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Thanks to a decision by the Pentagon in 2007 to not deploy their Active Denial System in Iraq, unwilling Iraqi test subjects were spared the further insult, indignity, and humiliation of possibly having their insides heated while sitting in their homes.
Senior officers in Iraq have continued to make the case. One December 2006 request noted that as U.S. forces are drawn down, the non-lethal weapon "will provide excellent means for economy of force."
The main reason the tool has been missing in action is public perception. With memories of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal still fresh, the Pentagon is reluctant to give troops a space-age device that could be misconstrued as a torture machine.
"We want to just make sure that all the conditions are right, so when it is able to be deployed the system performs as predicted - that there isn't any negative fallout," said Col. Kirk Hymes, head of the Defense Department's Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate.
However, the research arm of the US Department of Justice is readying an updated and portable version of the Pentagons' Active Denial System for use by homeland police to subdue unruly suspects at home. The device would fire a more concentrated microwave beam than the ADS system but the heating effect would be the same.
"The NIJ's laser weapon has been dubbed Personnel Halting and Stimulation Response - PHaSR - and resembles a bulky rifle. It was created in 2005 by a US air force agency to temporarily dazzle enemies (see image, right), but the addition of a second, infrared laser makes it able to heat skin too.
The NIJ is testing the PHaSR in various scenarios, which may include prison situations as well as law enforcement. The NIJ's portable microwave-based weapon is less developed. Currently a tabletop prototype with a range of less than a metre, a backpack-sized prototype with a range of 15 metres will be ready next year, a spokesperson says.
The truly portable mini-ADS could prove the more useful, as microwaves penetrate clothing better than the infra-red beam, which is most effective on exposed skin. Although the spokesman says: "In LEC [Law Enforcement and Corrections] use there is always a little bit of skin to target."
As nice as it would be to use a device like the PHaSR to keep pets from relieving themselves in your bushes, using such a device on any living thing should be considered cruel and unusual punishment. Common sense, no?
-tdm