Future Weapons
As technology advances, unfortunately so does the fierceness of weapons. The very first weapon was probably a rock thrown by an angry individual at a human. It had probably been tested on animals first. Maybe some prehistoric hunter before weapons were invented was so hungry that he headed out to kill an animal and thought of taking a rock with him. This was known as the technological advancement of weapons. It may not seem that way to us today, but to all those that were trying to catch animals with their bare hands, it must have seemed wondrous. Think of it this way, a rock allowed a person to keep a small distance between himself and the animal he was trying to kill. In the very beginning animals were probably killed by jumping on them and biting them to death, much as an animal kills another animal. Most people never think of humans so far back in history that they are completely without any weapons at all. This had to have been the case at one time, for those that believe in evolution. Even those that do not believe in evolution and believe in creationism, might have to come to the same conclusion, that is that in the very beginning, humans were weaponless. There is a school of thought that states that what I have said is not true. I do not understand how it can come to this conclusion, but the theory goes something like this, people had powers, mental powers, that they lost over many years. Why I cannot believe in this is simple. It would indicate that people never started from the beginning, but were more advanced in some ways than we are today. While our development of weapons was a slow and painful process that took place over many tens of thousands of years, we have become experts at developing killing machines. When you think about it, this is really not something to brag about. Each human death denies someone the right to live out their life and also denies their life to their loved ones. While more and more people feel this way, there are not enough of them in any position of power in the world to make any difference. This is not to say that people like this have not had any influence on weapons development. I think that all of us have noticed the tendency to develop non-lethal weapons. I believe that these weapons would never have reached the development stage if there wasn't a considerable amount of people trying to stop all the killing that is going on. Not all of these non-lethal weapons are entirely non-lethal however and these weapons are not be confused with the type known as less-lethal. The concussion from some can kill in some limited circumstances. Other non-lethal weapons that are said to cause things like temporary blindness, might just cause permanent blindness in a few people. It is important to remember that not everyone reacts the same way to the same stimulus. Even drugs that are created to save our lives may have a small fatality rate. One has only to look at television and see the warnings attached to some of these prescription drugs to realize what I am talking about. Weapons do possess a certain fascination however. Some people are very interested in guns, but they have no intention of shooting anyone. Other people are just interested in following the latest military weapons, so that they can assess where the balance of power is in the world. To this goal, I have decided to look into some of the very latest weapons. One of the biggest problems that this country has, is that it developed many advanced weapons for the Cold War. Some might say that a weapon is a weapon and can be used in any type of conflict, they would be wrong. During the Cold War weapons were developed with the idea that countries would be fighting each other and that these countries would have similar types of weapons. The type of terrorist actions that we are now fighting do not lend themselves to the use of many of these weapons. One of the reasons is that sometimes battles are fought in urban settings with a lot of innocent people around. Can you imagine setting off some type of super bomb in the middle of a town or city? Not only would this solve nothing, but along with killing a lot of innocent people, it would certainly turn the population of a country against us. That is exactly what has happened to us before. When we were in Vietnam we couldn't tell the enemy from our friends and many times we killed the wrong people. This led to a lot of South Vietnamese becoming Viet Cong. The weapons we had to develop were ones that could perform surgical strikes, or produce non-lethal effects. After all, as I said, you couldn't expect to send a missile into the heart of the city, kill many of its inhabitants and still keep the population on your side.
Non Lethal Microwave Weapon One of the weapons that was developed is becoming popular with law enforcement. It is a handgun that can only be fired by its owner. The gun contains a computer chip in the handle that reads the Prints of a person's hand and if they matched the print stored on the chip, it will allow you to shoot the gun. Giving this type of gun to the military does cause problems. While it prevents enemies from picking up guns that were dropped and using them and also using captured guns, it does prevent soldiers who have lost their guns from using a different gun, since the other gun would be encoded for someone else. One of the greatest assets of the Roman Army was the interchangeability of its weapons. If a soldier broke or lost his weapon, he could pick up one from a dead comrade and it was exactly like the one he had. A personalized weapon is not ideally suited to the battlefield. Most risky of all is when your weapons are based on computer chip technology. The military was very worried about foreign powers getting their hands on these chips, so they made sure that the chips they used for military systems were manufactured by American companies. As time went by they began to use more and more off-the-shelf chips from everywhere and at last count, we are now only using 2% of these specially manufactured American chips. Some might ask why we should be worried about this? The answer to that question is very very clear. Any one of the chips that we use could contain unknown instructions that we are not aware of. These instructions could be for viruses that would take down an entire system, they could be what is known as a back door, which allows others to peer into the workings of the secret system, or they could be as simple as a password maintainer of some type that would store the system passwords so that our enemies might be able to retrieve them later. Then there is the scariest scenario of them all. This is the one where our enemies take control of our weapons and turn them against us. Another simple example might be a powerful radar that we employ to detect incoming missiles. An altered chip might prevent this detection until it was too late.
XM-25 The XM-25 is a new gun that the US army is testing. The U.S. Army has had its share of problems when it develops new weapons for soldiers. An example of this is the M-16, which replaced the previous rifle. Before the M-16 became the great weapon that it is today, it was responsible for many friendly deaths in Vietnam. While the concept of the gun was a good one, it was not suitable for the rigors of jungle fighting and because of this was constantly jamming. It had been created to never have to be cleaned and yet not only were cleaning kits issued because of the constant jamming, but the gun had to be redesigned. The XM-25 fires accurately from 250 yards, but this figure is disputed and some say it is really 500 yards and can hit the target even if it is in a trench on being behind a wall, a capability that the M-16 lacks. The XM-25 fires special ammunition that is able to go around obstacles and come back from behind. This is the first smart weapon designed for the average infantry soldier. I have no way of knowing, but I believe that this weapon will only be issued to one or two soldiers in a squad and it could turn out that the amount of these weapons would be roughly equal to the amount of machine guns. The reason that I say this is that while the rifle is impressive, it only holds four rounds of smart ammunition and it seems to me that this could become quite a drawback during an all out assault. This is not to diminish the capability of this weapon would not be practical to guess how it is to be used. The rifle does not work the same way that a conventional rifle works. It kills by exploding its 25 mm shell over the target. It releases shrapnel. When an army general was asked about what happens when the enemy captures one of these weapons, he replied that it would be very hard for an enemy to reverse engineer it., If you believe this I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.
Hornet Israel is developing a new weapon. No it is not what you would normally think of as weapon, it doesn't kill people, it doesn't render them unconscious and it doesn't even cause them any physical pain. The new weapon is going to be people that are being trained to defend Israel's image on the Internet. Yes you heard me right, this is a sort of social weapon. Here is what an Israeli army spokesman stated about this social weapon,"mainly an international audience that is less exposed to operational processes. Foreign media do more 'zooming-in' and so it's important to us to show the totality of IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) actions without a filter." As you can see Israel feels that if they get out either what is truly going on, or their side of the story, they may be able to change some world opinion. Some say that world opinion is the most powerful weapon of them all. Since we are on the subject of Israeli weapons development, I have to mention the fact that Israel is creating something known as a bionic hornet. It is an insect sized robotic weapon that can be used for following, photographing and killing. Many believe that it is being developed, because it eliminates the chance of collateral damage. In other words, if you wanted to assassinate a powerful terrorist leader, all you have to do is send out one of these tiny insects, have them sting and it would probably go unnoticed. It could crawl into his bed, wait on a chair for him to sit down, or hide in many other places, until it was ready to inject its lethal poison. Even when the target died, the rest of his associates might never know what happened. For decades we have worried about nuclear weapons and the destruction that they can cause, but it just might turn out that a weapon like the one, that I have just described, could be far more deadly if released in waves of hundreds of thousands. It wouldn't have the restrictions that a nuclear weapon has, since it would leave all the structures intact and ready for use by the invader. One has to wonder what new weapons are being invented that we know nothing about? When we see the weapons that are being developed that are capable of all this devastation and yet we are allowed to know about them, we can only imagine what the ones that we hear nothing about are capable of. |
