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The drive for "humane warfare" has been with us for a long time. The pope banned certain kinds of warfare in the Christian nations, hundreds of years ago -- though he permitted them during the Crusades against the Infidel. In the Twentieth Century, there was the Geneva Convention. There are non-lethal weapons, too. By far the best and most successful is barbed wire. If it is used correctly and in sufficient quantity, it can prevent any but a very determined foe from penetrating an area. But it works best when backed with lethal weapons. It is most difficult to penetrate barbed wire if there are machine guns behind it ready to shoot anyone who tries to cut the wire. (And barbed wire won't stop a tank.) The problem is that non-lethality is directly contradictory to the real purpose of warfare. We don't fight for no reason; we're fighting to achieve a political goal which was not obtainable through diplomacy. Our purpose is to use force against our enemy to make him accept something he wasn't willing to grant peacefully. We do that with an army. If he also has an army, he uses it to resist, leading to combat. In that case, our goal is to remove his ability to resist, by neutralizing his army one way or another. We can do that by destroying it, by capturing it, or by driving it away. But that last is the least satisfactory, because he may reorganize and fight another day. We're not trying to take ground, unless the ground we take reduces his ability to resist. If he's using lethal weapons and we are using nonlethal weapons, and we take casualties and drive him from a battlefield, then it means that his army is intact and undamaged, while ours is reduced. We've taken ground, but we're weaker than before. Not a good way to operate. Which is why the whole idea of non-lethal battlefield weapons is nearly a contradiction in terms. The weapon proposed here would be virtually useless on a battlefield against prepared troops, since this beam projector would be vulnerable to a number of weapons it will face (mortars, light rocket launchers, sniper rifles, concentrated small arms fire) and even if it were successful all it would do is to make the enemy retreat. Which is not to say that it is useless. There are things it will be very useful for. When you're fighting a war, you often capture concentrations of enemy civilians, and there's a non-trivial problem with keeping them peaceful. Riots are a constant problem, and in that kind of situation wide-spread use of lethal weapons is undesirable. So they tend to use tear-gas or water cannons to disperse hostile concentrations of civilians. This heat-beam projector would be a very good weapon for that kind of thing. They are saying that it would be used on the battlefield, but I don't think they really believe that. The real situation is it would be politically difficult for them to justify developing an entirely new weapons system solely for the purpose of fighting civilians. (discuss) |
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