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."
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
Failure rate? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
In the US in 3, 2, 1 ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) used in Pittsburgh.
Expect the heat-ray very soon.
Question.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I'm a bit concerned... (Score:3, Interesting)
Tin foil hats will have to be outlawed, like bulletproof vests.
Only criminals need tinfoil hats. You ain't no CRIMINAL, is you?
Telling name (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
"Put your hand in the box." (Score:2, Interesting)
Reminds me of Dune. "I hold at your neck the gom jabbar."
Re:"Put your hand in the box." (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Very troubling (Score:3, Interesting)
If you take a single shot from a state policeman's sidearm, and a single shot from a soldier's sidearm, I would agree with you. But many soldiers are behind SAWs like the BAR, or are looking down the barrel of an M2.
I don't give a shit what the ammo is made of - if it's got some metal in it, and is coming at me at 4, 5, 6 rounds per second, my survivability isn't going to be all that high.
Sure, a soldier's last-resort, government-issued sidearm isn't as lethal as a state police officer's privately purchased first line of defense. Why would you expect it to be, when the soldier has some badass firepower, and the state police officer has just a single sidearm, and maybe a shotgun in the trunk?
That said, I agree with your point continuing the GP's that international law regarding weapons of war is pretty backwards.
Re:Very troubling (Score:1, Interesting)
Only if you lose. I've never heard of war crimes trials being conducting against the winning side, have you?
Re:Sounds ominously familiar... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Failure rate? (Score:3, Interesting)
I would take a few microwaves over a bullet anytime... trouble is that if I go to protest a corrupt or insane government it is very improbable (Western Europe) that I will be met with bullets (at most anti-riot gear, and haven't seen it in use in my life).
In the other hand, police would have less restraints to use this weapon even if it blinds 1 in 1000 people (they usually excuse police brutality on demostrators and even bystanders unless they get filmed on camera, and even then). Side effects will be ignored due to ease of use (see tasers, rubber bullets and smoke grenades), and blame will be put into the people hurt.
So yeah, it is a legitimate concern.
Corner reflectors (Score:3, Interesting)
The ADS being an EM emitter, I wonder what would happen if the demonstrators decided to carry corner reflectors [wikipedia.org] with them.
Re:Very troubling (Score:3, Interesting)
In that sense, it is practically a tautology that war crimes trials are never conducted against the winning side.
However, and this is important, all armies have internal codes of conduct and(unless they are really breaking down logistically, which means they probably aren't the winner) do enforce them at least much of the time. Thus, unless the army in question in fact endorses war crimes, the process of "war crimes trial" will be a series of individual, internal trials of members of the army, by that army, for breaking the rules. You can only be prosecuted for doing things that your army approves of if you lose; but any army that isn't currently disintegrating carries out internal punishment more or less continually for violations of its rules.
Re:Very troubling (Score:5, Interesting)
How many total years in jail were served by anyone as a result of Mai Lai?
Re:Failure rate? (Score:3, Interesting)
tell me... where do you live?
Norway. And I think I can safely say that our police is different than the police in USA. They're normally not armed, and need a special permit to arm themselves. In some of the more violent areas they have guns in the car, but it's locked down, and they need a confirmation from HQ to be able to use them.
A cop being stabbed, or even hurt at all when on duty is fairly rare here, and tend to hit the top 5 news cases for the day. If someone dies on duty, it's several weeks of news about it, detailed investigation, and so forth.
I remember two stories, both from the Obama visit in Oslo.
The first one started on a live sending, the camera crew spotted some protesters and a lot of police at one end of the (densely packed) plaza where Obama was. So they hurried over, figuring they'd get some juicy news. They asked one of the officers there if they were stopping the protesters from entering. "No," answered the officer. "We're trying to clear a path in for them, but it's just too many people here". The reporter sounded very sceptical, and asked the leader of the protesters. He confirmed it, and finished by saying "we really appreciate the effort, they've really tried to help us here. But we're happy, we got the protest going, we got a chance to display our opinions, even though we didn't manage to get into the plaza, and I see we're clearly outnumbered", with a smile on his face.
The other story was in an interview with the Oslo police chief after the visit, and he was asked how many complaints that came in. He smiled and said the only sort of "complaint" they've gotten was a german journalist that was a bit stumped by finding no-one that had anything bad to say about the police. The journalist clearly couldn't understand how that was possible, adding that something like that would never happen in Germany.
Our police is by no means perfect, and they have a lot of faults. But I'm constantly amazed at the expected quality of cops in other countries. Ours are at least trying to be non-violent, they're friendly, and they use common sense when doing their job. And they know that they're here to help and protect the people.
Re:I'm a bit concerned... (Score:5, Interesting)
Tin foil hats will have to be outlawed, like bulletproof vests.
Only criminals need tinfoil hats. You ain't no CRIMINAL, is you?
You might mean it as a joke, but the Germans are a step ahead of you here -- anything that can serve to protect you against police violence in a protest has already been outlawed for the last twenty years as a "protective weapon" (the law is 17a of the Versammlungsgesetz).
They have outlawed padded clothing that protects against beatings, mouthguards that protect against police knocking your teeth out, masks that protect against teargas and ballistic vests that make it harder to maim you from a distance. Outlawing tin foil hats is the logical next step.
Re:Very troubling (Score:3, Interesting)
1. It was tested, under controlled conditions, by experienced engineers who only turned the thing on long enough to test it. What happens when you get some sadistic grunt on the trigger who just holds the fire button down?
2. Cataract surgery is out patient in areas with the tech and for people with the money for it. What about in some town in Iraq or Afghanistan, or the back waters of Louisiana, where they don't even have indoor plumbing?
That said I think all you points however are dead on. Technically I don't think this device is covered by that section of the Geneva C's since it was not specifically made to cause blindness. I do however think that how it may be used later could be considered a war crime, like handcuffing somebody to the side of a building and zapping them until they talk, or die from shock.
Time will tell.
Re:Horrible (Score:3, Interesting)
I would mod you up if I could.
The US Army, and all other major armies, are designed to do one thing: destroy other armies. In a word, to kill. The American military is the best in the world at fighting other armies. They blew through the Iraqi army in literally hours. They haven't lost in a fair fight since Korea.
If the US wanted to, they could just let their military do their thing, and completely annihilate every country they're fighting in. They wouldn't even need nukes, just let the tanks roll and shoot everything that moves. Pave it, sell it to Disney, put up a theme park.
Of course, no leader in their right mind would do that. Most of the ones that aren't in their right mind still wouldn't.
The problem is threefold. First, no sane insurgent will go against the Army or Marine in "fair" combat. Second, soldiers aren't trained for nonlethal combat. You can't exactly pull punches with 5.56mm full metal jacket. Third, you can't deploy police to a country halfway across the globe.
So, the solution is what America always goes with: invent something. Make a poison gas that doesn't kill. Invent bullets made of rubber. Give the soldiers some kind of sci-fi non-death ray.
Sure, it won't be perfect. It'll probably kill people. But that's the thing people forget. You recall the saying, "shit happens"? That applies triple in a warzone. Shit happens. Jammed rifles. Friendly fire. Helicopter crashes. Civilians get shot.
War is the ultimate necessary evil. It takes homicide to the level of science, mass-produced murder. It is also completely necessary, and probably always will be.
You can unilaterally declare war. You can NOT unilaterally declare peace.
Re:Sounds ominously familiar... (Score:3, Interesting)
I bet it works really well against cameras and communications equipment carried by journalists. Possibly better than it would work against actual people.
Re:Yes, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Failure rate? (Score:3, Interesting)
I was curious, so... According to the wikipedia page (I know, I know) [wikipedia.org], 23 Norwegian police officers have been killed in the line of duty since WWII (both killed by criminals and accidents). 23 in 65 years is a rate of 0.35 per year.
Norway has a population of 4.6 million in 2008. The U.S. has a population of approx 305 million. A 66:1 ratio. Norway has a police force of approx 11,000. The U.S. had a police force of approx 970,000 or 675,000 [fbi.gov] in 2004, depending on how you define "police officer". Scale this up for the change in population (278 -> 307 million) and you get 1.06 million or 741,000 in 2008. That's a ratio of 96:1 or 67:1 compared to Norway.
Police officer fatalities in the U.S. vary year by year, but the FBI posts the statistics online [fbi.gov]. In the 10 years spanning 1999-2008, an average of 53 officers per year were killed feloniously [fbi.gov] while an average of 75 officers per year were killed in accidents [fbi.gov]. Plugging these rates into the above population sizes yields:
3.2 per 100,000 per year - Norway police total fatality rate (felonious + accident)
5 ~ 7.2 per 100,000 per year - U.S. police felonious fatality rate
7.1 ~ 10.1 per 100,000 per year - U.S. police accident fatality rate
12 ~ 17.3 per 100,000 per year - U.S. police fatality rate
Two things to note:
1) The overall police fatality rate in the U.S. is only about 5x higher than Norway's. The reason a police officer being killed in Norway is big news is simply because Norway has a small population.
2) The U.S. police fatality rate due to accidents alone is over 2-3x that of Norway's. The vast majority were killed in auto accidents. Clearly there is something else going on here than just police being armed with firearms or not.
Re:Tasers (Score:3, Interesting)
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?