« Mark Spencer gets carded! | Main | Sprint's WiMAX build - Now more than ever »
October 09, 2007
Passion and Feeding the Troops
On Monday, I took a (way too quick) run through the AUSA (Association of the United States Army) event down at the D.C. Convention Center, walking around on the trade show floor and getting a head full of stuff.
You can't talk mission-critical communications in the military these days without having VoIP and data on the menu; data is much more important these days, but networking gear is a must regardless. I think I laughed out loud in the press room when I saw one company's press release announcing an Ethernet switch that looked like they took something off the shelf and painted it camo.
General Dynamics has a lot of interesting hardened networking tech, but if you start asking them if they expect to branch out of military sales into the civilian sector, they'll tell you that Cisco is the 800 lb Gorilla. "You remember how you could never get fired for buying IBM... well..."
I think the thing that about broke my heart, however, was walking by the U.S. Army food display and listening to the U.S. Army civilian employee on the show floor talk up the virtues of the Unitized Group Ration-Express. UGR-E, in Mil-speak
It wasn't so much the subject matter that was sexy -- I mean, c'mon, we're talking about a big box that's one step up above the dreaded MRE designed to deliver a hot meal for 18 warfighters (we're at war, you don't call them soldiers these days) -- but the passion, enthusiasm, pride and conviction this gentleman had for talking about his product.
Basically, the group-meal-in-a-box allows troops, er warfighters to pull some tabs, add some water, and get a hot meal in 30-45 minutes without the muss and fuss of either having to haul out food in insulated containers or sending out a mobile kitchen and a cook to make it. Inside the box, there's 4 six pound trays of food - entrée, vegetable, starch, dessert, plus snacks, utensils, serving utensils, beverages, and dining trays.
When you don't have a McD's in the middle of Iraq or Afghanistan and have been eating MREs for a week, this isn't a bad thing. You also have to understand that food is important for morale.
UGR-Es eliminate the need for convoys to remote places in the field; they can be put in the back of the truck and dropped off, no fuss-no muss, no IED risk. They're so popular, they get picked up off the shipping dock and air freighted straight out to the field.
The second-generation UGR-E will replace the injection-molded plastic trays with fiber coated trays that are cheaper ($5/tray) and lighter. Less weight, more recyclable, better for the environment.
But again, it was the person talking about the product, what they've done with it, what the plan to do with it, how they're working to get scrambled eggs into a tray pack so they just add some water and pull a tab and you can get hot eggs for breakfast that's amazing. Or how they have "box o' Joe" container that you fill with water, dash a little water in the heating elements and 30-40 minutes later you've got a nice hot pot of water...
Well, you get my point.
If I were hiring, I'd be tempted to offer this guy a job in two seconds. But he's so enthusiastic about what he's doing and he knows what it means for his customers -- the warfighters -- that it would likely take 2-3 times his salary to even get him to think about it.
Posted by dmohney at October 9, 2007 11:58 PM