Legal and Ethical Guiding Principles and Constraints Concerning Non-Lethal Weapons Technology and Employment

A paper submitted to Non-Lethal Defense III, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Maryland, February 1998.Development and employment of nonlethal weapons and their associated technologies require legal and ethical review prior to the procurement and acquisition process. Non-lethal technologies apply to the entire spectrum of conflict in the post Cold-War environments, including Military Operations Other Than War. However, the use of these non-traditional methods must still adhere to the same principles which have historically guided the conduct of our armed forces, namely, humanitarian law, customary international law, and the Law cf Armed Conflict.The unconventional technologies associated with non-lethal weapons make them sensitive to the provisions of more recent treaties and conventions, including the Chemical and Biological Weapons Conventions and the four Protocols of the Certain Conventional Weapons Convention and the appended 1995 Supplement. In addition, other treaties such as the Nairobi International Telecommunications Convention and the Montreal Protocol on the Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer may impact the use cf certain non-lethal weapons technologies

A Scenario Based Methodology for the Selection of Non-Lethal Weapons

A paper submitted to Non-Lethal Defense III, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Maryland, by the Naval Postgraduate School's Non-Lethal Weapons System Engineering Study Team, February 1998.The allocation of finite resources to develop non-lethal weapons for deployment as effective military assets is a difficult task considering that there exists a myriad of potentially promising technologies. Each proposed weapon has operational, logistical, and developmental advantages and disadvantages,which often do not appear self-consistent. Attempts to invent a common figure-of-merit often fail because it is difficult to avoid subjective criteria and evaluation. Ideally, an objective, consistent weapons selection methodology is required. We have developed a scenario based requirements methodology that allows us to highlight inter-scenario commonalties among the weapons considered. We have evaluated some thirty different anti-personnel and anti-material weapons considering over a dozen scenario based requirements including such criteria as effective range, weather susceptibility, cost, logistics and training