An article in Slate about heat beaming weapons — which are supposed to be harmless, although they make you feel like you are on fire — makes an interesting observation about how the military got interested in such technology. It notes that “Twelve years ago, the Department of Defense observed that our armed forces were increasingly being used for peacekeeping, humanitarian aid, and protection of civil society. More of our enemies were blending in with, or disguising themselves as, civilians. Through the media, more eyeballs, hearts, and minds could see the infrastructure we destroyed. The DOD proposed the development of weapons ‘to incapacitate personnel or materiel, while minimizing fatalities, permanent injury to personnel, and undesired damage to property and the environment.’”
The Heat Ray and Humanitarian Emergency
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Interesting. This is in interesting mix of new and not unprecedented: Similar tools have been used by police departments for years–things like the TASER and the Flashball (In fact, I’m giving a talk next week, at the IES here at Berkeley, on the role of such tools in the 2005 French riots).
The logic behind them is usually along the lines of “to incapacitate personnel… while minimizing fatalities …[and] permanent injury to personnel” (although the TASER x26 has the additional feature of being able to connect to a standard PC via a USB port and report when it was used, the duration of use and temperature–all of which is supposed to make individual police officers more accountable to public scrutiny. This was a big reason it was adopted in France a few years ago. Check out the webpage, it’s trippy: http://www.taserx26.com/ )
What seems new here is the concern for infrastructure as well, or maybe it’s better to say the placement of “infrastructure” on the same ethical (?) level on which “life” previously enjoyed a monopoly.