Pentagon inks deal on portable milli-wave raygun tech
American weaponry globocorp Raytheon has been awarded a contract by the US military to improve the state of the art in microwave blasters for ground troops, offering "lighter-weight, non-lethal" rayguns as an alternative to deadly force.
The company announced a deal with the Pentagon's Joint Non Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD) to "a gallium nitride solid-state source for use in non-lethal weapons" this week.
The idea is that this is actually one of the nicer things that heavily outnumbered US troops might do to testy mobs if reasoning with them didn't work. A crowd-scattering dose of microwaves would be painful, but less so than a lengthy burst from a machine gun or a close encounter with a tank - so goes the thinking. It's even thought by proponents of the ADS that it might be a kindlier option than everyday beanbag projectiles, rubber or plastic bullets, taser electro-cattleprod guns, riot gas, metal truncheons etc.
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