Posted on 12/05/2004 1:23:24 PM PST by blink182prj
Government defense giant Raytheon Co. has developed the first nonlethal weapon that fires a heat beam to repel enemies and reduces the chance of innocent civilians being shot, a Pentagon official said.
Raytheon, the world's largest missile maker, delivered a prototype to the U.S. military last month. The product is expected to be evaluated from February through June to determine whether to equip U.S. forces with it, Colonel David Karcher, director of the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate, told Bloomberg Business News.
With U.S. casualties in Iraq rising, expectations are growing that Raytheon's weapon, called the Active Denial System, could be sent to Iraq in the next year, according to Charles "Sid'' Heal, commander of the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department. A former Marine, Heal headed nonlethal-weapons training for the U.S. military in Somalia in 1995 and advised Raytheon on the beam's development.
"It's there, it's ready,'' said Heal, who has felt the weapon's beam and compares it to having a hot iron placed on the skin. "It will likely be in Iraq in the next 12 months. They are very, very close.''
The weapon, mounted on a Humvee vehicle, projects a "focused, speed-of-light millimeter wave energy beam to induce an intolerable heating sensation,'' according to a U.S. Air Force fact sheet. The energy penetrates less than 1/64 of an inch into the skin and the sensation ceases when the target moves out of the beam.
The weapon could be used for crowd control and is effective beyond the range of bullets fired by small arms, Karcher said. The effective range of an AK-47 assault rifle is as far as 273 yards, while an M16A2 rifle has a range of 400 meters.
The primary benefit would be protecting U.S. troops, Heal said. The weapon would also limit deaths of noncombatants, he said.
"This forces your adversary to declare intentions,'' Heal said. "U.S. forces get killed because they are reluctant to shoot. It happens in Iraq every day."
"This is where the future is going,'' Raytheon Chief Executive William Swanson, 55, said at a conference in Tucson, Ariz., where he introduced the weapon to investors Wednesday. "This is the ability to protect our troops, and we're talking about the speed of light.''
Raytheon is two years into a four-year, $40 million development contract, Karcher said. How soon the weapon is deployed will depend on the military's interest, and while the technology may be ready, troops must also be trained on it and engagement rules must be decided by a four-star general, he said.
Heal said the military version would cost about $1 million, and the U.S. military could require many.
Karcher said the first prototype cost about $10 million.
Heal told Bloomberg Business News that Raytheon could expand the market by selling a smaller version to law-enforcement agencies. The company is working on a smaller, tripod-mounted version for police forces, and the price would have to come down to a few hundred thousand dollars each to be affordable, he said.
It sounds real quiet, like something media might not be able to hear.
Less than lethal force. Just because the one Humvee has the heat ray on the crowd doesn't mean the two behind it don't have machine guns.
When the police use bean bag rounds they use a cover officer with a real gun. When the military deals with a large crowd of possible hostiles it would be only common sense to have your lethal force option ready. I remember when they went in during the invasion and a crowd gathered in front of some big holy site. The officer had his men stop and immediately drop to one knee. The crowd was stunned. It was something they didn't expect and the press there didn't know how to cover it. There was no confrontation. The Muslim leaders and the officer talked and the crowd did not become hostile. That was a smart use by the Officer. But if you look at it from another way those soldiers had their weapons ready and were facing out in an arrowhead formation to engage any threat.
Fight smart. Get the people on your side. Identify and kill the bad guys. I so respect the military for fighting this smart.
I hope it's effective in place where it gets something like 150 degrees in the sun. /sarc
"The beam is much broader than your musings imply. They can't just step out of the beam. They have get far away from the source. Still they could probalby manage to run towards you and set off their bomb belt. Although the closer they got, the hotter they would feel. They could not even manage spray and pray with an AK."
I will simply accept your explanation. It is not like me to just go half cocked on something I do not understand.
What I should have done is see if there is any information on the unit available instead of "pre-judging" it.
I would be interested in how well they have downsized the electronics including providing a sufficient size Magnetron or Klystron, associated power packs to last any reasonable amount of time, as well as what type microwave wave-guide they have installed into the "gun's barrel", so to speak to actually provide a microwave beam of sufficient conical area, with sufficient joule output to actually penetrate clothing and burn the skin over a few hundred foot area linear distance to target. This all packed into a hand held gun. Or perhaps it is not a hand held unit, but something larger that must be mounted on a vehicle then obviously my negativism evaporates as far as what it is capable of doing.
Interesting to say the least. Obviously you know something I don't as how effective this unit is.
Okay men, set Phasers on "extra crispy".
" Fight smart. Get the people on your side. Identify and kill the bad guys. I so respect the military for fighting this smart."
Understand what your reply implies. And at this point I offer an appology to all in this thread for going a bit of the board, so to speak. I rushed judgment when I should not have.
Many posts I have contributed speak in the tones yours project. When people talked about dropping MOAB's etc., on places like Fallujah I spoke strongly against it for many reasons including what you illuminated in your reply.
Perhaps I am getting a bit weary. And am starting to post replies similiar to the ones I have spoken out against in the past.
Lets just say this poster goes along with all the more intellegient responses in this posts, at this point.
I hope the "gun" works out very well.
Pretty funny post, if you ask me! Welcome to FR!
"Here's a bit more about it.
http://www.de.afrl.af.mil/factsheets/activedenial.html
It's a very large unit."
Thanks. I will check it out. And just below your reply dcuddeback included some data and a link.
Thanks guys. Will read the stuff. At least I understand at this point we are not talking about some little "pop gun"
that is the size of a rifle for instance. I just couldn't visualize how one could pack a power energy beam into such a small package and expect it to do crowd control.
It's mounted on a hummer. I think it may use a phased array, with the individual sources being right on the array, but I could be wrong about that. Still they could use a solid state source composed of many individual amplifiers or oscillators rather than a single klystron or magnetron. Those don't work so well at the higher frequencies anyway. You might check on the Raytheon website. www.raytheon.com (I used to work for RatCo, after they bought Texas Instruments Defense and before they laid me off )
M-16s are cheap, but grunts to shoot them aren't. This is an area denial weapon, not an individual one. It would be analogous to a crew served weapon.
Actually millimeter wave. For some reason centimeter wavelengths got deemed "microwave" but millimeter waves are just that, with wavelenths in millimeters. In this case 95 GHz translates to a wavelength of just under 3.2 mm or just under 1/8 of an inch.
It also doesn't actually burn them. It creates the sensation (PAIN) of being burned, but doesn't leave burns.
given that, I wouldn't be surprised to find that a really motivated person could force themselves to keep coming. Probalby would not be able to do anything complex, like aiming a weapon, but pushing on the detonator to his Islamacide vest might be doable. Or maybe you could provide some sort of topical anesthetic that would allow for more purposeful action.
IIRC, M-16s from FN cost the government a bit less than you could go to the most cut rate gun store and buy an AR-15 made by DPMS,Rock River Arms, Bushmaster or Olympic, let alone Colt. One source (http://usmilitary.about.com/od/armyweapons/l/aainfantry1.htm) says the Unit Replacement Cost is $586.
True, but you should be able to generate an EMP that will put enough voltage on the field wire to set off the cap. This millimeter wave device won't do it, but there are pulse generators that might be able to do it.
Actually a conductive layer would tend to reflect not absorb. It might arc too, if it was "crinkly", like wadded up aluminum foil. (Try putting some of that in your microwave oven :) but don't set the timer for very long, even seconds will let you see the effect, or you might damage your magnetron. )
Yes, a device to generate an EMP would do it. However to be militarily useful, the device will have to do it at some distance from the troops it is meant to protect.
In the past, EMP has been associated with detonation of a nuclear weapon at altitude (where the EMP was the only thing reaching the ground). Worked good except that it killed everything electronic (enemy and friendly) that was unshielded within its effective radius. The U.S. and NATO spent alot of money - alot of money - in the 1970s and 1980s building and retrofitting its critical military and civilian equipment and infrastructure to defeat the effects of expected Soviet EMP weapons that would be a logical part of any outbreak of general warfare between the two opposing camps. Subsequently, there has been research done into non-nuclear versions of EMP weaponry. Not sure of the status of these efforts at present. Nor is the military utility of a wide area EMP weapon evident in this situation (IEDs); frying everything electronic along the patrol path probably qualifies as a good working definition of "massive overkill" of the intended target.
There are EMP devices available at the small end of the scale that probably could be employed once the target is identified. I have seen televison features on a small EMP generator that has been tested using police patrol cars to stop high speed pursuits. It involves launching a small wheeled vehicle (size of an RC car) from under the pursuing patrol car at a close distance from directly behind the fleeing automobile. The device accelerates using small rocket boosters and generates an EMP pulse as it passes under the engine compartment of the fleeing automobile, knocking out the ignition circuit. With the motor dead, the concept of employment claims that the vehicle coasts to a stop and the pursuit ends.
Something like this would work - once you know where the IED is. That brings us back to dealing with the trashy road side issue previously discussed. Once you know where the IED is, you still must determine whether or not detonation is a desired/acceptable way of disarming the IED and if it is, position the EMP generator where it can generate a sufficiently strong pulse to detonate the IED.
Since the AIF (anti-Iraqi forces) are able to observe MNF operations, you can expect that they would in time figure out the policy governing the use of EMP generators and begin to position the IEDs in places where they couldn't be detonated for fear of damaging critical infrastructure or injuring civilians - effects that they, the AIF, don't care about. And just to add another operational variable into the mix, once you deploy your EMP pulse generator and begin having success with it, the enemy will target it using either pedestrian or vehicle-borne suicide bombs as the means of attack.
And the beat goes on...
"I think it may use a phased array, with the individual sources being right on the array, but I could be wrong about that. "
I went to the to links listed in this post. Most informative.
To much to describe. Sorry to hear your number was up. I also got dumped, AT&T Bell Labs. Between 1966-1979 I worked at
Westinghouse AeroSpace/Defense in MD, they where bought out by Northrop a few years back.
I worked on quite a few weapon systems, amoung them, the first Harpooon Cruise Missile Raytheon produced. We had the "onboard mapping computer" part. So your shipboard computer uploaded the map coordinates into our computer which obviously took over once the missile was launched. We used the same basic computer for the cruise missile that we used for the F16 Fire control Radar Computer. A 16 bit 3.3 megahertz box. Our Westinghouse "milli computer" was a state of the arts machine back then. Of course we developed the hardware interface I/O boards for PC3 Orion, Sub, shipboard, launch. If I remember correcly we had six variations for the Cruise Missile during it's first couple years of service. I was a senior electronic tech during my last years with Westinghouse. Lots of fun projects.
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