Air Force chief: Test weapons on testy U.S. mobs

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Nonlethal weapons such as high-power microwave devices should be used on American citizens in crowd-control situations before being used on the battlefield, the Air Force secretary said Tuesday.

The object is basically public relations. Domestic use would make it easier to avoid questions from others about possible safety considerations, said Secretary Michael Wynne.

"If we're not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens, then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation," said Wynne. "(Because) if I hit somebody with a nonlethal weapon and they claim that it injured them in a way that was not intended, I think that I would be vilified in the world press."

The Air Force has paid for research into nonlethal weapons, but he said the service is unlikely to spend more money on development until injury problems are reviewed by medical experts and resolved.

Nonlethal weapons generally can weaken people if they are hit with the beam. Some of the weapons can emit short, intense energy pulses that also can be effective in disabling some electronic devices.

On another subject, Wynne said he expects to choose a new contractor for the next generation aerial refueling tankers by next summer. He said a draft request for bids will be put out next month, and there are two qualified bidders: the Boeing Co. and a team of Northrop Grumman Corp. and European Aeronautic Defence and Space Co., the majority owner of European jet maker Airbus SAS.

The contract is expected to be worth at least $20 billion (€15.75 billion).

Chicago, Illinois-based Boeing lost the tanker deal in 2004 amid revelations that it had hired a top Air Force acquisitions official who had given the company preferential treatment.

Wynne also said the Air Force, which is already chopping 40,000 active duty, civilian and reserves jobs, is now struggling to find new ways to slash about $1.8 billion (€1.4 billion) from its budget to cover costs from the latest round of base closings.

He said he can't cut more people, and it would not be wise to take funding from military programs that are needed to protect the country. But he said he also incurs resistance when he tries to save money on operations and maintenance by retiring aging aircraft.

"We're finding out that those are, unfortunately, prized possessions of some congressional districts," said Wynne, adding that the Air Force will have to "take some appetite suppressant pills." He said he has asked employees to look for efficiencies in their offices.

The base closings initially were expected to create savings by reducing Air Force infrastructure by 24 percent.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/09/12/usa....ap/index.html

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I'm all for the production of non-lethal weapons... but why should they be tested on a real population first?
If they are non-lethal, they're about as likely to be dangerous as new drugs.
Why don't they pay people big to volunteer to be tested on before trying it on a civilian population.
If not, they could at least test it on the battlefield on people they would kill anyway. At least if it malfunctions there, it isn't any worse than the alternative.

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I have no problem with this policy. Why do liberals oppose non-lethal weapons so much? Why are they a bad thing?

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What I oppose is testing things they claim to be non-lethal but which have not been tested on unwilling civilians.

Your argument is like saying I oppose medicine because I don't think they should just stick it in the arm of some unsuspecting person before they've tested it to see how it works.

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Of course these weapons have been tested before..the microwave weapon in particular was tested on the host of a Discovery Channel TV show already. I've seen it.

They are saying that if we really believe they are non-lethal (and we do) that we should not be reluctant to use them on our own people in situations where crowd control is called for. Because otherwise it makes it appear as if we do not really believe they are non-lethal. I agree with them.

What is the alternative you people have to non-lethal weapons?

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Liberals who I know in Ann Arbor would argue that even non-lethal crowd-control is an affront to individual liberties (and you can launch it from there into the berserkosphere if the ACLU gets onboard, which they will).

Powerful graphic images come to mind: blacks being set on by dogs or fire-hoses, pinned to walls until all their fight was left and the cops could come in for the gang-stomping---just like Rodney King.

Argue Rodney's criminal record since that stomping was caught on tape, and I see signs of an unrepentant lawbreaker who got rich for a while by playing the Victim Card. And he was entitled to, for those cops were dead wrong in the number of stomps it took to bring down a guy higher than hell on PCP.

Every case is different in what level of force you employ to preserve the public peace. We pay cops to be our hired killers, and hold them to standards so rigidly high that it almost transcends the hope we'll get human beings and not automatons to do our policing.

There are electronic devices mounted to the underside of police cars which set free a remote-controlled vehicle that rolls under a felon's car, and electrically shuts down his vehicle. This is no different, it's just person-to-person. And that gets us back to the type of people we want for our police.

Once a year, zap every cop in America, to remind him what these cattle-prods under any other name can really do. Call it earning your badge.

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Oh, this new technology is superior to the old "non-lethal" ways which always seemed to cause fatalities despite their "non-lethalness", in addition to a lot of permanent bodily damage.
I suppose if they've been tested, I'm all for it... with one more caveat.
Even non-lethal weapons should be saved for when the protesters actually step over the line of peacable assembly and not just whenever the law enforcement feels that it needs to break up a protest for the hell of it... not that law enforcement does that now or anything.

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