...But what the hell did the people buying them think they were doing??

Clickity bomb detector

Who would spend £27K on a bomb detector without absolute proof that they worked....

Anyone whose boss has received a sufficiently large bribe.

Don't forget that the people actually using them would probably in large measure not have been capable of knowing whether they worked or not.

That's quite a depressing way of looking at it...

Did they find any golf balls? I hate losing golf balls.

It's depressing in that it's true the world over.

It's on TV, it's advertised, it costs twenty grand - how can it *not* work? Surely they wouldn't allow someone to sell it otherwise?

And it's not just in the locations where it's sold. I work in Cambridge (in electronic design) where it's considered there's a reasonably high level of technical expertise... and yet we get people with fresh electronic engineer degrees coming for jobs who don't know what the components we use look like; who can't think except in black box ways; who have no idea what happens to electronic assemblies at high pressure, high temperature, high vibration... or often, just on the bench. These are folk who have the technical theory but no practical sense.

And to be honest, even if you doubted that the new toy from high command works, what squaddie is going to risk taking it to bits to see what's in it? 'Technologically unsophisticated' is a lack of education and training, and it's as common in the west as the middle east or Africa.

After all, how many people know how a smart phone works?

Indeed, Neil. And it reminds me of Arthur C Clarke's third law

The issue is that, with technology pervading every aspect of modern life, there is no way that a person can understand every technology. Hence just having to 'accept' some things work, because they do ... and hence the potential for guys such as this to exploit that.

MrsC was in Baghdad in February and the hotel security staff were using this device, as many Iraqi checkpoints did in Basra in 2006. She was about to point it out to the CPT leader (who she knew from Basra), but he said "I know what you're going to say! But we gave up trying to explain. At least WE know there are no bombs on our vehicles!"

God does it, through the power of prayer.

(Although, in placebo controlled, double-blind testing prayer turned out to be slightly more effective and reliable method of communicating than my iPhone).

Whilst this is completely true, the military have an amazing ability to break things. Did no-one ever run one over in a tank?