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
