Thursday, January 25, 2007

Portable Gods


Yesterday's demonstration of the active denial system - a directed-energy weapon that heats the water in human skin to an uncomfortable temperature - seems to have gone nicely:

During the first media demonstration of the weapon yesterday, airmen fired beams from a large dish antenna mounted atop a Humvee at people pretending to be rioters and acting out other scenarios that US troops might encounter in war zones....

Anyone hit by the beam immediately jumped out of its path because of the sudden blast of heat throughout the body. While the heat was not painful, it was intense enough to make the participants think their clothes were about to ignite….

"There should be no collateral damage to this," said Senior Airman Adam Navin, 22, of Green Bay, Wis., who has served several tours in Iraq.
This is the first time I've ever heard the ADS described as "not painful"; the whole point of the weapon is to produce a level of pain that people can't tolerate.

Beyond that, an angry mob whose members are simultaneously trying to get out of the path of a heat ray sounds to me like an unbeatable recipe for "collateral damage."

“Cheer up,” says Dick Destiny, “it may never happen!”
The military microwaver, you see, has always been coming but never quite arriving, perhaps one reason being because no sensible officer wants to see his career go down in flames over it when it's unleashed on a defenseless crowd and creates an atrocity that's captured on TV camera.
Although I agree with DD overall, I’m not entirely reassured by this argument. If a "sensible officer" doesn’t want to deploy the ADS, there are several ways of getting around that obstacle. Also, one nation’s atrocity is another nation’s weak-willed overindulgence; there are plenty of commentators and politicians whose biggest problem with the ADS will be that it gives "evildoers" a chance to escape.

That said, I do think the ADS is likelier to be used in a more relaxed and intimate setting, like a torture chamber.

Or perhaps it could serve as an invisible barrier against illegal border crossings. That could be very effective, especially if the pain rays were accompanied by a 75-foot, flag-waving, fire-breathing hologram of Michelle Malkin. In a post recently cited by Subtopia, Architectures of Control discusses the possible uses of projected or holographic images in conflicts large and small, and reproduces this snippet from a fascinating document called Nonlethal Weapons: Terms and References:


This reminds me of the “techno-colonial dream" described in 1883 by a New York Times op-ed piece, in which a phonograph serves as a "portable god" with which to overawe the savages. And of Henry Stanley, who used a concealed battery to shock African natives who shook his hand.

In other news, police in Tijuana are patrolling the streets with slingshots.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

For all the cash they spent on this thing, and I am sure it was a lot, it doesn't seem very effective.
You can jump out of the way of it, unlike a bullet. You can move away from the pain, unlike a Taser.
And how BIG would one of these have to be to really control a raging mob. Especially one with some sort of projectile weapons (stones, not bullets)?
Gindy

Anonymous said...

The military microwaver, you see, has always been coming but never quite arriving, perhaps one reason being because no sensible officer wants to see his career go down in flames over it when it's unleashed on a defenseless crowd and creates an atrocity that's captured on TV camera.

You've hit on the basic problem with nonlethal weapons.

The military is taught to kill the enemy. Nonlethal weapons don't kill.

So they're said to be suited to applications like crowd control. But they have to pack enough of a wallop that some people will be vulnerable to them. Since you can't choose your crowd, some of those vulnerable people are likely to be present, and they're likely to be civilians. So you may wind up killing or maiming them.

Or maybe someone dials up the power on the microwaver too high. Mistakes can be made.

Nonlethal weapons aren't deadly enough for serious fighting but they're too deadly for crowd control.

CKR

Jonathan Siberry said...

im not sure i agree, the army is trained to kill yes but also to hit targets. if the gun fires rubber bullets or real ones the enemy is likely to fall down and stay down for a while.

so the military are not trained to kill per cay, but to use weapons that kill and as long as non lethal weapons mock real ones there is little problem

Non lethal weapons work fine on crowds such as sleeping gas or tear gas, pepper spray or a fire hose have all be proven efficient methods of crowd control.

the new weapon sounds great but it must have some side effects, your screwing with your insides

personally i prefer crime prevention and prefer guarding my assets with security cages (or locking people in them)

anyway i think it probably needs more testing to be secure, for now prevention is the key

Anonymous said...

I beg to differ with you, jonathan, but my Marine Corps husband is a military guy and he was trained to kill people. He was trained to do this both on the ground (infantry) and in the air (bombs from planes). He has never done it and cannot now as he is retired, but he was trained that way.
Gindy

Anonymous said...

Jonathan, I'll add to Gindy's comment.

I was in the position at one time of trying to sell nonlethal technologies (not this one) to the military. What I said above is exactly the way they put their objections.

CKR