Making Marines Into MacGyvers
Marines race scrap-metal “urban canoes” across a Camp Pendleton parking lot.
Photographer: Thomas Prior for Bloomberg Businessweek
At a desk in a trailer along a fence behind a garage, America’s future war fighters are squinting at widgets. If not for the camouflage uniforms, they could be watchmakers, these eight Marines, age 20 to 25, all grasping digital calipers and taking precise measurements of tiny things to put those measurements into a computer-assisted design program and build a 3D model that will be printed in plastic. When the day began, only a few of these men had ever worked in CAD or touched a 3D printer, and now they have only one hour to make a functional multitool.
“The best tool will go on the Wall of Fame,” says Brad Halsey, a tall, exceptionally cheerful man in khakis and sneakers. “The worst tool will also go on the Wall of … Shame? No, failure isn’t shame. It’s just another tool. We’ll call it the Island of Misfit Toys.”