Two days after the war with Iraq began, Jerry Whitaker, who works at the US Army Soldier Systems Center in Natick, Massachusetts, a military research organization, got an e-mail message from Hasbro, the nation's second-largest toy manufacturer.
Hasbro, which makes GI Joe and his acceesorized worlds of war, including a "desert arena" collection introduced after Operation Desert Storm in 1991, wanted the latest information on chemical protection suits.
Whitaker wasn't particularly surprised. The Army and Hasbro have worked together for years.
The US$20.3 billion toy industry is closely watching the Iraq war with an eye toward new pro-duct introductions for Christmas. Seated next to it at the television set, flipping through the same news weeklies and military enthu-siast magazines, is the US$10.3 billion video game industry.
The two industries know, from experience with Desert Storm, the raid of Mogadishu in Somalia and the hunt for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, that new battle tools will be showcased by the armed services, and they could be new battle toys by Christmas.
The relationship is not a handoff, in fact, but a trade.
"The M-16 rifle is based on something Mattel did," said Glenn Flood, a spokesman for the Pentagon, which is looking to toys and electronic games for parts, prototypes and ideas that can be developed effectively and inexpensively as battlefield tools.
Inspiration has come from model airplanes (reconnaissance drones), "supersoaker" water guns (quick-loading assault wea-pons), cheap cellular phones for teenagers (video-capable walkie-talkies) and gaming control panels (for unmanned robotic vehicles).
Because the newest generation of soldiers grew up playing with electronic toys and games, the symbiosis between them is nearly genetic. Today's troops received basic training as kids.
Durability and miniaturization are a toy's basic design briefs. It makes them, in an enhanced military version, eminently suitable for deployment in the field, where stresses and weight are key concerns in troop movement.
Though full development of a new toy takes months, toymakers and retailers, for their part, have been quick off the mark. Hasbro issued a desert Tactical Advisor figure, modeled after the Army's desert Delta Forces, in January. At Toys "R" Us at Times Square in New York, GI Joe's patrol jeeps and strike vehicles have taken positions front and center.
Small Blue Planet, a large independent toy retailer, introduced a series of "Special Forces: Showdown With Iraq" figures, assembled from parts of existing figures to duplicate as accurately as possible what was observed in the news media during the troop buildup in Kuwait. Two of the four models sold out immediately.
"We started work when the `Showdown' buzzword hit the airwaves," said Anthony Allen, Small Blue Planet's president.
"There's fierce competition among manufacturers to get the new things out first," he said.
Christian Borman, a president of Plan-B Toys, which makes military action figures based on the search for bin Laden in Afghanistan, as well as a Delta Force sniper, outfitted a Marine Force Recon figure last month from television coverage in Kuwait.
"If you know what you're looking for, you can see it on the screen," he said.
At the American International Toy Fair last month, Borman had a piece of sales advice from a buyer for the Army and Air Force Exchange Service, which oper-ates stores on military bases.
RSS