CITIZEN ALERT v1.24Non-Lethal Weapons

What you are looking at is ACTIVE DENIAL TECHNOLOGY or an ACTIVE DENIAL SYSTEM (ADS) as it's known. This is what the DOD is experimenting with in hopes of cutting down on civilian deaths during wartime. I am a big proponent of non-lethal weapons (NLW) for use in our military as well as the UN which I'll discuss at length some other time.

I am also a big supporter of furthering research and funding along these lines. What bothers me about this big humvee with the dish on top is what the DOD's first priority is with it: Crowd control.

ADT is a non-lethal direct energy weapon that uses a beam of millimeter waves to heat an adversary's skin to 131 degrees, causing intense pain without damage (supposedly). ADT does not burn and does not cause prolonged or unnecessary suffering, permanent damage, or long-term effects (supposedly). An individual that comes into the path of the beam will immediately retreat from it until the pain goes away.

Now, one of the first examples that I read about was a scenario in Somalia where our troops would come in contact with crowds of thousands throwing stones at them. While you don't want stones being thrown at you, you also don't want to disperse the crowd with lethal force. So, ADT seems the perfect weapon for the job.

I've been interested in NLW for sometime and having read up on it for awhile now, what I'm not seeing is consideration for its uses in combat zones. Imagine the Israel-Hezbollah conflict and how it would turn out if the UN were able to intervene with a technology to neutralize both sides, detain and arrest subdued individuals and return peace to a region and their governments back to a diplomacy policy. Imagine an invading army being stopped in their tracks by a line of UN ADS trucks or more in the future from an orbiting UN ADS satellite, stunned into submission, then disarmed by ground forces, arrested and marched back across the border. War could be in effect outlawed. Sounds like a silly Star Trek episode, but remember where we got the idea for cell phones from.

With all these possiblities, what is the military mainly looking into when it comes to active denial technology? Civilian crowd control. Instead of soldiers running into one of these on the battlefield, I believe we will most likely encounter it first in front of our local federal buildings at some anti-war protest.