Wednesday 7 September 2011

When PR Goes Wrong

So you are in the middle of the desert and you look into your viewing scope on your tank. At first there is nothing there, then eerily several cows start to lumber towards you threateningly. Do you ignore it and look for solid targets that resemble tanks or do you fire?


Well if you had kept up to date with your daily reading of the Telegraph or Twitter, as an experienced tank commander you might have noticed that BAE Systems latest technology is to 'cloak' the infra red signature of a tank so that it appears as a cow on a scanning device.

Now I have never been in the army, far less been in charge of the weapons system on a tank, but armed with BAE's press release I might now know that if I was in the heat of a battle and several cows advanced at me threateningly I might actually guess that they were tanks.

They say any publicity is good publicity but sometimes is it not better to just shut up? The great advantage of the Klingon Cloaking device in Star Trek is that Captain Kirk never new it was there. If it looked like a cow floating in space at warp speed then he might just have guessed that there were Klingons actually off the starboard bow after all.

Is it me or should the PR man be fired? 

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