Heat Ray Gun Fails Final Test; Nixed From War 299
eldavojohn writes "The heat ray gun to be deployed in Afghanistan has failed its final test and will not be deployed. US military commanders who have had it in the field now have declined to use it. After being tested more than 11,000 times on around 700 volunteers, it failed to achieve satisfaction from the military and will not be deployed."
Not in Afghanistan... (Score:5, Interesting)
So does that mean they're bringing them home and will be using them domestically? /tinfoilhat
Re:Final report (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Not to worry! (Score:3, Interesting)
They already have the sound cannons that cause instantaneous and permanent hearing damage, and can rapidly cause permanent deafness.
They were used against protesters to the G20 meeting.
Put them on Japanese whaling vessels (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:11,000 times on 700 volunteers (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Final report (Score:3, Interesting)
This isn't an ordinary war. It's a house-to-house search for malefactors. Or at least it should be. Clear an area, leave a presence to prevent it from being taken again and to cap anything that was hiding, then move your main force on to the next one. Tile the country with your wins, and the war ends.
Unless in the process you turn good guys in your pwned sectors into bad guys by acting like the bad guys they once helped you exterminate.
Regardless, in the process you don't allow yourself at any time to fall victim to medieval tactics like pincer moves. Unless you're a stupid cunt.
Re:Final report (Score:4, Interesting)
The article was very light on details. Why was the weapon scrapped? Why was it never tested in a real world scenario as a non-lethal measure. The truth is that as much as the military is against non-lethal weapons, they can actually save lives on both sides and help in the winning of the war at the same time because you have less casualties which tend to cause the other side to galvanize against you.
This was not meant to be used against the enemy or anyone else on the "other side". This was intended as a non-lethal crowd control measure.
Shooting into a crowd is bad press and will certainly galvanize a population against you, making them enemies. This "heat ray" eliminates the news story about the 10-yr-old kid who was shot in the head by a ricochet bullet (reported as intentional genocide by the press) with his crying mother screaming over his lifeless body.
So when the angry crowds form over the aid tent that was accidentally bombed, you have three options:
1) Fired into the crowd, dispersing them, but causing more crowds to form all over the world.
2) Hold you position and get torn to little pieces by the angry crowd or the actual enemy who is dispersed among the crowd, encouraging them.
3) Run, encouraging the enemy to stage protests at other strategic locations.
I prefer option four:
4) Utilize something like this heat ray and disperse the crowd in a harmless fashion until the local political leaders get control of the situation.
Re:Another misleading /. summary (Score:2, Interesting)
It's 1 am and your mother goes into labor. Your father is not around because he was killed recently in a random act of violence. You get her into your beat up, barely functioning, pickup truck and start driving to the nearest hospital. As you round a corner you see an odd flash from a dark alleyway but don't pay any attention to it. Your focused on taking care of your hysteric mother. For your failure to stop a soldier in the dark alleyway opens up with a 240B Machine Guns [wikipedia.org].
Why didn't the soldiers have big flashing lights and large obvious signs that they were conducting an operation there? The soldiers were currently on a raid to capture a high level insurgent member who was personally responsible for importing and deploying EFPs [wikipedia.org].EFPs responsible for killing soldiers from their unit . The raid was being conducted as covertly as possible to minimize any early warning for the insurgents. This is also why the soldiers engaged with the minimal warning. The only people fleeing from soldiers conducting a raid at 1 am are most likely insurgents.
The end result was mother lived, baby died, son died. Insurgent was not captured. Did they deserve to be shot because the driver did not know that the ROE for the soldiers was to have signs visible (black out, no lights to see them with), verbal warning (could not be heard over engine), and to signal with a light to stop (a single flash of a light in the dense urban city in the middle of the nigth)? I'd say those are pretty ambiguous.
Re:Final report (Score:3, Interesting)
I would utterly destroy you if you attempted that shit in my neighborhood. Absolutely. Destroy.
I doubt that. You'd have to have numbers, or infinite luck.
The bad guys aren't numerous in most areas, and in most areas the good guys are all too willing to help me out. It's not terribly easy to root out small numbers of them from large populations, but it's doable.
In areas where bad guys are numerous, we switch from house to house picking and choosing to clearing the entire area. This is where war gets messy, but that's why it's war and not something we do for fun on weekends in the Hamptons.
If I bring force and stick to my plan of clearing an area and doing it righteously and keeping it clear, I win. This, on the other hand, is #fail: Insurgents bully bakeries in Marjah, Afghanistan [dallasnews.com] Those guys should be dead, not hassling naan-flippers, or the story should be "U.S. Forces Kill Taliban Thugs Who Harassed Marjah Merchants". Petraeus needs to recognize this and fix what McChrystal didn't.
Medieval tactics are inferior to modern tactics in the same way that Unix is inferior to modern OSes like Windows.
That's cute, but it's wrong. I use both Unix and Windows, precisely because I know their where not to use either of them. Military tactics can be nullified by military strategy, so knowing when not to allow a tactic to come into play means it's me FTW. Like I said. If you're vulnerable to well-studied medieval tactics -- or worse, you're trying to use them on someone who's been through a war college and a few campaigns, then you're a stupid cunt, and he's an even stupider cunt if you succeed.
Re:Another misleading /. summary (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Another misleading /. summary (Score:1, Interesting)
Civilian cars are often shot up at military check points because the drivers don't understand that they are supposed to stop.
Source, please? My information is about Iraq, since I've been here for the past four months, and have driven all around Baghdad and the outskirts. It's certainly a different situation in Afghanistan, but the way we tend do things like checkpoints is fairly standard.
Even if drivers didn't spot the soldiers standing around, the guard towers, and the big stop signs in Arabic, and were oblivious to the bone-jarring speed bumps, they'd crash into the massive concrete barriers that you have to slow down to around 5 mph to swerve around.
But, generally, given that they've been putting up with us for almost 10 years, I'd hope you'd give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they've figured out what a checkpoint looks like by now.
Since soldiers have to assume these could be car bombs they shoot to disable the vehicle but in real life that means people get killed.
If you had to set up a hasty TCP (traffic control point) and had no portable barriers (big plastic mamba jambas, just add sand!), you could still set up signs and markers for escalation of force (EOF). The idea is that you use various signals to slow a vehicle down, from sirens to lights to lasing (very effective) to warning shots and only then to a disabling shot. If a vehicle is going so fast that you're forced to do a disabling shot right away, it probably is a VBIED.
And, just in case you're wondering, yes, all EOF incidents are investigated.