Old news in science fiction, coming soon to a riot-control zone near you ….

Active Denial System (ADS) Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration (ACTD)

The Active Denial System (ADS), an Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration (ACTD), provides a new non-lethal capability helping to fill the gap between the ’shout’ or ’shoot’ alternatives faced by our troops.

It provides numerous advantages over existing non-lethal weapons, such as extended range and extremely small risk of injury, and it has the potential to provide a tremendous new capability for U.S. forces in support of today’s complex missions.

Learn more about ACTDs at http://www.acq.osd.mil/actd/.

Official DoD site for information on the ADS

[Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program]

Active Denial System: the Goodbye Effect

According to documents obtained for Wired News under federal sunshine laws, the Air Force’s Active Denial System, or ADS, has been certified safe after lengthy tests by military scientists in the lab and in war games.

The ADS shoots a beam of millimeters waves, which are longer in wavelength than x-rays but shorter than microwaves — 94 GHz (= 3 mm wavelength) compared to 2.45 GHz (= 12 cm wavelength) in a standard microwave oven.

The longer waves are thought to limit the effects of the radiation. If used properly, ADS will produce no lasting adverse affects, the military argues.

Documents acquired for Wired News using the Freedom of Information Act claim that most of the radiation (83 percent) is instantly absorbed by the top layer of the skin, heating it rapidly.

The beam produces what experimenters call the “Goodbye effect,” or “prompt and highly motivated escape behavior.” In human tests, most subjects reached their pain threshold within 3 seconds, and none of the subjects could endure more than 5 seconds.

“It will repel you,” one test subject said. “If hit by the beam, you will move out of it — reflexively and quickly. You for sure will not be eager to experience it again.”

But while subjects may feel like they have sustained serious burns, the documents claim effects are not long-lasting. At most, “some volunteers who tolerate the heat may experience prolonged redness or even small blisters,” the Air Force experiments concluded.

The reports describe an elaborate series of investigations involving human subjects.

The volunteers were military personnel: active, reserve or retired, who volunteered for the tests. They were unpaid, but the subjects would “benefit from direct knowledge that an effective nonlethal weapon system could soon be in the inventory,” said one report. The tests ranged from simple exposure in the laboratory to elaborate war games involving hundreds of participants.

The military simulated crowd control situations, rescuing helicopter crews in a Black Hawk Down setting and urban assaults. More unusual tests involved alcohol, attack dogs and maze-like obstacle courses.

In more than 10,000 exposures, there were six cases of blistering and one instance of second-degree burns in a laboratory accident, the documents claim.

The ADS was developed in complete secrecy for 10 years at a cost of $40 million. Its existence was revealed in 2001 by news reports, but most details of ADS human testing remain classified. There has been no independent checking of the military’s claims.

[Link: Wired.Com]

Via Boing Boing.

ADS Contracts

On October 4, 2004 the DOD published the following contract information:

Communications and Power Industries (CPI), Palto Alto [sic], Calif., is being awarded a $6,377,762 costs-reimbursement, cost-plus fixed-price contract. The contractor shall design, build, test, and delivery a two to 2.5 megawatt, high efficiency, continuous wave (CW) 95 gigahertz millimeter wave source system. The contractor shall perform extensive modeling, simulation, experiments, and testing to the maximum capabilities of their facilities (which shall no less than one megawatt peak RF output) that will ascertain the final CW capabilities of the source. The contractor also shall provide input for the requirements for the government’s test stand, which will serve as a full power facility in the future. At this time, $900,000 of the funds has been obliged. This work will be complete by January 2009. Negotiations were completed September 2004. The Air Force Research Laboratory, Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, is the contracting activity (FA9451-04-C-0298).

[Wikipedia]

Active Denial Systems: experimental protocols

There were 14 documents [Wired.com] … you can see how the Air Force’s testing evolved from simple experiments on a few square inches of skin into fully fledged war games … the cautious approach of early tests is gradually relaxed as experimenters gain confidence in the system’s supposed safety.

One of the experiments involved giving the subjects carefully measured doses of vodka to see if it helped them withstand the pain.

One test exposed military dog teams to the ADS’ effects, apparently based on the idea that if the device is used for tasks like perimeter security, then there is a real risk of ‘friendly fire’ on dogs as well as humans.

The testing gets serious with an assessment of ADS in an urban environment, in which a whole range of scenarios are described. These typically involve a security force dealing with a red force of aggressors and a number of noncombatant bystanders. There’s a traffic control point set up, route clearance and search and rescue, all of which give some idea of what the ADS is expected to achieve.

… Software used for modeling the pattern of the ADS beam was originally used for checking mobile phone coverage. More importantly, it tells us the safety factor for the ADS: A dangerous dose is approximately four times what anyone can stand. (Which is fine so long as you can get out of the beam: The test protocols specifies that the beam has to be turned off if anyone ends up in the water, as combined beam reflections off the water and the hull could otherwise be dangerous [emphasis added]).

F-BR-2006-0018-H Effects of exposure to 400-W 95-GHz Millimetre Wave Energy on Non-Stationary Humans … practically a future reality game show, in which the contestants have 3 minutes to cross a ‘maze-like’ course and get through a combination-locked gate to escape while multiple ADS beams are used to drive them back.

[Wired.com]

Vehicle-Mounted Active Denial System (V-MADS) @ GlobalSecurity.og

Louis Slesin, editor of Microwave News, a leading newsletter on non-ionizing radiation, calls VMADS a “significant development” in directed energy weapons. However, he says that possible injuries, particularly to the eye, could lead to stopping further development and actual deployment of the device-as the Pentagon did in the mid-1990s when it was trying to develop blinding lasers. “The real question is whether it will go the way of the lasers,” Slesin says. Like laser, exposure to the microwave beam could cause eye damage. “People will get out of the beam, but [injury to the eyes] depends on how much exposure they get,” Slesin says. Slesin also notes that “the only people who are doing health research on the effects of electromagnetic radiation are the people who are developing this weapon-the Air Force Lab. . . . They’re the only people who have any money in the United States to do research on the health effects, and they’re in firm control of the [safety] standard-setting process. . . . That’s a clear conflict.”

… This technology and its proposed use in an operational system have been given a preliminary weapons legal review as required by Department of Defense Directive 3000.3 “Policy for Non-Lethal Weapons,” and the United States’ treaty - obligations. This preliminary review found that further research, development, and testing of this technology is permissible. As required by law, a final, comprehensive legal review will be completed prior to entering the acquisition cycle.

Two primary organizations are executing this program: the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate at Quantico Marine Corps Base, Virginia, and the Air Force Research Laboratory, headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. The Air Force Research Laboratory is developing the technology with funding from both the Air Force and the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate.

From the Air Force Research Laboratory, two directorates are involved: the Directed Energy Directorate at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, and the Human Effectiveness Directorate at Brooks Air Force Base, Texas. The former works technology development and testing; the latter is in charge of biological effects research.

There are three primary contractors: Raytheon AET in Rancho Cucamonga, California, is the systems integrator, CPI (Communications and Power Industries) in Palo Alto, California, is the source developer, and Veridian Engineering in San Antonio, Texas, is performing biological effects research.

Other organizations and agencies that are involved in the this project include the Air Force Force Protection Battlelab at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas; the Marine Warfighting Laboratory at Quantico, Virginia; the Air Force Special Operations Command at Hurlburt Field, Florida; and the U.S. Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida.

The Air Force’s Electronic Systems Center at Hanscom Air Force Base, Massachusetts, will manage acquisition of the Vehicle-Mounted Active Denial System based on this technology.

[GlobalSecurity.org]

Microwaving Iraq
William Thomas cites an anonymous soldier: microwave “popper” weapons saturating Fallujah

Desperate to improve images of civilian carnage, US commanders are using portable electromagnetic-frequency weapons in Fallujah and other “hot spots” in the Sunni Triangle to pacify restive neighborhoods with invisible EM radiation. “Active Denial” antenna arrays mounted on Humvees are also being deployed to panic and disperse hostile crowds by flash-burning exposed flesh with microwaves. But unintended side effects from the hidden rooftop transmitters are reportedly triggering violent attacks by exposed insurgents — while leading to AWOL rates of up to 15% among US forces disoriented by these same weapons, as well as the electromagnetic emanations from high-power radars, radios and “jammers”.

On the rooftop of a shrapnel-pocked building in the ruins of Fallujah, a team of GI’s stealthily sets up a gray plastic dome about two-feet in diameter. Keeping well back from the sight lines of the street and nearby buildings, they plug the cable connectors on the side of the “popper” into a power unit. The grunts have no clue what the device does. They are just following orders.

“ Most of the worker-bees that are placing these do not even know what is inside the ‘domes’, just that they were told where to place them by Intel weenies with usually no nametag,” reports my source, a very well informed combat veteran I will call “Hank”.

“ Intel” stands for “intelligence” officers who target the most restive neighborhoods in a country gripped by anarchy and chaos. The lack of nametags indicates membership in a spooky “alphabet agency”, either within or outside the military chain of command. Similar “black: teams removed “Made In The USA” chemical weapons from Iraqi trenches after Desert Storm. [Bringing The War Home by William Thomas]

The grunts call the plastic devices “poppers” or “domes”. Once activated, each hidden transmitter emits a widening circle of invisible energy capable of passing through metal, concrete and human skulls up to half a mile away. “They are saturating the area with ULF, VLF and UHF freqs,” Hanks says, with equipment derived from US Navy undersea sonar and communications. But its not being used to locate and talk to submarines under Baghdad.

After powering up the unit, the grunts quickly exit the area. It is their commanders’ fervent hope that any male survivors enraged by brutal American bombardments that damaged virtually every building in this once thriving “City of Mosques”, displacing a quarter-million residents while murdering thousands of children, women and elders in their homes—will lose all incentive for further resistance and revenge.

A dedicated former soldier, whose experiences during and after Desert Storm are chronicled in my book, Bringing The War Home, Hank stays in close touch with his unit serving “in theater” in Iraq. When I asked how many “poppers” are being used to irradiate Iraqi neighborhoods, he checked and got back to me. There are “at least 25 of these that have been deployed to theater, and used. Some have conked out and been removed, so I do not know how many are currently active and broadcasting.”

[William Thomas: Link]

Details of US microwave-weapon tests revealed — July 2005, New Scientist:

The ADS fires a 95-gigahertz microwave beam, which is supposed to heat skin and to cause pain but no physical damage (New Scientist, 27 October 2001, p 26). Little information about its effects has been released, but details of tests in 2003 and 2004 were revealed after Edward Hammond, director of the US Sunshine Project - an organisation campaigning against the use of biological and non-lethal weapons - requested them under the Freedom of Information Act.

The tests were carried out at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Two experiments tested pain tolerance levels, while in a third, a “limited military utility assessment”, volunteers played the part of rioters or intruders and the ADS was used to drive them away.

The experimenters banned glasses and contact lenses to prevent possible eye damage to the subjects, and in the second and third tests removed any metallic objects such as coins and keys to stop hot spots being created on the skin. They also checked the volunteers’ clothes for certain seams, buttons and zips which might also cause hot spots.

[New Scientist]

Microwave beam weapon to disperse crowds — New Scientist, October 2001

Last week, the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) in New Mexico finished testing the system on human volunteers. The Air Force now wants to use this Active Denial Technology (ADT), which it says is non-lethal, for peacekeeping or riot control at “relatively long range” - possibly from low-flying aircraft.

ADT uses a 2-metre dish to create a narrow beam of microwaves that can be scanned across a crowd or even aimed at individuals. AFRL is using infrared photography to analyse the heating effect on the volunteers’ bodies.

AFRL says that the 3-millimetre wavelength radiation penetrates only 0.3 millimetres into the skin, rapidly heating the surface above the 45 °C pain threshold. At 50 °C, they say the pain reflex makes people pull away automatically in less than a second - it’s said to feel like fleetingly touching a hot light bulb. Someone would have to stay in the beam for 250 seconds before it burnt the skin, the lab says, giving “ample margin between intolerable pain and causing a burn”.
Little data

But critics question the AFRL’s claims that the weapon’s undisclosed exposure levels are safe. John Pike of think tank Globalsecurity.org fears that the beam power needed to scare people may be too close to the level that would injure them.

[New Scientist]

Non-Lethal Weapons: a Framework for Future Integration
Air Command and Staff College, Air University research report, 1998

Pulsed High Powered Microwaves (HPM) — Disrupts and neutralizes electronics. Jams or scrambles C2 systems. Shuts down engines, explodes ammunition. Induces confusion, stupor or coma in personnel and animals [emphasis added].
AM/AP

[PDF: Globalsecurity.org]

Non-Lethal Weapons planning circa 1996 –

The advent of an era when the military services were increasingly required to perform Operations Other Than War (OOTW) has led to the need for NLWs. In early 1995, USMC LtGen Anthony Zinni was charged with protecting the final withdrawal of UN forces from Somalia and explored the prospects of using NLW. LtGen Zinni asked for quick response to field a NLW capability. The US Marine Corps and the US Army teamed to provide available NLW technology for use in and around Mogadishu. Although the NLW effects were marginal, LtGen Zinni’s aggressive support added credibility to the NLW effort.

General John J. Sheehan, USACOM Commander, spoke at the Non-Lethal Defense Conference II, which was held in Washington, DC on 07 Mar 96. In his speech given at the conference, General Sheehan examined the global requirements for use of non-lethal weapons and emphasized the necessity for those weapons as standard-issue military hardware. On 09 Jul 96, DoD Directive 3000.3 was issued. The directive established joint service organizational responsibilities and provided guidelines for the development and employment of non-lethal weapons. The directive designated the Commandant of the US Marine Corps as Executive Agent (EA) for the DoD Non-Lethal Weapons Program, with the responsibility of providing “…program recommendations and for stimulating and coordinating non-lethal weapons requirements.”

The Commandant of the Marine Corps has been designated as the Executive Agent for the Department of Defense (DoD) Joint Non-Lethal Weapons (NLW) Program with the responsibility for providing program recommendations and for stimulating and coordinating Joint Non-Lethal Weapon requirements. As the Army’s proponent lead for non-lethal weapons, the Infantry worked closely with the sister services and DoD to develop a coherent joint operational concept. The U.S. Army Military Police School (USAMPS, at Fort Leonard Wood, MO) is the designated single proponent for Army Non-Lethal Applications, effective 12 September 2000. USAMPS serves as the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command’s single voice for all developments and initiatives to field NL capabilities.

[Globalsecurity.org]

Microwave ovens into microwave weapons — networked tribes, infrastructure disruption, and the emerging bazaar of violence. An open notebook on the first epochal war of the 21st Century.

Unfortunately, directed energy weapons are much more valuable to global guerrillas than nation-state militaries due to the target imbalance between nation-states and non-state foes. The technology needed to build these weapons is generally available and inexpensive (numerous experiments … with a converted microwave oven demonstrate this). Homemade directed energy weapons will eventually become the weapon of choice for global guerrillas intent on infrastructure destruction.

[John Robb: Global Guerillas]

How To — from Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner
– Written in the mid-sixties, set in 2010 AD –

… A large number of recent manufactured products employ honeycomb aluminium sheet bonded with a European adhesive sold here under the name ‘Weldigrip’. This tends to fail when exposed to gamma. Radio Test Source Inc.’s catalog item BVZ26 incorporates a cobalt-60 emitter designed for inspecting high-carbon steel castings up to 9″ thick. It should be placed close to a critical joint …

… The missile-bombardment doors on the North Rockies Acceleratube are sensitive to gamma. The sensor is in a large black container at the eastern entry and at the western it’s in a green conical thing. Those doors weigh over a thousand ton apiece …

… If you have re-evacuation facilities, note that the electron gun in current Admiral TV sets can be modified to deliver a linear instead of a fanned jet. What it does to a sensitive circuit is nobody’s business, but it ought to be …

– From a selection of duplicated, photocopied, holographed, offset, lithoed and printed leaflets on file at Ellay police HQ

[John Brunner: Stand on Zanzibar]

Nikola Tesla — a man ahead of his time, the wizard of energy — grandfather of the Death Ray –

Later in life, Tesla made some remarkable claims concerning a “teleforce” weapon. The press called it a “peace ray” or death ray. In total, the components and methods included:

1. An apparatus for producing manifestations of energy in free air instead of in a high vacuum as in the past. This, according to Tesla in 1934, was accomplished.
2. A mechanism for generating tremendous electrical force. This, according to Tesla, was also accomplished.
3. A means of intensifying and amplifying the force developed by the second mechanism.
4. A new method for producing a tremendous electrical repelling force. This would be the projector, or gun, of the invention.

Tesla worked on plans for a directed-energy weapon between the early 1900s till the time of his death. In 1937, Tesla composed a treatise entitled “The Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through the Natural Media” concerning charged particle beams. Tesla published the document in an attempt to expound on the technical description of a “superweapon that would put an end to all war”. This treatise of the particle beam is currently in the Nikola Tesla Museum archive in Belgrade. It described an open ended vacuum tube with a gas jet seal that allowed particles to exit, a method of charging particles to millions of volts, and a method of creating and directing nondispersive particle streams (through electrostatic repulsion).

Records of his indicate that it was based on a narrow stream of atomic clusters of liquid mercury or tungsten accelerated via high voltage (by means akin to his magnifying transformer). Tesla gave the following description concerning the particle gun’s operation:

“[The nozzle would] send concentrated beams of particles through the free air, of such tremendous energy that they will bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 200 miles from a defending nation’s border and will cause armies to drop dead in their tracks.”

Tesla died of heart failure … [January] 1943, at the age of 86 …. Immediately after Tesla’s death became known, the Federal Bureau of Investigation instructed the government’s Alien Property Custodian office to take possession of his papers and property, despite his US citizenship. His safe at the hotel was also opened. At the time of his death, Tesla had been continuing work on the teleforce weapon, or death ray, that he had unsuccessfully marketed to the US War Department. It appears that his proposed death ray was related to his research into ball lightning and plasma and was composed of a particle beam weapon. The US government did not find a prototype of the device in the safe. After the FBI was contacted by the War Department, his papers were declared to be top secret. The so-called “peace ray” constitutes a part of some conspiracy theories as a means of destruction. The personal effects were seized on the advice of presidential advisors, and J. Edgar Hoover declared the case “most secret”, because of the nature of Tesla’s inventions and patents. One document states that “[he] is reported to have some 80 trunks in different places containing transcripts and plans having to do with his experiments […]”. Charlotte Muzar reported that there were several “missing” papers and property.

[Wikipedia]

See Also

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