TV for those who enjoy massacres

Medium cool for heat ray guns

For that part of the audience now filling the old SoF segment of those yearning to see someone bayoneted, progress has fulfilled this by showing the host machine-gunning a parked civilian automobile with a dummy behind the wheel while Blackwater employees look approvingly on.

If that is not sufficiently trigger happy, there's kit to be had from Britain, the AS50, made by Accuracy International, pumping heavy slugs through cinder blocks and into head-sized melons. The subtext: If you're hiding behind a wall in Iraq, we can still pop your head like a troublesome zit.

In every other episode, a cameo is reserved for the wizard of limpet mines, Bangalore torpedoes, detonation cord, plastique and shaped charges, Sidney Alford of Alford Technologies.

Euro arms developers have got wind of the opportunity presented by Futureweapons and have wasted no time in getting their PR efforts onto it, presumably to get their wares in front of American buyers. Notable is Bofors of Sweden. Sweden appears to have little need of a chemical and radiologically sealed fully automated artillery piece called the Archer, but there is always the Pentagon or Nigeria, the latter perhaps providing an opportunity to call down a barrage on women who presume to protest at oil terminals.

There is much backslapping between the host and an arms manufacturer over the development of novel explosives for armour-piercing rocket launchers, the better to attack buildings held by insurgents and terrorists. They are said to be superior because the new munitions contain two charges, one to make a small hole in the side of the building, the second to incinerate everything inside. Claimed to be superior in avoiding collateral damage because, hmmm, well, one forgets why upon watching some building being transformed into sticks and plaster in fond slow motion and glorious replay.

As an educational tool for measuring delusion within the Department of Defense and political establishment, Futureweapons delivers. Since it is devoted to the demonstration of potential massive escalations in force as an answer to everything, it mirrors the philosophy of the US military, capable of turning a foreign country into a cauldron of misery while losing and turning the entire citizenry and rest of the world against it with merciless exhibitions of sophisticated mechanised cruelties.