TCS: Tech Central Station - "Send it, and We'll Figure Out How to Use It.": "Middle America has a heartening tendency to actually do things for troops in the field. When grunts wrote home noting it was 140 degrees inside their tents, but that the Revolution In Military Affairs  provided them with electricity to power tactical laptops, good people mobbed Walmart's to send $99 air conditioners to the nation's sons and daughters using  one of the DOD's Really Good Things : The APO . It delivers parcels, even those containing air conditioners, to war zones with FedEx speed at 4th Class prices.

So what could Santa deliver to good kids spending the holidays under fire?"

...

Used Tires
Not just any ones, and not the whole donut. What's needed is a program to round up and skive off the Kevlar belts that rim the nation's mountains of balding aircraft radials. This would spare our landfills while affording ingenious Gunnies a prime raw material for spanning hard to fit gaps in improvised explosion shields.

Glass Ceramics
Good old Corningware bowls bounce off concrete, but its ballistic resistance pales in comparison to the tougher stuff that glass makers transform into well named hard discs for computer memory drives. Cheap and readily manufactured, such materials approach the fracture toughness per unit weight of honest to gosh armor ceramics. Adding cesium to the precursor melt beefs up the computer grades, and mass production -- were' talking stovetops and windowpanes here -- can turn them out faster than silicon or boron carbide.

(Via a DefenseTech.)