When a little-known agency of the US Army asked Joe Amadee III to come up with an idea for saving lives in Iraq, it was thinking of some contraption. After all, the Rapid Equipping Force, a 5-year-old think tank for military innovation, had come up with some pretty hi-tech stuff: robots to search caves in Afghanistan, an acoustic sniper finder and a hand-held laser pointer that soldiers use to flag down cars at night.

But, instead of a gadget, Amadee proposed a green solution. And so, before long, he and a crew led by an Oklahoma roofing contractor were at a desert base east of Baghdad spraying foam onto tents.

Their plan is to turn all of the Army’s hulking, heat-absorbing tent barracks into rigid shells of 2-inch insulation. The way that would improve soldiers’ lives might be self-evident. What is less obvious is how it also could save their lives.

The key is fuel: The more of it a base uses, the more soldiers are exposed to deadly roadside bombs on fuel convoys. During the US mobilisation in Iraq there wasn’t much time to consider that. Dan Nolan, chief of the power task force at the Virginia-based Rapid Equipping Force, said it came to him indirectly when a commander in al-Anbar province asked about hybrid electricity generation. “What he’s telling you is that the most dangerous thing in Anbar at that time was driving fuel to the Syrian border,” Nolan said.

The assignment went to Bruce D. Jette, former science adviser to the Army chief of staff, and founder of Rapid Equipping Force. Jette, who has a doctoral degree from MIT, became a legend in Afghanistan when he suggested that the Army use robots instead of soldiers to search caves for Taliban fighters. When the fuel challenge came along, wind, solar, geothermal and trash generation were obvious solutions. But Amadee, another REF veteran, was drawn to insulation. “Everybody in the military thought the answer was going to be power generation,” Amadee said. “I thought, ‘We’ve got to stop trying to cool the Horn of Africa.’” Amadee teamed with Glencoe Insulation & Roofing of Okhlahoma. Its machines draw chemicals from 50-gallon drums into a mixture that sprays on like paint and expands into a thick layer of foam. A layer of ultraviolet protection goes over that.

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