This is just ridiculous:
“Killing people and destroying things for some political purpose” is how prominent defense scholar Richard Betts describes the essence of military force. Betts’ description reflects the pervasive view of military force held by most military and foreign policy experts. However, it does not account for a variety of non-lethal options that policy makers will have to consider using in future conflicts.
If the idea is that soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen will go into battle with non-lethal weapons, just end the debate right there.
One, non-lethal weapons are merely less-often-lethal weapons. If you don't want to kill people, don't fire things at them. And using "non-lethal" weapons makes any death seem much worse because of the expectations game.
These weapons are worse in propaganda because while these weapons are less likely to kill, they can leave disabled or blind survivors who make lovely poster boys (or girls) against our brutality. These are our enemies, remember. They'll use this gift of information warfare material. We just didn't want to risk using "non-lethal" weapons in Iraq for reasons such as this.
Second, any enemy will salivate over the prospect of facing our troops with "non-lethal" weapons while they try to kill us. Who wouldn't want that type of advantage?
Or our enemies dressed as civilians can take advantage of our rules to push the envelope by doing all the violence that they can without firearms, knowing we won't escalate to lethal force.
Fourth, doesn't this mean we will capture more of our enemies? But if we can't hold our enemies, what is the point of not killing them? Isn't this why the president has continued to insist that Guantanamo Bay will close and instead uses armed drones to kill enemies?
Fifth, the practical reason this is pointless is the rise of remotely piloted/driven weapons systems and eventually robots. Firing a bean-bag round at a drone raises the level of stupid doesn't it?
The stupid is mutating. Although to be fair, if we expect our enemies to fire bean bags and rubber bullets, it makes perfect sense to have unarmored vehicles that use their ability to avoid enemies to stay intact.
I'm not on board (although I did see one combat use for a "death ray"). Not one bit.
Look, the article isn't totally worthless if you just set aside the notion that actual warfare is obsolete. If one point is that cyber-warfare and other approaches allow us to pressure countries short of war, fine. Add those into the mix of pressure short of shooting war we already have.
Heck, fire hoses can be used when you don't want to shoot:
A Chinese coastguard ship used a water cannon last month to drive Filipino fishermen out of disputed waters in the South China Sea, illustrating aggressive enforcement of new Chinese rules, the head of the Philippine military said on Monday.
But the notion that these measures can apply the same pressure as a shooting war to compel a state to behave as we wish is just nonsense.
Like any measure of pressure short of war, the target nation will either cope with the pressure or--if it is really bad--consider the pressure the equivalent of war that will lead them to respond with their own means of waging war the old fashioned way by killing people and breaking things.
Funny enough, given their humanitarian motives (I'll be generous), suggestions for non-lethal weapons just makes it more likely we'll go to war. Leaders will believe that we can win without much death.
Yet once begun, such a pseudo-war will prove to be either indecisive or we will lose against an enemy that actually tries to kill our people, forcing us to belatedly escalate. Having lost an initial chance to stun and defeat an enemy, that war will be longer and more costly than first thought.
But hey, enough time has passed to bring up the subject again.
If you don't want to wage war, don't wage war. If you need to wage war, wage war. Save the "non-lethal" weapons for certain types of law enforcement situations or to help kill enemies with lethal weapons in some situations.
