Sure, until someone says "hey can we stick this on a truck and use it against cars?" "Hey can we stick this on the belly of a plane and use it on a building?" "Hey what happens if we do a flash of this at protestors?"
It’s not going to do anything useful against cars, let alone buildings. It would blind people, and that would be bad, but it’s a very expensive way to hurt people. I think this one is for what it says it’s for.
The point is, why would they bother when there’s cheaper and easier ways to do it? A high tech laser system is great for shooting stuff down because it replaces missile systems that cost even more. If you want to cripple people, why would you use it instead of a cheap gun or baton?
“It could be used to hurt people” doesn’t mean much. You at least need “it could be used to hurt people, and it’s better at it in at least one way than what’s already available.”
Quit listening to the propaganda, listen to the actual claims.
We have one clear noncombatant child death--killed by the device aimed at her father (who was a valid target). We have a handful of people who are underage, but no details about them. Plenty about the one innocent, nothing about the rest. Are they truly that inept, or would looking into the rest reveal they weren't non-combatants?
The fact that they only managed to find one case to parade in front of the cameras says a lot. The beeper attack is probably the best special operations move pulled off in recent times.
Even if your goal is terror, cost effectiveness means you can commit more terror.
The pager attack was incredibly cost effective. It would have cost orders of magnitude more to achieve the same thing by dropping bombs.
Cost isn’t a number subtracted from a bank account. Cost is, how much of this can you actually do?
That’s the whole reason this system exists. Their other systems work fine for shooting stuff down. But they cost too much. That is to say, they can’t shoot enough stuff down. This system can shoot more stuff down.
Countries dont generally invest in shitty weapons when they already have good weapons. Bombs & missiles already exist and are much better than lasers if your goal is to destroy a stationary target.
In Batman Begins, the villian just makes the drinking water toxic. With todays AI and Biotech, one can create a new bacteria or virus and cripple water supply of cities. I am sure a suitable trained AI can get more creative with such low cost attack vectors.
Nah. You can't just engineer some sort of pathogen which will survive water purification treatments, or grow and reproduce in pure water without any nutrients. Real life isn't like the movies.
This just means, the addition of the pathogen has to happen after purification treatments. Viruses can stay dormant and activate only within human body, no need for food.
“Viruses” have a very broad feature set-beyond evoking Batman, it seems like a lot of details need to be hammered out here, even residually chlorinated water can be problematic in maintaining titers.
IMO, These days, public health policy (conspiracy?) seems to be a more efficient way to spread pathogens. Not precise targeting tho.
Won't work very well. Such things need great stability.
And it's not like there's any need of a fancy weapon to do that. This exists to engage high speed targets. Just because you can use a GBU-28 to kill a gopher doesn't mean anyone ever will.
