January 10, 2025: Palestinians are outraged at the Israeli practice of using body parts from dead Palestinian gunmen for treating Israeli soldiers and civilians as well as Palestinians. The most obvious organ used is skin which is used for replacing skin loss due to fire, explosion or other types of incidents that remove or badly damaged skin. Despite Palestinian protests at using the skin of dead Palestinians, Israeli hospitals continue to collect it, mainly for Palestinian and Israeli civilian victims of skin injuries.

Damaged skin is a major problem among soldiers everywhere. Twenty years ago the American military took inadvertent advantage of those fears by introducing Active Defense System or ADS technology. ADS is a microwave transmitter that is directed at a hostile crowd to scatter it. The microwave energy creates a burning sensation on the skin of its victims, causing them to want to leave the area, or at least distract them. ADS has a range of about 500 meters. ADS is carried on a hummer, along with a machine-gun for those who are not put off by intense skin pain. ADS was never employed as designed though one unit sent to Iraq in 2010 but never used at all.

ADS has been in development for over a decade, and the marines were ready to take delivery of some of the systems before September 11, 2001. But there were always delays. First there were demands to make sure ADS would not cause permanent damage or kill people. The trouble with non-lethal weapons is that, under the right conditions, these devices, including tear gas, can cause serious injuries, or even kill people. There is no such thing as a non-lethal weapon, only less lethal weapons. This makes commanders reluctant to use these weapons, knowing that eventually people will die, and the troops will be lambasted for misusing non-lethal weapons.

ADS has been ready to go for years, but not enough commanders and senior officials were willing to sign off on it. There were some accidents while testing ADS that led to severe burns. This happened a few times when some of the volunteer testers got more exposure to the ADS microwaves than they were supposed and needed skin grafts to repair the damage. The military could have taken advantage of this but when people in Congress heard about it, further use of ADS was cancelled. Like poison gas and biological weapons, some items are too gruesome to consider using. ADS ended up in the gruesome category and was gone for good.

Meanwhile, soldiers still had battlefield skin problems. Fifteen years ago soldiers fighting in the deserts of Iraq and southern Afghanistan endured lots of burns, abrasions, insect bites and scratches. While the medics could treat these minor injuries, the troops preferred to obtain their own cures. But none of the available ointments seemed to do the job well. Then the wife of a soldier developed a new skin balm which she called Combat Ready Balm. Commercially this was a profitable item. That made it possible to send thousands of 59 ml jars of Combat Ready Balm to military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan. Soldiers and marines bought a lot more at $25 a jar because, as most of them pointed out, it worked. The balm was even useful during Afghan Winters, when dry skin replaced insect bites.