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There do exist non-lethal weapons, but they're not appropriate for battlefield use. They are mainly intended for area denial, and our military forces do indeed have them. But they are intended for riot control in occupied cities, to disperse unruly crowds without having to slaughter huge numbers of them. They include such things as tear-gas, stink bombs, and other non-lethal gas weapons; fire hoses; directed energy weapons such as high power microwave beams, and painfully loud sirens. But these are not appropriate weapons for use in a real battlefield situation against enemies who are shooting real bullets and firing real artillery pieces. In a battlefield situation your goal is not to take ground, it's to destroy your enemy's ability to resist. If you do that, you can take as much ground as you like. If you don't, taking ground does no good. If we use area-denial weapons to displace our enemy without harming him, the problem is that each time we do some of our soldiers will be killed to no purpose. No sane person will sacrifice their own people for no good that way. In a battlefield situation, all the non-lethal weapons just listed have countermeasures. They are slow and ineffective and very short range; to use them at all requires exposing our soldiers to enemy fire which means some of them will get shot. It requires us to close with the enemy without first softening him up with lethal bombing or lethal artillery fire, which means that his force will be at their maximum effectiveness in using lethal weapons against our force. And against men in tanks with gas masks and earplugs, none of them work. There do exist non-lethal weapons which could reasonably be used in a battlefield situation, but all work by maiming rather than by killing. For example, there are antivision weapons. This would be a laser beam which would be attached to the standard infantry rifle, issued to all front line troops. They incapacitate an enemy without killing him by blinding him, and I mean permanently blinding. Enemy troops would be alive but no longer able to fight because they would never be able to see again. You can take out a large army this way, but you do so by leaving a huge number of profoundly crippled men behind. It is possible to build an equivalent capability for artillery shells and bombs, such that when they go off they create a huge flash of light so bright as to fry the retinas of anyone in the vicinity, sort of an area-blinding. There would still be some danger from the concussion, but that could be minimized by making it an air-burst, which would also increase the effectiveness of the flash. Such shells would have to be used multiple times in an area to make sure that they got everyone, but you do that with artillery shells anyway. But I don't think this is quite what the pacifists had in mind. Blinding lasers and other anti-vision weapons violate international treaties, but the real argument against them is the same as the argument against the use of lethal poison gas: retaliation in kind. Anti-vision weapons are relatively low tech (although expensive) and easily captured and used against our own people, and they are very difficult to defend against. I don't like the idea of 20,000 young American men coming home from the war with their eyes burned out. Non-lethal weapons make sense as anti-riot weapons. They do not make sense on the battlefield and won't any time soon. All effective non-lethal weapons work by permanently maiming rather than killing. There does not exist any effective non-lethal weapon, even in theory, which incapacitates an enemy without doing permanent damage to him, and any such conceivable weapon would still require us to excessively expose our own people to the lethal weapons of our enemies. For the forseeable future, any offensive operations will be conducted with lethal weapons. We're in a shooting war, and in a shooting war people are killed. Get used to it. (discuss) |
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