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US Deploys 'Heat-Ray' In Afghanistan
Koreantoast writes "The United States military has deployed Raytheon's newly developed Active Denial System (ADS), a millimeter-wave, 'non-lethal' heat-ray, to Afghanistan. The weapon generates a 'burning sensation' that is supposedly harmless, with the military claiming that the chance of injury is at less than 0.1%; numerous volunteers including reporters over the last several years have experienced its effects during various trials and demonstrations. While US military spokesperson Lt. Col. John Dorrian states that the weapon has not yet been operationally used, the tense situation in theater will ensure its usage soon enough. Proponents of ADS believe the system may help limit civilian deaths in counterinsurgency operations and provide new, safer ways to disperse crowds and control riots, but opponents fear that the system's long-term effects are not fully known and that the device may even be used for torture. Regardless, if ADS is successful in the field, we'll probably see this mobile microwave at your next local protest or riot."
... is the defrost setting any good?
Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
That active denial system sounds eerily like the thermal discouragement beam...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFRbGppLaUI
FoOd fOr ThOUghT.
Here's how to create microwave-resistant clothing.
That miserable desert wasn't hot enough that they had to throw in a 'heat ray'?
I'm a bit concerned about how this might interact with my tinfoil hat... and cod piece!
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
It's been known for over fifty years that microwaves, at just a few milliwatts per square centimeter, cause cataracts. That's why there are rather tight limits on microwave exposure around radar and telecom equipment.
Spraying microwaves around and possibly inducing mass blindness is not going to look good in the history books.
FTFA: "the US military says the chance of injury from the system is 0.1%. It's already been tested more than 11,000 times"
So, there has already been eleven injuries from that?
Rather than high-tech indiscriminate non-lethal weapons, the US should invest much more in intelligence gathering and infiltration. Which is difficult, but just because slapping a shiny new weapon into the battlefield is easier, doesn't mean it's better.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSMyY3_dmrM
Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) used in Pittsburgh.
Expect the heat-ray very soon.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The cops or soldiers that use them will work out how to make the weapon have far worse effects than were intended.They *always* do.
For example, trapping fleeing civilians against a wall or fence so that they can't esape, or more than one beam focussed on one person. (Incidentally, one technique with plastic bullets or baton rounds is to ricochet them off the street, so that they shatter and rebound up into the victims face)
Like tasers, they say that they're a 'non-lethal' alternative to guns, but in reality they still use guns the same as they always did, but now use tasers when they would just have grabbed someone & handcuffed them, or just spoke to them.
I don't really know anything about microwave physics...or any kind of wave physics, but would holding a metal sheet in front of you (either flat or curved) be effective in dispersing the energy directed towards the crowd/enemy, or maybe even direct it back towards the operator of the device?
The 'burning sensation' was developed and extensively tested based on the US military's prior experience in the Red Light district of Amsterdam and Eddie Murphy's stand up comedy.
The abbreviation, which could mean any number of things, is telling of the military habit to name destructive, harmful things with innocuous sounding phrases that do not imply damage "Active Denial System" could just as easily have been a web term or a feature of an antivirus program. Imagine a TV ad: "Norton's Active-Denial-System or ADS is proven to..." This is shared by government which will often use formal, even flowery language to cover up a practice which is morally or ethically contentious:
For instance, a military spokeman or officer or a high-up politician cannot very well come out and say this without coming off badly from it: "We believe that as we kill off our opponents in the Taliban a number of civilian casualties are necessary to allow our victory."
Therefore you get pretentious, padded-out diction like this: "We concede that the Taliban are a formidable foe who possess a humanitarian record that we can only describe as deplorable. However if we are to restore and preserve the freedoms of the Afghan people, and we think you'd agree with us on this, that a certain number of hazards for those present in the field are bound up in these transitional times are justified in the context of the achievement of the coalition's greater goals: We're in the sphere of granting those formerly under oppression a life of liberty, free of oppression and terrorism."
This sort of puffed out prose is a long-time euphemism which has only proliferated over the 100 and more years - masses of Latin words lengthen a point, and those who do listen can't be bothered digging out the true meaning which was basically that civilian deaths can't be avoided and are actually needed for the coalition to win. The end justifies the means. But in our hypothetical wording up there this was disguised: The great enemy of clear writing is insincerity. A well-known author named George Orwell wrote much on this and his essays are recommended.
This is totally horrible.
Just like tasers, this will give nincompoops of military the freedom to hurt civilians and innocent people on the grounds that it won't 'harm' or 'kill' them.
It just gives them more incentive to be trigger happy against the civilians because the aggressors (read: military or police personnel) won't fear consequences of being court martialed for murder and there will be less public outcry against 'harmless' methods of crowd control.
This is just an alternative to the golden military rule: "Double check your fucking target", turning it into "Shoot your fucking target, if it happens to be the wrong one, just apologize".
yep, or the military will buy ADS2 in a few years time, and flog the old ones cheap to police departments (which is normally how military equipment ends up in the hands of civilian police)
FGD 135
Ever felt one of those sensory illusion devices that has a stack of parallel tubes with alternating hot and cold lines? The hot lines are not enough to burn you, but when you put your skin across the stack, your heat sensing system interprets the feeling as intense burning. Closest thing I ever felt to the black box.
That means you point it at 1000 people and one of them will be injured. In what way? Skin burns or toasted cerebral cortex?
If some over-aggressive soldier leaves it on too long, does that make the number .2% or 10%?
How long do we have to point it at people to change that to 100%? 1000 times too long or just a few seconds too much?
Lots of things can be used for torture, but the list of things that leave no evidence of torture behind is much shorter.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
This is why I prefer the M-60 machine gun. After firing a few thousand rounds of 7.62mm NATO down the street, all you need to clean up is a firehose.
The "safer" a weapon is, the less the restrictions and controls over it's use, and the more often it is used.
As we have seen with tasers, people begin to see them as a tool which achieves their objective with minimal repercussions. There follows a normalisation process resulting in usage becoming considered appropriate even in situations where other forms of violence would be considered unacceptable. Like when trying to stop a student making a scene as he is leaving the premises as requested. Tasers were touted as a less violent option to bullets, instead they seem to be used as a more violent option to wrestling (and, if you go by Youtube, talking).
Even if the technology is 100% safe and cannot result in permanent injury, it is still the exercise of pain and violence in controlling civilians and must be very tightly controlled. Instead there seems to be very little interest in the misapplication of violence by officials if nobody dies.
Seriously, making people feel like they are on fire in order to "disperse crowds"?
One of them will be serious injured. (statistics an lies...)
But still it surely better than the current mandate the soldier in afganistan have. Their main weapon now are bullits and heavier variant, and it is no suprise that a lot of people are killed because of this. Some might be civiliians (it is not a traditional war after all). If you point a automatic weapon at a crowd, the odds that you hurt lots of people is much higher.
A better solution would be that the US invasion force would have to keep to laws like police would have to, but having less lethal weapons might be a working alternative.
... in Afghanistan they smile and wave as you drive by. Then they whip out their cell phones and trigger the IED. How's your heat ray against that?
If this is just an excuse to see if a new gizmo works by harassing a few villagers with it, it'll make an excellent recruiting tool for the Taliban.
Have gnu, will travel.
And so the use of force to perpetrate democracy, freedom, and capitalism continues unabated, it seems. Brought to you by the same group of people responsible for the fair-minded genius of ACTA.
CS was used to flush the Viet Cong out.
GB use was also hinted at.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Where people might be hesitant to use lethal force due to the consequences, I suspect that they'll be all to willing to use "non-lethal" weapons as soon as things start to look remotely ugly. Or possibly for no reason at all. It's a lot harder to prove that an incident occurred if it doesn't leave bodies behind. Of course, they'll know their actions are wrong and will attempt to make it illegal to record incidents where the weapon is used, much as police departments are trying to prevent recordings of officers now so that there will be no documented proof of police brutality.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Actually, I think this weapon, oh sorry, device might have a frightening psychological effect on folk who can't really comprehend what the thing is doing. They know about guns that shoot bullets. But this thing didn't shoot anything, but they're suddenly feeling uncomfortably hot.
"Yo, they're using black magic! Is that allowed by the Geneva Conventions?"
Remember, when the first US troops arrived in Afghanistan, the Afghanis thought that mirrored sunglasses had X-ray vision, so that the soldiers could peep at their wives. Even if the local Taliban leader has a microwave oven at home and tries to explain:
"Do no worry! It is harmless! It is just like my microwave oven here . . . oh, um . . . "
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
While such a device is too expensive to replace every instance of goons with blunt objects, it(or its scaled down for trade-show demonstrations counterpart), is a virtually perfect torture device, and people are frankly right to worry.
By all accounts, being hit with it feels like being on fire, except without leaving a mark(and without killing nerves, so the pain isn't self-limiting). The theory is that, if using it on a crowd or people approaching something sensitive, it will be a self-limiting deterrent because they will just move.
If the person it is aimed at happens to be restrained at the time, rather horrible agony of substantial duration could be trivially inflicted, all without the pesky physical damage that the lower-tech goon route usually involves...
The Agonizer! Please tell me the project manager looked like Leonard Nimoy with a beard.
The ADS being an EM emitter, I wonder what would happen if the demonstrators decided to carry corner reflectors with them.
GPG 0x1B479C78
The purpose of such clothing is not to afford the wearer absolute protection or provide a cloak of invulnerability, as it were. The purpose is to neutralize the weaponry - which is intended to inflict invisible pain on the recipient. If induction heating causes the shirt to burst into flames, the pain is no longer invisible. That sort of thing doesn't look good for the cameras.
This won't be used in situations where they want to cause death.
No sig today...
Was there are old lady administering the test? Did she have a little needle at your neck?
On a related note, having any weird dreams lately?
unfortunatly the chances of cameras catching you bursting into flames are slim.
The chances or any cameras which do catch you bursting into flames not being confiscated for the sake of national security are even slimmer.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Quite true. However, inventing devices specifically to inflict pain, is something very different from misusing a general purpose device to this end. The whole mentality of painful non-lethal weapons should be questioned: e.g., one could disable people with foam, or by throwing a net over them etc..., which is painless, or one could disable people with painful Tasers. See the difference in attitudes?
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
But reportedly, not death.
And that's my point.
Given misuse of this or a dozen men with fully automatic weapons, this will cause injuries. Bullets through your brainpan tend to cause death.
Are you really arguing that we need to worry about an injury rate of 0.3% or 3% or 30%, when the alternative is death? Because that sort of idiocy is what I was pointing out as a very poor rationale for holding back use on this weapon.
This is a weapon used by SOLDIERS for crowd control. They are currently using automatic weapons. Why is it so hard to see that there is a very, very good chance that this is a better option?
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor