#1 There are so many brilliant ideas like this that fall by the wayside for a dumb reason. The NGOs that would use these are continually reinventing the wheel. They seem to have no grasp of taking a technology like this, or innumerable others, and running with it, developing it, and advancing it like the US military or commercial entities would. For example, were a private corporation or the military to run with an idea like this, they would determine if it would work, where it would work, how many they would need for various situations, what its drawbacks were, and was it cost effective. Then they would acquire a number and have them available for deployment. But NGOs do none of that. And this is why, when there is a disaster like the tsunami, the US Navy is there and helping in a few days, long before the NGOs send a few people there to *study* the situation and make recommendations, hoping that someone will fund them and provide them with materiels and other support--all of which have to be procured, in whatever form, and delivered.
And this inability isn't just in disaster relief. Hundreds of good ideas just aren't pursued. There are no "lessons learned" that are then passed on to others in different situations, no prior preparation and training for those in similar situations. Again, reinventing the wheel each time, often based on what the NGO personnel have picked up on the news or by reading magazines. No institutional knowledge. |