US Deploys 'Heat-Ray' In Afghanistan 406
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."
Very troubling (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Very troubling (Score:2, Insightful)
Bah. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Very troubling (Score:2, Insightful)
As opposed to bullets, which have been known to cause death. Seems fair enough. Cataracts vs. death?
It'll be just like plastic bullets (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Failure rate? (Score:3, Insightful)
Because we al know when the cops show up to bust up a crowd of 1,000 protestors, no one gets hurt.
Re:Bah. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bah. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a binary choice.
An investment in intel won't necessarily stop riots, especially riots calculated to provoke violent retaliation without regard to own-side casualties. Less-lethal weapons won't produce bloody martyr cell phone footage. :) Smart opponents want martyrs, especially when the martyrs aren't their own operative and are just expendable locals they may not care for anyway or actively dislike.
Intel isn't something you can (always) buy. though that IS a good idea if done carefully.
Horrible (Score:4, Insightful)
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".
Re:Failure rate? (Score:3, Insightful)
Terms like "pre-existing medical conditions" in the press can also get that number down even if your family has a forensic pathologist.
Re:Failure rate? (Score:1, Insightful)
Oh, yes, because the politicians in power are always right and anyone who disagrees is a bused-in mercenary who creates gratuitous mayhem.
Umm... .1%? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Concerned that it could be used for torture? (Score:5, Insightful)
"safer" means used more (Score:5, Insightful)
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"?
Good against riots, but ... (Score:4, Insightful)
... 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.
Re:Bah. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a binary choice.
An investment in intel won't necessarily stop riots, especially riots calculated to provoke violent retaliation without regard to own-side casualties. Less-lethal weapons won't produce bloody martyr cell phone footage. :) Smart opponents want martyrs, especially when the martyrs aren't their own operative and are just expendable locals they may not care for anyway or actively dislike.
Intel isn't something you can (always) buy. though that IS a good idea if done carefully.
While I agree with most of your points (good post), I am personally of the opinion that good intelligence would ALSO impede those kinds of riots you talk about, if not immediately then in the long run, by eliminating the ringleaders of the Taliban, which would incite those riots. Using the microwave weapon to quell the riots, even though non-lethal, will cause resentment as much as a few dead rioters would. Totally IMHO.
Re:Very troubling (Score:2, Insightful)
And so it goes.... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Horrible (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Very troubling (Score:5, Insightful)
The "Protocol on Laser Weapons" has nothing to do with this issue.
The weapon under discussion is not a laser. The wavelength it emits is at least a thousand times longer. It comes out of a waveguide, not out of a optical lens.
As With Tazers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You can protect yourself from the ADS (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a missing ingredient in that recipe: a grain of salt. For instance, it says there that this "protects against most RF and EMF based attacks, including: ... Dielectric heating which causes cataracts". WTF? How can it protect your eyes, unless you wrap your head with the treated cloth?
Protection against unwanted electromagnetic fields is a technology called electromagnetic compatibility [wikipedia.org]. Unless you know what you are doing and use complex test equipment, results may not be what you expect.
Psychological Effect (Score:4, Insightful)
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 . . . "
Re:Failure rate? (Score:3, Insightful)
I just love it. Once, a long long time ago, people were upset that the army uses lethal weapons to disperse unarmed crowds in conflict areas. So the army sits down to develop non-lethal weapons - they cost more than guns, they are usually harder to operate (sorry, no citation) and place the soldiers in more danger (you are safer if you just shoot the opponent).
What happens? Is everyone happy that the army is trying to lower the death counts in those conflict areas? No, people complain: "This is not safe", "this causes cataracts", "this hurts someone in 0.1% of the cases" (notice: injury, not death), "this makes them unhappy", "this causes chronic impotency". I mean, WTF? yes, we want to find safer weapons*, but let's give them some slack, at least they stopped using friggin' bullets in their friggin' heads!
* - Safer weapon - the oxymoron of the year!
Re:You can protect yourself from the ADS (Score:2, Insightful)
I imagine if you wear such treated clothing in an airport terahertz scanner, you would fall under suspicion and be taken to a private room for further investigation.
Re:Very troubling (Score:5, Insightful)
What are you talking about? The weapon system HAS been tested, TFA points out it's "already been tested more than 11,000 times on around 700 volunteers." And there's nothing in article 2 requiring testing anyway. As much as you would like to apply common sense definitions to legal documents, it doesn't work. Furthermore, cataracts do not fall under the definition of "permanent blindness" in the protocol. Cataract surgery is a common outpatient procedure and can certainly restore one's sight to better than 20/200 corrected. Finally, as the previous poster was saying, even if there were some slight possibility of permanent blindness, that itself is not a war crime. Bullets can cause permanent blindness too, btw, as can mines, mortars, and almost anything on the battlefield, up to and including a blow on the head with a rock. If the worst thing a weapon has going for it is that it may, in some limited circumstances, cause cataracts, it would be one of the safest weapons ever devised.
So, in short, you're wrong. You have not demonstrated in any way that the use of this weapon could be classified as a war crime.
Re:Failure rate? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah. Police forces always are, always have been, and always will be, a model of conduct. They only hit with the force needed to violent people, non-violent demostrator or even by-stander who happen to be near are safe and won't be hit without provocation. Police brutality is an oxymoron.
The agressions from police officers caught in camera are just optical illusions.
Really, tell me... where do you live?
Re:Torture? Give me a break! (Score:3, Insightful)
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...
Re:Horrible (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but you need to shut the fuck up. The military is not some gang of murderers.
Soldiers already have automatic weapons, high explosives, and incendiary weapons. If some sociopath in the military wanted to hurt someone, they are already better able to do it.
Scenario: There's a bunch of protestors, unarmed, but they're filling the streets, keeping soldiers from getting to the actual enemy.
Case 1: They don't have the ADS, or any other less-than-lethal weapon. They fire several rounds into the air, which fails to disperse the crowd. They then fire on the crowd, killing dozens and wounding many more.
Case 2: They have ADS. They use it, and the crowd disperses enough for them to pass through. Several people suffer 1st-degree burns, and one goes blind in one eye.
Which case would you prefer?
Re:NO (Score:2, Insightful)
False choice (Score:3, Insightful)
This won't be used in situations where they want to cause death.
Re:NO (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:You can protect yourself from the ADS (Score:5, Insightful)
really it was his fault that I fucked him to death with a knife.
His body wanted him to run away faster but he didn't.
So it was his fault!
Re:Enquiring minds want to know (Score:1, Insightful)
Does a whining dog sound more pleasurable to you?
I can handle that, if I know it will stop when the training is complete.
Well, maybe they increase the sound level, in order to fight back.
I can handle that, if I know it will stop when the training is complete.
While the non-lethality to people has been tested, I don't know if they also tested the non-lethality to the lawn. :-)
I can handle that, if you kids get off my lawn!
Re:Failure rate? (Score:2, Insightful)
Indeed, even lethal weapons are rather harmless, except for people in certain pre-existing medical conditions. Those conditions are commonly referred to as "being alive."
Re:Very troubling (Score:1, Insightful)
Do you really believe the way they are tested will reflect the way they are abused in the field?
Re:It'll be just like plastic bullets (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And so it goes.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Failure rate? (Score:5, Insightful)
The argument here is similar to that of taser - that you would injure more people by not having this tool and having to disperse crowd in other ways (i.e. tear gas, water cannons, possible gunfire).
Of course, the problem is that it ends up being used to solve problems it wasn't initially designed for, such as torturing without leaving marks, just like taser did.
Re:Very troubling (Score:1, Insightful)
Sounds like an important issue left to resolve in said 1980 convention.
Re:Torture? (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:Assault (Score:1, Insightful)
when you work outside the system it would bear down on you and destroy you. That kind of talk will get you dismissed as a nut at best. At worse you become a "domestic terrorist", and there are all sorts of justifications used to violate your rights when you are put in that category.
If some one opened fire every time a "unruly" crowd was knocked to the ground in agony with one of these weapons. It would just be used as an excuse to use such a weapon against "dangerous" crowds.
If you bring costly lawsuits down on the manufacturer of these devices, the police and security forces that use them, and the government that mandated their use I believe you will get a lot further. You must use the system to destroy the system from within. We still live in a day and age where it is possible to find an independent judge. And it is still possible to fight the government in a civil court and win a lot of dough for your trouble.
Once there are a few cases won various local police departments, with their tight budget constraints, are going to be very wary of using their shiny new toys on citizens. A chief of police does not really want to answer to a city council or governor for losing the government a few million bucks in a court case. And ultimately it is the leadership within law enforcement organizations that set policy on when, how and if these devices are used.
For private security, if I'm not trespassing, they have no jurisdiction. If I am at a mall, and I have not been formally asked to leave, then it is a criminal assault. And there are numerous people you can take to civil court for that. I'm not just talking ideals here, there have been a few news articles on pepper spray and taser use on customers (usually in malls or big box stores). If I am not even on private property and it happens, then it is just plain nuts and they have opened themselves up for some serious hurt from any moderately competent lawyer.
I know slashdotters like to go on about how a big company can get away with anything because they can afford infinite amount of lawyers and legal fees. I've worked for big companies that have lost many costly cases against individuals. I even participated in a class action suit against my own (very wealthy and powerful) employer and won. Criminal cases are pretty easy to squirm out consistently of with an expensive lawyer, civil cases are less of a sure thing for the rich and powerful.
Re:You can protect yourself from the ADS (Score:1, Insightful)
This is why I have troll/flamebait comments set to +5.
I didn't mod you down, and I've never met the person who modded you down, but I know that, right now, both of us are having a laugh at your expense. I mean, seriously, who writes something like this with a straight face:
or this:
Seriously.
Dude, if you're that angry over a "troll moderation," or something you read on the internet, it's time to turn off the computer and go outside. Perhaps reevaluate your priorities, or your station in life, because a comment like yours could only be written by someone living a very sad life, in a very small world.
Re:Horrible (Score:5, Insightful)
I prefer case 3: our politicians don't put the world's best killing force in a position where killing people is not appropriate.
Our army is not trained in non-violence; they are trained to kill people and blow shit up. When killing people and blowing shit up is not on the menu, then they should not be involved in the situation.
Once we begin your scenario, where our military is facing down a bunch of civilian protesters, everyone has already lost. It should be police forces facing them down, because that is police-work. It doesn't matter if we have an ADS or a magical calm-the-fuck-down ray - our military should not be involved in the situation at all.
Re:Horrible (Score:3, Insightful)
How about this: The military deserves what it gets when it goes to places where it isn't welcome (Afghanistan and Iraq) and so the civilians have every fucking right to protest day and night, and your military trying to disperse the civilians (in their own country) is just more violations to add to the invasion of the civilians' land.
The preferred thing would be for the military to respect its advertised principles and leave the protesters alone. Have to disperse them? Do it peacefully without hurting them or simply don't try.
Use your often-neglected brain for a second here, your military is fighting against a ghost enemy: Unrecognized entity, unrecognized lands, and unrecognized faces. Your ghost enemy easily recruits more personnel because of your military's abuses and violations of the civilians, day in and day out; including maiming kids, killing innocent civilians and turning wedding parties into funerals. Your ghost enemy easily recruits civilians who wish to take (rightfully so) revenge against your armed forces.
So using this method to disperse crowds simply adds more fuel to the fire burning inside the hearts of the civilians of the invaded countries and therefore turning them into easy-to-manipulate would-be members of your ghost enemy.
There, now what would you like to have?
Case 1: Using this method to enable your ghost enemy to recruit even more personnel.
Case 2: Try to disperse the crowds peacefully, in order to drain their anger instead of elevating it. I'm sorry, but you have no grip on reality for other reasons, such as:
Although I didn't specifically say 'gangmembers', instead I said nincompoops and aggressors; which many of them simply are. Reasons? Tell me what would you call things such as torture, killing civilians, firing at civilians without checking targets... as well as lots and lots of aggressive actions against the civilians.
Do you think we've forgotten Gitmo and Abu Ghareeb? Do you think we've forgotten that Afghani taxi driver? Or that wedding that was bombed?
Your military has a extravagant record of war crimes and violations against civilians in the world, especially Iraq and Afghanistan, and then you want us to praise it and stop doubting its integrity and principles? Face it, a large sum of your armed forces are just as bad as the 'terrorists' they're after; which is what anybody with a brain can conclude after seeing with eyes unclouded by bias the horrible acts your military does against people in invaded countries.
Oh, and don't tell me those are actions of a few crazy and defective soldiers; those are the principles encouraged by your entire military pyramid, starting with the president (Bush and Obama) through your defense secretary (Dick) and then down through your generals and commanders.
If your military had any sense of integrity, then why did the aggressors of Abu Gharib and Black Water go free? What about the US military personnel who raped girls, killed their families or did both in Iraq and Afghanistan go free, simply getting deployed somewhere else or kicked from military?
Give me a break, your military earned many good reasons to be labeled as aggressors, and everybody in this world has a right to label them as aggressors.
Re:Horrible (Score:3, Insightful)
Every military has a history of war crimes. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. Any other military would have the same problems. Your ignorant, if "trendy", anti-Americanism just doesn't let you see that. Seriously, the last time SECDEF was a "Richard" was 1993. Richard "Dick" Cheney was Vice President under Bush Jr., a post now filled by Joseph Biden.
Were the incidents you referred to tragic? Yes. But look at the bigger picture. A handful of tragedies amongst an entire occupied country does not invalidate the entire system.
I don't have time to give you a point-by-point rebuttal, so I'll limit myself to what you said in Case 2.
"Torture" is a massively overused term these days. People are calling pepper spray and tasers torture. The term is so diluted now that it is essentially a meaningless word with powerful emotion, but no logic.
In any case, "torture" as defined by the UN Convention Against Torture, is simply beyond the purview of infantry. Front-line troops neither interrogate nor punish.
You yourself seem to have no knowledge of angry crowds. There is no peaceful way to disperse an antagonistic crowd. None. The best you will get is a nonlethal one.
And again you bring up civilians getting killed. Get over it. People die every day for a million reasons, and the one you're most worked up about is military accidents? Yes, accidents. No soldier wants to shoot a civilian. Soldiers are not blind aggressors, at least not in the US. They see themselves as noble warriors, fighting for truth, justice, etc. They want to kill the bad guys and go home, in that order. Civilians do not fall into the category of "bad guys"; they are not military targets; they are only killed when something goes wrong. Civilian deaths would decrease even further if the enemy followed the Geneva Convention. In particular, the part where they have to wear uniforms, so they can be identified as combatants, which protects the noncombatants.
Re:Failure rate? (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, there was a VERY good suggestion early on in several countries that have police force equipped with tasers, but that was shot down by the corporate lobbyists because it would reduce sales:
Every time police fires a taser, they would have to account for it in the EXACTLY SAME WAY AS IF THEY FIRED A FIREARM. Essentially making taser a proper "use only when there are no means other then firearm to diffuse the situation" kind of a tool, as it was marketed to the public, rather then the current "tase just because you're too damn lazy to even try other methods" situation.
Re:Failure rate? (Score:3, Insightful)
The argument here is similar to that of taser - that you would injure more people by not having this tool and having to disperse crowd in other ways (i.e. tear gas, water cannons, possible gunfire).
I agree with the crowd bit, but tasers are not used to disperse crowds, and tasers also do not reduce injury in a sense because they are situationally quite different. Here in Australia where they have only recently introduced tasers there are already talks of having them banned. When people get given a safe weapon they don't think twice before using it. A quick google search will show case after case of police tasing children. Would they have pulled out their guns and shot them?
When people stop thinking and simply pull out a safer weapon at will (note safer, not safe since tasers have caused a share of deaths recently) the injury rate doesn't improve as more people are exposed to the weapon's use.
Re:It'll be just like plastic bullets (Score:3, Insightful)
It might be what they think they're doing.
Adults love to rationalise why they do horrible things, like convincing kids to go plant bombs.
Re:Sounds ominously familiar... (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting point, as a line of sight area weapon with highly limited targeted ability, is it appropriate to torture innocent people in the background because you are targeted people in the foreground. Will it be child abuse when children are tortured by burning pain.
So a device that inflicts extreme pain and suffering, with no record of who it is aimed at and for what reason and all neatly wrapped up in it doesn't directly cause 'permanent harm' as such tough luck for collateral victims sitting quietly within their own properties.
Using it on ill informed peoples will undoubtedly trigger claims of it generating harmful radiation that will cause sterility in children (that claim can last for many years until it is logically disproved).
Here's betting where ever the device is use it will cause an escalation of retaliatory violence, even in domestic protest, that kind of torture device will likely alter the nature of protest and trigger long term violent retaliatory hostilities. A very bad idea in concept that will inevitably be abused, in the worst possible ways against the most vulnerable people.