What do you think about mixed use weapon tech? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Ben321
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: October 15, 2022, 04:22:14 am
content: Usually mixed use technology means stuff that benefits both the military and civilians, and that when in the hands of civilians is relatively harmless, like thermal cameras. Those can be used for heat seeking missiles, or as a camera for checking heat in electronics. However, there's also weapon tech that has mixed use. And its civilian used is NOT for the average citizen (unlike thermal cams). I'm thinking particularly about the LRAD sound cannon, used in the battle field to warn off potential enemy threats to give them a chance to retreat rather than opening fire on the enemy imediately. This same tech is used by civilian police though to break up riots. Do you think that's overkill? Do you think this is more an example of some mixed use tech that is equally useful in war and for law enforcement? Or is it more of a military tech that happened to find its way to law enforcement, and can be seen as militarization of the police?

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 15, 2022, 04:51:52 am
content: Maybe the best way to answer your question would be to ask one of you. Do you think surgical procedures and wound healing technologies should be withheld from civilian medical facilities for fear of militarizing them. Or that police should use water cannons and truncheons to break up riots instead of using non-lethal technologies developed by the military.The real question is whether something is appropriate to use, and doesn't depend on the original developer or someone on the current list of users.

author: Ben321
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: October 15, 2022, 08:25:02 am
content: Quote from: CatalinaWOW on October 15, 2022, 04:51:52 amI know some people are afraid that if it's perceived by police as being easier or less dangerous than other methods, they might use it as their first step in a conflict, resulting in them using it, rather than first trying to deescalate the conflict. It's also believed by many to be something they will use at genuinely peaceful protests, not just riots, if the cops themselves happen to politically disagree with the protestors. Also, water cannons are pretty effective at stopping actual riots from what I've seen in the news.

author: jpanhalt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 15, 2022, 10:51:00 am
content: Are you trying to make this into a political thread through the backdoor of "mixed use technology?"

author: Karel
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 15, 2022, 11:21:55 am
content: Only very few things can only be used for evil things.Most inventions can be used for good or bad things.Inventions (or weapons for that matter) aren't bad, but people are.Also,"We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violenceon those who would do us harm."

author: Stray Electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 15, 2022, 02:17:37 pm
content: I'm very curious to know how you define "equally usefulin war and for law enforcement"? (and I'll add purely civilian applications). Personally, I can't think of any technology hasn't hasn't found at least some use in all three worlds and also who's "usefulness" in each hasn't shifted over time.Also can you point to any technology or invention that hasn't found use in both "military" and "civilian" applications? Even things like "canned" food (in glass bottles!), developed to feed the armies of Napoleon, have found widespread use in purely civilian usage. Where would the world be today if someone had suppressed that technology because of it's possible military use?LRAD sound projector technology has found widespread use in flat panel speakers in museums and exhibits where you want to project the sound directlyand onlyto the audience of a particular exhibit and not to people at nearby exhibits. The flat panel speakers aren't cheap, about $2k each the last time that I looked, but I expect that within a few years it will also be in use at individual product displays in stores and many other places. I picked up about 20 of these in some surplus a few years ago and they're quite impressive. If you ever get a chance to play with them, you should!

author: Stray Electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 15, 2022, 02:21:59 pm
content: "This same tech is used by civilian police though to break up riots. Do you think that's overkill?"Let's see, the choice is being fired upon by police with firearms or with sound cannons; and you want to know if that is "overkill"? Is that a trick question?

author: aduinstat
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: October 15, 2022, 04:08:05 pm
content: Quote from: Stray Electron on October 15, 2022, 02:21:59 pmWell, the police could deescalate. Just having the tools available makes you want to use them.

author: Stray Electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 15, 2022, 04:28:35 pm
content: As a civilian, I would be happy to see the police "deescalate" by using rubber bullets instead regular bullets, pepper spray instead of bullets, stun guns instead of real guns, or water or sound cannons instead of real cannons;when it proves effective.Or by "deescalate" do you mean for them the police to simply leave the area and let the rioters destroy other people's property like they did in Portland and other places on the left coast of the US over the past 3 or so years?Some of you seem to be determined to shift this into a political thread about the police and not a thread about the dual use (military vs civilian) of technology.

author: coppercone2
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 15, 2022, 09:27:58 pm
content: I think that dual use technologies sometimes make for a problem but usually they improve things more then they hurt.If you consider the savings earned by something like thermal cameras1) search and rescue is cheap and easy2) forest fires caught early3) agricultural yields increase4) border patrol is cheaper5) mondo home energy savings6) less electrical fires7) better auto repaireasier / cheaper R&d, people get TC for things they normally would not unless their super specialized9) easier equipment repair10) easier and cheaper preventative maintenance, less downtime, less 3x overtime work for repair crews that bankrupts companies and increases energy delivery cost (finding overheating circuits)11) advancement of thermal sciencesconsider the financial benefit of all those things and the money that is saved, compared to having to do things the old fashioned way. If you consider the net benefit, it is vastly greater then the few problems incurred..You might say wars could have been started because of financial problems that slowly screw a country (electricity cost, fuel demand) that are being solved or mitigated with thermal cameras.

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 16, 2022, 12:28:52 am
content: Quote from: aduinstat on October 15, 2022, 04:08:05 pmYeah try that with a riot and let me know how that goes.IMHO if you don't want to be on the receiving end of a water canon or teargas grenade, learn how to behave in public. In all of my years I have never once been tempted to riot, it has been extremely easy to avoid, so I've never really understood the problem. If you want to protest something, you better be willing to police your own because it only takes one bad apple to spoil the whole barrel. If things start to get out of hand, then anyone who remains on the scene is guilty by association.

author: AVGresponding
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 16, 2022, 08:16:16 am
content: Quote from: james_s on October 16, 2022, 12:28:52 amThings are not so simple or black and white as you would like to believe. Ian Tomlinson was going about his lawful business in the area where he lived, where protests (somewhat short of a riot) were happening, when he was struck by a police officer, and collapsed and died some minutes later.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Ian_Tomlinson

author: Stray Electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 16, 2022, 02:26:25 pm
content: I completely agree with James-S. Being beaten by the police isn't something that I live in fear of. However I have been robbed by thugs, more than once. So I've vote to keep the police and to keep them involved and on the streets with no "deescalation".With Google and the internet it's not hard to find cases where someone has been injured or killed by excessive force used by the police (see George Floyd and/or Rodney King) but those RARE cases do not justify abolishing the police departments (code word: "defunding") or forcing them to abandon the streets to the rioters (code word: "deescalate"). Like it or not, innocent people are killed very day, all over the world. Butrarelyby the police. Look at the hundreds of murders in London, Paris and the US by Islamic extremists in recent years or the hundreds of murders of totally innocent in Ireland and England by the IRA bombings; just to name a few. Those are much greater frequency than the extremely few numbers of completely innocent people that are killed by the police.NOW, show me how any of those has anything to do with dual use technology!In all three cases, including the one that YOU named, the victims were beaten with clubs or in G.F's case manually strangled. No technology of any sort was involved, dual use or otherwise. If you can't then get out of this thread and take your police hating politics somewhere else.

author: AVGresponding
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 17, 2022, 05:01:02 pm
content: Quote from: Stray Electron on October 16, 2022, 02:26:25 pmCan't speak for anyone else, but at no point have I advocated the abolition or defunding of the police, and to suggest that I have is either a mistake due to not reading my post correctly, or a disingenuous attempt to brand me as some sort of anarchist.My point in linking the Ian Tomlinson case was not directly about dual use technology, it was a refutation of the frankly idiotic claim that anyone on the scene of a riot that isn't a police officer is guilty by association.As regards the technology available to police forces, aduinstat has already pointed out that if they have a tool available, they are likely to use it, even when it might be inappropriate. UK police have been criticised, and censured by the courts, on multiple occasions recently, for unlawfully holding DNA samples beyond allowable limits, and there is great concern, justifiably so in my opinion, regarding the use of facial recognition systems.

author: hans
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 17, 2022, 05:26:01 pm
content: Imagine this..MIlitary defense have invested a lot in building robust and reliable radar systems. The research that has gone into that is not only the building of electronics, but also design of antennas and field measurements on various objects or antenna reflections (e.g. structural vs electrical scattering properties).Backscatter is used in RFID, which can be used anywhere from strict access regulation (e.g. to police or military stations), or for an electronic door lock in a public/large building.Going 1 step further, we want to look into using backscatter radio for building wireless sensor networks. Since creating reflections is such a cheap way of broadcasting data, it severely cuts down on battery consumption and thus operational costs.RFID, much like radar, requires an excitation source (a sine wave) to create reflections from. However, that requires infrastructure which could be a hassle. So recycling existing RF signals is being investigated with ambient backscatter radio, which has been successful for various signal sources (TV, FM, WiFi, Bluetooth stations).Now imagine a world where we can have sensor devices everywhere, and nobody needs to go around replacing batteries to keep them on, and these sensors can piggyback their communications of existing signal powers. Imagine a government information agency or the military that can develop a device which continuously transmits mic data from a room, using existing RF infrastructure, permanently integrated into e.g. furniture or building structures to keep them hidden.Wouldn't that be an awesome spy/intel device for military/gov? Is that sci-fi enough? Probably. But this story has gone full circle, and I imagine virtually any tech can do that. Now personally I work on the IoT part of it.. but looking back and forward you can always identify military applications. Even then any tech that has a great value in military can also benefit civilians: always-on sensors are an example, but also imagine better radar systems for airports and air space control. Or future warehouses if we replace all Amazon employees with drones to fly and navigate them indoors (which if reports are correct, are running out of people since high turnover rate).The problem is probably that when people are going to mount real weapons on those drones, and navigate them radars or GPS, that now drone, radar and GPS technology have all been militarized and are bad. I don't think that's the case. A water cannon can be used to split riot groups, extinguish a building on fire, or be used for events to give the crowd a blast (literally).

author: Infraviolet
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 19, 2022, 05:00:10 pm
content: Not sure how your LRAD example is "mixed use" (the wod was always "dual use" I thought), it is still a weapon in both circumstances. Whether it used by soliders against soldiers, by civilian sailors against pirates, or by law enforcement (often in a mroe oppressive fashion than when used by actual soldiers against soldiers), it is still a weapon, still infact the very same weapon.My general consideration would be things with true dual use, that is to say an application that is not a weapon or other form of military/paramilitary equipment is all morally ok, because it has a civilian non-combative use which is of value to society and the economy.Anything which is a weapon solely for battlefield use by armed combatants against one-another is morally fairly ok. The same for law enforcement weapons which would only be of practical use against violent adversaries. War is ugly, but when both sides are there for a fight then so be it and they may as well have an arms race for the best kit.Anything which is primarily for use by governments/corporations against civilians (mass surveillance tech, facial recognition, censorship tech, creepy financial control schemes...) is morally unacceptable, and doesn't tend to have dual uses because it is usually specific enough in its details it can only ever serve to surveil/censor/maniuplate/oppress whether the operator is a government or a private entity.

author: cool_man
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: October 21, 2022, 01:38:31 pm
content: I think that mixed use weapon tech is a great idea.

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 22, 2022, 12:21:01 am
content: As this is an EE forum rather than a philosophy forum, might as well consider the question under the angle of engineering as a profession, rather than engineering (or even more vague, "technology") in general. Even if there's still some philosophy under that angle. But this is ethics, and talking about ethics in relation to engineering sounds relevant to me.To me, the question is, what do you, as an engineer, accept to work on? Is there anything you personally would refuse to work on if you knew it was going to be used to kill people? Where would you draw the line? If there was a question of benefit/risk ratio, would you feel able to determine this ratio - or judge the relevance thereof if it was given to you as a premise - and act accordingly? If you got orders from some authority (your boss, or some higher authority), would you consider that it exempted you from being personally responsible?Those are pretty personal questions in the end, and the answers probably can't be generalized, except maybe at the surface. OTOH, those are questions that almost any engineer will face at some point. Ethics is a bitch.Just my 2 cents though.