The New York Times > Magazine > The Quest for the Nonkiller App.
I recently was invited to the Pentagon to watch a film depicting field tests of a new weapons program called the Active Denial System, which, it occurred to me, could have been named by an unhinged cognitive therapist. The live-action video opened on a vista reminiscent of Iraq or Afghanistan. Scattered amid the scrub of a desert plain, angry demonstrators howl unintelligible slogans and advance menacingly on a handful of soldiers who nervously pivot their rifles back and forth trying to deter the mob. For safety's sake during this test run, the ''crowd'' -- played for the most part by off-duty soldiers -- flings bright green tennis balls at the uniformed servicemen instead of rocks. As one member of the crowd hurls a ball, a soldier operating the Active Denial System (it looks like a squat satellite dish) targets an unruly protester in the weapon's viewfinder, squeezes a trigger that releases a beam of energy and, in a split second, one ''civilian'' howls and scampers away, fanning his rear end. Other demonstrators suffer similar fates, yelping and fleeing in panic, as if they have encountered a wall of invisible fire. After tumbling backward, the horde spins around, pointing and hollering like a Stone Age tribe encountering modern weaponry for the first time.
What they were feeling was a blast of electromagnetic energy that causes a great deal of pain but does no lasting harm. That, in essence, is the point of a new generation of nonlethal weapons being developed by the military: to enforce and do battle without killing, or in the words of the Defense Department, ''to incapacitate personnel or materiel, while minimizing fatalities, permanent injury to personnel and undesired damage to property and the environment.'' Along with the Active Denial System, the military is testing bullets that disintegrate in mid-air, propelling their nonlethal payload to their targets, slimy goo that stops people in their tracks and, eventually, guns that shoot pulses of plasma energy that stun and disorient.
In an era when the American military increasingly finds itself in situations where civilians and combatants can be difficult to distinguish between, and when the line between soldiering and policy has blurred, nonlethal weapons could prove useful. At the same time, such nonlethals might be abused, like any other weapon. Still, in a world where the tolerance for ''collateral'' casualties is fast diminishing and where soldiers return home haunted by their ''kills,'' such novel weapons, if made to work, could well make war less hellish. Sue Payton, a deputy undersecretary of defense who screened the film for me, put it this way: ''The less killing we do, the better.''
I recently was invited to the Pentagon to watch a film depicting field tests of a new weapons program called the Active Denial System, which, it occurred to me, could have been named by an unhinged cognitive therapist. The live-action video opened on a vista reminiscent of Iraq or Afghanistan. Scattered amid the scrub of a desert plain, angry demonstrators howl unintelligible slogans and advance menacingly on a handful of soldiers who nervously pivot their rifles back and forth trying to deter the mob. For safety's sake during this test run, the ''crowd'' -- played for the most part by off-duty soldiers -- flings bright green tennis balls at the uniformed servicemen instead of rocks. As one member of the crowd hurls a ball, a soldier operating the Active Denial System (it looks like a squat satellite dish) targets an unruly protester in the weapon's viewfinder, squeezes a trigger that releases a beam of energy and, in a split second, one ''civilian'' howls and scampers away, fanning his rear end. Other demonstrators suffer similar fates, yelping and fleeing in panic, as if they have encountered a wall of invisible fire. After tumbling backward, the horde spins around, pointing and hollering like a Stone Age tribe encountering modern weaponry for the first time.
What they were feeling was a blast of electromagnetic energy that causes a great deal of pain but does no lasting harm. That, in essence, is the point of a new generation of nonlethal weapons being developed by the military: to enforce and do battle without killing, or in the words of the Defense Department, ''to incapacitate personnel or materiel, while minimizing fatalities, permanent injury to personnel and undesired damage to property and the environment.'' Along with the Active Denial System, the military is testing bullets that disintegrate in mid-air, propelling their nonlethal payload to their targets, slimy goo that stops people in their tracks and, eventually, guns that shoot pulses of plasma energy that stun and disorient.
In an era when the American military increasingly finds itself in situations where civilians and combatants can be difficult to distinguish between, and when the line between soldiering and policy has blurred, nonlethal weapons could prove useful. At the same time, such nonlethals might be abused, like any other weapon. Still, in a world where the tolerance for ''collateral'' casualties is fast diminishing and where soldiers return home haunted by their ''kills,'' such novel weapons, if made to work, could well make war less hellish. Sue Payton, a deputy undersecretary of defense who screened the film for me, put it this way: ''The less killing we do, the better.''
Comments