Slashdot Mirror
Heat Ray Gun Fails Final Test; Nixed From War
eldavojohn writes "The heat ray gun to be deployed in Afghanistan has failed its final test and will not be deployed. US military commanders who have had it in the field now have declined to use it. After being tested more than 11,000 times on around 700 volunteers, it failed to achieve satisfaction from the military and will not be deployed."
That we should have been investing in either freeze or death rays.
I'm sure these things will start showing up in U.S. police departments soon enough.
It didn't fail any tests at all, it was merely not deployed. I can think of multiple reasons not to deploy this. The biggest being that it is really only useful as crowd control during riots, and even then could be relatively easily taken out. There's also the fact that leaving enemies angry enough to shoot at you alive would seem to be a bad idea. Since the US military, the only people using the tech, would not have enough manpower to roundup all the people they used this against, all it would do is cause greater US casualties in the long run.
The truth is that as much as the military is against non-lethal weapons, they can actually save lives on both sides and help in the winning of the war at the same time because you have less casualties which tend to cause the other side to galvanize against you.
Not really.
The truth is "conditioning" pisses people off. Useless missions to touch the edge, raze some troops for non-tactical entertainment, and run off are a good way to show the enemy that we're completely evil and have no respect for life. Defending our borders and encampments is fine; but dipping into enemy lines just to do some damage and run is not.
Unfortunately, any useful military strategy involves penetration. While defending our encampments has obvious tactical advantages, those encampments are worthless if they don't support military motion. Thus, our military is of the predisposition to advance through enemy resistance onto a target.
In any non-lethal strategy, we have problems. If the enemy is allowed to retreat, they will increase resistance further ahead: the 500 troops facing us at the next battle become 1000 troops. If the enemy is left for dead, they trap our troops in a pincer maneuver: the enemy troops immediately behind us don't have to mobilize for interception far ahead, and can prevent our retreat and attack from behind when we encounter more resistance. Alternately, we can take prisoners of war; this is a lot of prisoners to deal with though, quickly mounting to several times the number of active troops.
Thus, the only viable military strategy to win a war is to advance through enemy resistance, inactivating troops we encounter-- that is, killing them or butchering them to uselessness (remove limbs). For those being invaded, a repelling defense eventually wears out the political atmosphere and economics of the invader; but a decapitation exercise is a better strategy for either side. In either case, lethal force is necessary: invaders that don't die will continue to attack until you die for quite a while, without eroding the political atmosphere anywhere near as quickly as casualties.
Support my political activism on Patreon.