vehicles licensing bureaucracy flows)
2.) the use of that knowledge to make the complex system behave in ways that favor you (or, avoid the problems it creates)
The heart of this is an acquisition of technical savvy; jettisoning faith that things will work out, naivete and blissful lack of knowledge with sufficient information to make a system do what you want or leave you alone. Often, you also possess the ability to predict how a system will behave in response to certain stimuli.
The Vietnamese who used creative mis-directs were hacking the understood behaviors of the American 'people detection' system. Because they used a low tech approach it's possible to miss the larger point in celebration of the victory of "simple" over "complex". It was their technical savvy that enabled them to successfully create this hack.
No doubt, Iraqi guerrillas are doing much the same thing, though few seem to acknowledge it. One of the interesting things about media coverage of the Iraq war, particularly in the US, is how relentlessly shocked many seem to be that Iraqis understand tech and have been able to deal with every device thrown against them thus far...as if they were living in the 5th century and, awed by the machine power on display, would hail their would-be conquerers as gods).
Note the theme: although you may not have advanced technics at your disposal, your understanding of how they work creates, even so, a leveling effect because you're able to exploit system brittleness (and all complex systems are brittle...under unique stresses, they break in interesting ways, making exploit possible).
This is how societies that, on paper, can be labeled less "advanced" become capable of defeating, or at least, vexing, those with more powerful tools.
Even if you don't have the ability to produce F-22s you may be able to neutralize them as a threat if you understand the weapon system's capabilities and behaviors.
.d.