At the risk of betraying my utter ignorance in all things military, Why aren’t we using non-lethal weapons in, say, Falluja? Why can’t we tell the city that they must evacuate the town in 72 hours, and anyone left will be considered hostile, then just use a non-lethal nerve gas from building to building in the event that some innocents were left behind. If not nerve gas, how about some of those sound weapons? They’ve been in testing for so damn long why not just try them the hell out? I just can’t imagine we still have to do this siege shit these days. Enlighten me.
Remember the Moscow cinema siege? Some demonstration of “non-lethal” that was. There is a reason that anaesthesiologists study for so many years and even then occasionally kill a patient in a monitored operating theatre.
Surely the guerillas would just stash their weapons and leave and return with everyone else?
I heard there are sound weapons that make people shit themselves. Or am I thinking of that South Park episode with the recorders and the “brown note”?
In any case, I could see using the sonic shitter to say, disperse an angry mob, but in a combat situation aren’t most guys pretty much shitting themselves already?
I imagine that TV shows on such exotic non-lethal weapons are more manufacturers and police patting themselves on back than the realistic capabilities of such weapons. How would you use a sound weapon that makes people shit themselves without shitting yourself or your making your allies do the same. Besides, making a whole town of folks shit themselves might just piss them off more.
Part of the problem with non-lethal weapons is they really only work for small amounts of armed people. You can take on an entire mob of peaceful protestors, but when 20 guys with lethal weapons take on 20 guys with nonlethals, it would be pretty brutal. Lethal weapons subdue for much longer time periods, and even some of the nonlethals get bad raps because of broken ribs (in the case of bean bags and rubber pellets), or death (the same). It likely won’t ever be used in a military situation, only a police one, and only against small numbers of people. As an aside, nonlethals came about due to uproar about police killing suspects who had weapons. Television makes people think that cops can shoot guns out of people’s hands and not in the center mass. Sonic shitters would be cool, but then, likely, it would be construed as humiliation towards the Islamic religion, as we don’t make other religions crap their pants.
All the more reason for Peter Parker to turn over his webbing formula to the authorities, so they can mass-produce a non-lethal weapon that’s proven effective in live field tests. 
That method only works in a closed room.
You obviously haven’t seen the new Spiderman movie, it’s part of his body now.
FYI, I always thought the original idea of Peter Parker whipping up a batch of the stuff and carrying it around was lame. The spider had web making stuff in his gut, why not Spiderman?
Maybe because the military need to spend billions in R&D first… and then drop the program ?
Its the same military that didn’t have many predators since they were too cheap to be effective. No flashy billion dollar tags on it.
Oh, I know. I just thought it was silly in the comics that Parker couldn’t think of a way to get rich using that formula, when so many instances exist where non-lethal weaponry would be a major benefit.
But that’s okay, the new movie opens next week, then we’ll add computer-controlled tentacles to the arsenal…
Erm, this would piss people off less HOW?
One danger of non-lethal weapons is just that - you’re more likely to use them. Then, once they stop working, you have a lot of really pissed off people to deal with. The concept of evacuating an entire city (Fallujah ain’t a little desert outpost!) is a logistical nightmare in itself - where are the people going to go? How do you stop the bad guys from leaving with them? - but gassing an entire city would be horrendous press, even if non-fatal.
While it is nice to fantasize about a battlefield where soldiers get bruises instead of bullets, that is not a terribly realistic scenario, for several reasons, the least of which is not that non-lethal weapons aren’t reliable for taking an enemy out at a distance.
They work decently for police work - the actual breaking down the door and arresting someone - but not on battlefield scale.
In any case, most civilian (and I believe military) casualties are from explosions and shrapnel from mortars, grenades, and bombs. You hear stories in Iraq about two sides shooting at each other for 30 minutes with one death on each side (true story from yesterday), then you hear about a stray mortar killing 3 and injuring 18.
I’m not really sure what this means since it makes no sense.
Non-leathal weapons certainly have a place in police and crowd control roles - rubber bullets, less than lethal projectiles, tear gas, fire hoses, etc.
Exotic stuff like ultrasonic pain beams, nausia beams, dazzle lasers, sticky foam, or whatever are basically still in the laboratory stage and not deployable on the battlefield.
They wouldn’t be effective in a city full of angry armed locals anyway.
This thread’s hilarious!
“They’re shooting at us…deploy the sticky foam”
There’s really no such thing as a nonlethal weapon. You can beat someone to death with a Wiffle Ball bat if you had the mind to. You might mean weapons less lethal than guns, but if you look at the history of crowd control weapons you’ll find that they just piss people off, a good bit of the time someone dies anyway, and the military is not a police force. Sure, it’s being used as one, but that is an inappropriate use of the military.
Non-lethal weapons have been deployed of course, billy clubs and so on. But that is avoiding the meaning of the OP. (I only do that when deliberately causing trouble.)
In the period of tension leading up to Operation PRAYING MANTIS (the secret US was that destroyed the Iranian naval forces) a laser weapon (called a ‘Dazzler’) was used against Iranian aircraft for the first time. The eye-safe weapon is mounted on a rubber M-16 (Since it makes it easier to point the laser) and is aimed at the approaching aircraft. As the name implies, it dazzles him, encouraging him to turn away.
No cite. Trust me.
And thus we reach the apex of near-sightedness.
…
Wait a min, I’m having issues with this. I’m not calling you a liar, I just think the image in my head is wrong.
You’re saying that a soldier on the ground with a rubber M-16 with a laser mounted to it aims at a jet fighter cruising at around 600 mph from below and somehow manages to hit the enemy pilot in the eyes, mildly annoying him and thus causing him to abort the mission?
I’m somewhat dubious as to the image I have in my head. Please correct my misconception. O_o
I’ve heard of such a weapon, although I thought it was a Tom Clancy invention. He used it in Debt Of Honor. What it allegedly is is a light or laser, which) that focuses a beam that is bright enough to essentially flash-blind someone but has shielding to protect their sight from harmful rays. In other words, a disorienting weapon. An airplane on approach to a target/landing will be flying in a predictable manner, and since the light is so focused you can walk it right up into the target and cause immediate disorientation.
If it exists I’d like to see it. It’s not that I don’t trust you, Paul From Saudi, but I read about it first in a work of fiction and even then I thought it was too good to be true.
I’ve seen the dazzler used in close quarters combat but not as Paul mentioned.
Well, as I understand it, the idea is the bad guy is flying toward the ship, so you point and click to zap his eyeballs. I read about it (somewhere, Armed Forces Journal Monthly?) at about the time is supposedly happened.
The Tom Clancy gadget sounded much more nasty.